Treasure

Hyderabad, July 22, 2025

This last weekend has been particularly good. Among other things, just yesterday, we reached 100 unique users for Frames. The spirits of gratitude and writing seem particularly productive in times like these, so I try to make the best of them.

It is very cliche in the startup world to write about your journey. It is also a very well-known meme to observe that in many of life's quests, "The real treasure is the friends we make along the way". So I think I'll do a bit of both. I've been very fortunate to have met a truly spectacular cast of characters along this path that I've been on in the last 5 years.

I have tried, not quite my best but until my eyes began to hurt, so forgive me if this post is not well-cited. I will fix it when it bothers me enough, or someone personally tells me how tiresome or illegible my writing is.

Krishna

Like more famous others setting out on their personal journeys with trepidation in their hearts, I was awakened to my own by someone named Krishna. I remember speaking with him on the phone in early 2020, just before COVID hit. I had just finished working for Volante, a technology company that built and sold payments processing software to banks. Krishna was one of the founders of Volante (he had left to do other things after the initial years), and had been in and around Silicon Valley's startup culture for over 20 years now. We discussed things I could go on to do, given my "experience" in payments.

During this call, he brought up how Stripe and Square had done such an amazing job building incredible products and businesses and essentially creating the FinTech category as the world knew it. I nodded along and asked a few questions, but it became clear to him at some point in our conversation that I had no idea what these companies really did. He went on to berate me for having been in payments for 3 years and still having little knowledge of these companies.

See, he was speaking to a child of 24 years who always "knew" that he was going to end up doing something important in the world, but just didn't know how or what it was going to be. It is painful to even write these words now, but this conversation was perhaps the most impactful on the trajectory of my entire life. The best people will not help you clear the fog and optimize your current life, they will hand you a map to crucial territory you did not know existed. This chat was a real wake up call — the world was not going to come to me. I had to go to it if I wanted to do anything meaningful.

That was enough for me. I immediately joined iSPIRT (a non-profit that helps the government build tech infrastructure like UPI, Aadhaar, etc. in India) as a volunteer in early 2020. I also wrote neural nets from scratch as a side-project and my first few blog posts, Creating Deep Neural Networks from Scratch: An Introduction to Reinforcement Learning (link). Fortunately for all of us, my blog titles are shorter now.

By the end of the year, I had moved cities to Bangalore (a cradle for tech startups in India), and met Sharad and Ankit.

Sharad

Sharad was, in a loose sense, leading iSPIRT efforts at the time, gently directing and guiding projects across many different technology infrastructure projects ispirt was helping build. I only had a first meeting with him after about 9 months of contributing to iSPIRT. By this point (late 2020) I had moved on from COVID assistance applications, and was helping iSPIRT with efforts to evangelize the many disparate, but incredibly modern payment systems in India.

Sharad has the deepest frames of anyone I've met so far, across many aspects of life: technological, business, epistemological, emotional and poietic (thanks, ChatGPT).

There was one particularly painful conversation we had, after I was tasked with working on a marketplace for data exchange. I had tried a few different things and learned what other companies in this relatively new "industry" were doing, so I had developed some ideas for designs that I was happy with. I went back to Sharad and gave him context of what I had worked on and the proposal I had in mind. During the course of the conversation, he asked me questions to prod me on my thinking, and over time he seemed to have come to the realization that I had just adapted Amazon's data exchange to our problem. After a few long moments where he weighed whether to call me out on it, he decided to go for it. I remember being a little defensive at the time, but eventually asked him what I was supposed to do if not adapt a current model. I remember his response very vividly.

He urged me to look at the problem, and then go away and really think about it, try a few novel solutions, and make something that works. For some reason, I never knew I could do that. I pushed back, "But if it was possible, wouldn't someone have done it already?" He told me markets for data exchange is a new problem, since data is a fundamentally new type of resource. Novel problems require novel solutions, and more than a few iterations to get right. Actually sitting with a problem, coming up with ideas, and molding them to solve the problem at hand is necessary to bring something new to life. That's how Einstein and Newton came up with their ideas.

You might not be alone in thinking, "What did he just say? Isn't it obvious?". Not really. It wasn't to me atleast, at the time. I was always under the impression that ideas came out full and complete, and that if I didn't know the answer to something immediately, I wouldn't ever get it. I was so wrong.

Ankit

After my time at iSPIRT (where Ankit was also a volunteer), I worked with Ankit to build a company for embedded lending in the US. This was my first proper startup experience. Ankit is the first person I closely interacted with who was entirely self-made, and had the highest level of grit I've ever seen to prove he deserved it. He had already built and sold a payments company before. He was also genuinely creative in his work, and I saw it first hand. While so far I had dabbled in working at a startup, in Ankit I saw what a professional looked and worked like.

I worked with Ankit on Vaya for 9 months, and then stepped away to do other things. I spent 3 months after that reading about crypto protocols, and I also traveled and trekked in the Himalayas. I remember this period most fondly of my entire last 5 years — so much of life happens in the transitions.

Sam

We are now in the second half of 2021, and squarely in the crypto bull run (wow, it's been 4 years!). Just as I was about to join a DeFi protocol in India, I stumbled upon Arweave via a video on mechanism design by Sam Williams. I liked Sam's video because it was the first time I had come across someone that approached crypto and blockchains from the frame of mechanism design. Blockchains are still relatively new, so the ideas in this space are underdeveloped relative to its closest rival for Breakout Technology Of The 21st Century — AI, which even though only recently started really working, has a modern intellectual vintage spanning over 80 years at the very least.

I messaged Sam on twitter; turns out he was hiring for Chief of Staff at Arweave. Over time, I came to know that Sam is one of the most creative, intelligent and unabashedly independent thinkers I know. I saw first-hand at Arweave what a world-class research and engineering technology outfit looked like. Add to this that Sam is himself one of the best practitioners of code I have ever met. He embodies what being truly great at software looks like, and allows you to do. Having grown up in India and instinctively wanting to avoid being stereotyped as the "software guy", I had not been able to appreciate that it is truly software that is the fundamentally new thing that I have been running around for, all this time. Markets have always existed; the new resources reshaping them were all forms of software.

If there's a theme in the each of the people mentioned here, it is life progression on the X axis, degree of application of their minds and creativity in their own lives on the Y-axis, and a line with the equation y=x. We've had so many interesting conversations over the last 3 years (more than half of them while playing golf in VR while on opposite sides of the world).

Sam has also gone from outsider to insider in tech, and the one who kindly gifted me a 1943 edition The Fountainhead. This book was the philosophical counterpart to my conversation with Sharad 2 years prior.

Akash

This last person's friendship is both much more recent, and yet (no pun intended) predates all the others. The previous 8 months has been the longest contiguous block of time I have spent at home, since I began traveling in 2020. It has given me the opportunity to get close to my father, and rekindle and kindle bonds old and new. Akash bhaiya is a cousin before he was a friend, and we grew up in the same house together (along with about 45 other people!). He's the most strategic minded and strong-willed people I have come to know in Hyderabad. The only person in my extended family I can actively think with, and who has both the epistemic humility and emotional fortitude to allow for it. We have been playing badminton somewhat regularly for the last few months. The best thing about Akash is that, despite having been an unquestionably better player than me for the last 6 months, he always plays to win. He is extremely tactical, driven and ruthless on the court. He's always been like this, in every sport, for as long as I can remember. There can be no pain you have, no personal handicap, no score differential that will make him relent on a point. These are the people I like to play with. Everyone else is being unhelpful under the pretense of being kind.

There are others, of course, who have and will continue to impact me in the future. Some associations are young and as yet unripe, and others are like air: every breath depends on it, but you don't thank the air for life.