Startups and spirituality
The only two things I’ve ever really cared about. I’ve been building and selling things since I was fourteen — some of it worked, and the parts that didn’t are the reason a+ exists.
My first job at 14 was finding leads for a wholesaler of semi-precious stones. I did it by scraping data off Alibaba and Amazon. I didn’t know what a web scraper was, and before my 15th birthday I was a pro. That was the first time I learnt about code.
Then in high school I tried a lot of things. I re-sold costume jewellery from my father’s store. I worked construction sites supervising staff, to learn real estate. I became assistant to the chairman of the Bombay Stock Exchange, to learn stock broking.
In 2009, when I was 18, I set up ION Education. My first company. We taught high school and college students how to invest in the stock market through short certification courses. Instead of theory, we helped them open their first investment account and actually start.
Over three years we trained 10,000 students across 50 universities. Then we pivoted to IonID and turned the student ID card into an RFID card they could use for attendance and to pay for food.
In 2011, when I was 20, we got our first term sheet — from one of the SVPs at Google. Instead of taking his money, I asked for his time. On two weeks’ notice I moved to San Francisco, onto the top bunk of a house called the Hacker Quarters.
My flatmates there taught me how to code, how to build a computer, how to make mobile apps. On my 21st birthday I launched OneShop, a simple way for Etsy sellers to launch their own website. Thousands of merchants on the waitlist, product ready to go, and then my visa application fell through. Just like that, we had to wind down.
The story wasn’t over. I came back to India and filled in an application to build in the UK, which meant taking on a new co-founder. We moved to London and raised our seed round, and then I had my second setback: co-founder conflict.
I was blackmailed. Give him 3x more equity, or he would delete the codebase and write to the UK government to cancel my visa. I stood my ground, and watched him burn the company to the ground. All customers lost, zero money in the bank, UK visa cancelled after being issued.
It’s 2014, I’m 24, and I have less than $50 in my bank. Living on popcorn, 50-cent bagels and water, I wrote to my brother to send me a hundred dollars so I could pay for food and rent.
In 2015, when I was 25, I asked myself whether I was actually meant to be an entrepreneur. Maybe it was all a story I was telling myself. Maybe I should apply for jobs. The first company I wrote to was Haptik. I met Aakrit the very next day, and that same week I started leading all product and growth.
In 18 months we raised $16M, scaled the team from 20 → 650 people, and brought in two million downloads.
In 2017 my father wanted to sell his car. I had just seen a podcast with Elon talking about the Model 3, and I thought I’d try something wild — what if I converted this car to an EV instead of selling it. My father thought I was crazy. I took that as a sign.
I started spending my mornings and nights at IIT Bombay with the student team building EV racing cars. I imported tiny battery cells from China, welded lead strips, built my own batteries, all of it alongside my job at Haptik. In 2018 I got my first scooter moving on a battery we had built from the ground up. That got us our first seed investor, and ION Energy was born.
In 2019 Haptik was acquired by Reliance for $100M, and that was the first time I experienced startup equity as liquid cash. Incidentally, I was doing an acquisition of my own — Freemens, a French company making battery management systems. That is how I met Alex, my co-founder and CTO.
Together we built the largest supplier of battery management systems in India. We partnered with Hero, the world’s largest two-wheeler maker, and deployed 250,000 units. In 2022 Endurance Technologies acquired the business for $40M. That’s the 13-year journey it took to my first million.
Along the way, Alex and I also built Altergo, a digital twin platform used by large energy players to manage their renewable assets.
My thesis is simple. AI is making it easy to build, so millions of entrepreneurs will be born, and over 90% of them will fail. Because somewhere along the way we accepted the idea that 90% of startups die, and the ecosystem evolved to play those odds. Investors can take a hundred shots on goal and win the match with two. For the founder, it’s all-in on one.
That framework comes at the expense of the other 90%, whose entrepreneurial energy gets quietly suppressed. They go back to jobs, or get stuck in companies they no longer enjoy building. This is not my idea of healthy entrepreneurship.
75% of startups die for three reasons: they never reach product-market fit, the co-founders fall out, or they can’t raise. I have lost companies to two of the three. a+ is the infrastructure I wish had existed.
The rest of it The part that isn’t work. Open it if you like.
