Hold on to the railings. I am going to talk about myself.
I am good at none but okay at many
If you put me on the dance floor and put on Mukkala Mukabula, you won’t regret it. I am not good at sports, but I enjoy being on the ground. If you play Badminton, TT with me, I manage to send the target to the other side. I cook mean South Indian food that you will ask the recipe for. Also, I am a decent RPG game master and I manage to make enemies out of friends playing board games like Catan.
I love walking
Walking is my meditation. It is the time I force my friends to remember me. It is when I have remote round-table talks with my family. But, importantly, it is the time I catch up with myself.
I indulge in books, beer and friends
Stout beer is my poison. Books are my getaway. Friends are my home. If you meet me, you will likely see me with a book. I realized long back that having a book is a super easy hack to pose as an intellectual :P.
I am a through-and-through family guy
I can sit in my home for days on end and have the best time without ever leaving home. I love having philosophical talks with my mom, gossiping with my sister and playing with my dad. A day doesn’t go by if I don’t speak with them. I recently got married to my girlfriend of 6 years. And I just figured out that the way I eat, walk and sleep were all wrong.
I like to stay neutral
I like my emotions to sway around the philosophical mean. I willingly choose very few topics to care about. For most topics, either I can argue both sides, or I will accept I don’t know anything about it.
I am an entrepeneur
Here’s my journey so far:
Had to do research at IITB and work at Goldman Sachs to realise that starting up was the right choice for me.
Made every rookie startup mistake. Started up with five co-founders. Only to realise we all have the same skill sets.
Created a dating app because I was an introverted single. Only to be schooled by a pub owner that I was wasting my talent.
Created a Facebook clone because “building another Facebook must be so easy”. Only to realise tech without distribution goes nowhere.
Found my footing at Headout. Built v1 of products as the first engineer. And when I hired better engineers, I shifted to product management so that no one could blame my code quality.
Finally found a co-founder who is as clueless and as hungry as me for Adaface.
Built a chatbot that people thought was human. Way before GPT made it easy to build one in minutes :P
The 4th year of bootstrapping Adaface. After making every mistake a first-time entrepreneur could make. We sold million dollars worth of product. Completely organic.
I love building
Here are a few head-beaming-high products that I am proud to have built:
Adaface.com (cofounder)
Btw.so (cofounder)
PH profile (6 top products of the day launches)
Headout.com (first engineer → PM)
WSD research paper (coauthor)