The first time I touched the internet, I was 14 years old, standing inside a computer café in India, paying by the minute.
A friend dragged me there for a school science project. He sat me down, typed something into a machine, and hit Enter.
I remember getting goosebumps. Not because of the answer. Because of the idea that you could ask anything, and something, somewhere, would answer.
That feeling never left me.
The Room Behind the Bakery
About ten by ten square meters. One bed, one old TV. The bakery was at the front. We lived at the back. My parents ran that shop for almost twenty years without a holiday.
I was standing behind the counter at eleven, watching things so nothing went wrong. That is where I first learned what responsibility felt like. Not the idea of it. The actual weight of it.
We folded the bed every morning and put it against the wall. No desk. No study table. I sat on the mattress to do homework, back against the wall, books open in front of me. And when it rained, the sound on the roof was everything.
Be good at school. That was the whole plan. That was everything they could give me, and they gave it completely.
I am telling you this not for sympathy. I am telling you this because if you are sitting somewhere right now feeling like your circumstances are the ceiling, they are not. They never were.
The Door
I never owned a computer growing up. My parents thought I would just play games. They weren't wrong.
But I made my father a deal: first place in class, and he would get me a machine.
I got first place.
He got me a banged-up Dell. Pentium dual-core. 1GB RAM. 120GB of storage.
I treated it like it was a spaceship.
I spent the next two years teaching myself to code. Built a fake "Win free phone" website to fool my friends. Stayed up nights I cannot count. I was also winning chess tournaments and throwing javelin. I was always competing. That part of me was never going to switch off.
But computers felt different from all of it.
It felt like a door. And I just had to find out how far I could push it.
If you have that feeling about anything, even a little bit, hold onto it. That is not nothing. That is everything.
Find Your North Star
The first Indian woman in space. Someone who came from a small town, from a country people didn't always associate with that kind of ambition, and went further than almost anyone.
"The path from dreams to success does exist. May you have the vision to find it, the courage to get on to it, and the perseverance to follow it."
— Kalpana Chawla
I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to see the world from outside it.
I never made it to orbit.
But that impulse never left me. The need to see from a different perspective. The need to exist beyond the obvious. Kalpana didn't give me a career path. She gave me a way of thinking.
Find yours. It does not have to be a person. It just has to be something that pulls you forward when nothing else does.
The Call
Finished engineering. Landed at Accenture. I was not coasting. Twelve to fifteen hour days. Nights, weekends, whatever it took. Won Employee of the Month twice. Then the Accenture Excellence award, their highest recognition.
Not listing trophies. Just saying: the work was the point.Showing up completely, every single day, was the point.
Then a call came.
Sky Deutschland. Munich. Germany.
My first international trip. Ever.
I landed feeling zero fear. Just electricity. I had seen Europe through movies my whole life and here I was, walking into it. No plan. No contacts. Didn't speak the language.
Just showed up and decided to figure it out.
Learning to Live From Scratch
The first two weeks I played tourist. Saw everything around Munich. Then I sat down and thought, okay, what now?
So I posted on Reddit. Genuinely. "Hey, just moved to Munich, what do I do here?"
People came through. Go to meetups. Do sports. Get out and meet people.
So I did exactly that. see the reddit thread
I felt like an outsider. I didn't know the culture, the language, the unspoken rules. But I was open to it. And that openness changed everything.
I learned to take care of myself for the first time. Cooking, sleep, health. Things that slide when someone else is holding things together at home. I became more responsible. More open-minded. I made real friends, through running, through fitness, through just showing up alone and seeing what happened.
No matter where you are in the world, if you are willing to go out and explore, you can build a beautiful life.
Then the World Opened Up
Over the years that followed, this happened.
I saw the ocean for the first time.
I learned how to swim. Then swam in ice-cold open water in Eisbach. One of the most terrifying things I have ever done. Would do it again immediately.
I saw snow for the first time. Actual snow. Stood there like an idiot and just stared at it.
I stood at the top of the Alps. Tried snowboarding. Fell a lot.
I went to concerts, drank beer at Oktoberfest, visited the Canary Islands, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal. Stayed in a hostel. Did a backpacking trip across three countries alone.
Lost money in the stock market. More than I should have. We move on.
None of this was on a plan. It happened because I took one leap, and then kept taking them.
The Grind, Both Sides of It
Here is something I want to be clear about.
Everything I built on the side happened after work. Nights, weekends, whatever was left. My side projects were never an excuse to give less during the day. I was doing both, fully, at the same time.
At Sky I kept climbing. Senior Engineer. Staff. Then Head of Engineering, leading 23 people, some of them fifteen to twenty years older than me.
There was doubt when I took that role. Of course there was. Because suddenly you are not just working for yourself. You are working for the team. Hearing different opinions. Holding different perspectives. Finding solutions that work for people who have been doing this longer than you have been an adult.
There were moments people pushed back. Questioned the direction. Doubted the call. And I had to learn to hold my ground, not out of ego, but out of conviction. Knowing when to listen and when to stand firm is one of the hardest things about leadership. I am still learning it.
But I also met incredible people along the way. My manager believed in me before I fully believed in myself. Friends I still have today. People I ran with, travelled with, built things with. The grind is real. But so is the growth. And so are the people who make it worth it.
Failing in the Hours Nobody Sees
With Scout, my first exploration, we failed four times. A music platform. An artist marketplace. A few other swings that didn't land.
Watching everyone else move fast while you feel stuck is a particular kind of pain. You start wondering if the problem is the idea, the execution, or just you.
But we kept going.
"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."
— Elon Musk
The fifth product got acquired for €300K. That one paid for every late night the others cost.
Then came SALT. An agent memory and orchestration engine. The thing I believed in more than anything I had built. Four and a half months of barely sleeping. Sports dropped off. The people closest to me kept saying slow down.
I applied to Y Combinator a couple of times. Got rejected. Ran POCs with three companies. Shipped it. Scaled it. Fought for it.
Then I shut it down.
The frontier moved faster than I could alone and my "product" kinda became a feature.
That one still stings. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
You're Not Behind
I am 28. Nowhere near where I want to be. Still exploring, still building, still figuring it out.
But here is what I know.
If you are a kid or someone graduating or just in a bad place, dreaming about seeing the world and wondering if it is actually possible for someone like you. If you feel like everyone around you is moving and you are standing still.
You are not behind.
You are just earlier in the journey than you think.
I grew up in a ten by ten room behind a bakery. No computer. No connections. No roadmap. I posted on Reddit asking what to do with my weekends in a country where I knew nobody.
And I figured it out. Not because I was special. Because I refused to stay comfortable. Because I kept showing up even when it wasn't working. Because I was competitive, not just with other people, but with the version of myself from last year.
The grit you build in the hard years compounds. You don't feel it while it's happening.
But it's happening.
If my 14-year-old self, the one sneaking into that café, stunned by the internet, dreaming about planets, could see me now...
I don't think he'd believe it.
I barely do sometimes.