The long version

I was born in the heart of India, in Bhopal, the city of lakes. My father worked for the government, so every few years a transfer letter would show up and we'd pack. One of those took us to Nainital for a while.

As a kid, I asked a lot of questions. I wanted to know how the world worked, what other people saw in it, and why they didn't spend every waking hour on the things they loved. I couldn't imagine not doing that.

For me, my first love was football.

I played every chance I got. I was fortunate enough to represent my school & district, and loved every second of it. Football taught me things no classroom did: how to lose, how to show up the next day anyway, and how a team becomes more than the players in it.

Around the same time, I found robotics.

I wanted to understand every piece of a machine. Why does this motor turn that way? What happens if I change this sensor? Could I make it smarter? I spent hours making, breaking and remaking things, long before I knew the word "engineer".

I never really stopped. Years later, I was still making robots, just bigger and more ambitious ones.

In my late teens, I was mesmerised by music & its power to convey emotions & feelings. First it was Avicii, and those strings inspired me to create my own mixes.

Music taught me that what you make isn't finished until it lands with the person on the other end. You can create a feeling, layer by layer, but only the listener decides if it works.

Then came engineering at PICT, an internship at IBM, and my first job at Barclays building banking apps for customers & payments. After that, Concentric AI, where we built the data pipelines from scratch & I ended up as a co-inventor on a US patent.

In my early 20s, I got into crypto & investing. That little venture would go on to help me a lot in my later years as an entrepreneur managing risk.

Finance had always fascinated me. So in 2025, along with my best mates, I started KnowYourCompany.ai to create the research platform we wished we had for our own investing.

It taught me the hard parts: marketing, sales & fundraising. It also taught me the biggest lesson of my career.

Value in and of itself is not commercially viable. It has to be easily consumed, verified and understood. Everything else is just a facade.

Looking back, football, robots and music were teaching me the same thing all along. Work with your team, understand the machine, and never stop thinking about the person on the other end.

I'm eternally grateful for the time I've spent with my friends, creating products with the technology this world has to offer, and learning from the people we made them for. These days I spend a lot of my time thinking about where AI will create real value, and where the world is heading next.

There's still so much to do, and I'm confident about the next decade.

Maybe I didn't become a professional footballer or a DJ, but I found my team, and I still get to create things people use every day. I'm grateful to my parents, to my friends, and to the strangers on the internet who taught me so much of what I know.