The long version
Lifespent
The other page is what I can do for you. This one is how I got here — three years failing an exam, one economics lecture, a phone call at 2:30 in the morning, and what all of it actually taught me.
Read it if you want to know who you'd be working with. Skip it if you're screening — I'd rather you spent that time on what I've built.
My life plots as a chart. So I drew it.
Every candle is a chapter. The red one is three years I don't get back. The tall green one is a night I spent on the phone at 2:30am. Click any of them — or use ← →.
I graduated in aeronautics.
Aeronautical engineering. I liked it well enough. But I finished the degree already fairly sure I wasn't going to spend my life around aircraft.
What I actually wanted was to be in the room where decisions got made. So I went looking for that instead.
Four rooms, and counting.
Only the durations I can actually stand behind — seven years I can put a number on, and a fourth room I'm still standing in. The last bar has no end on it on purpose.
Delhi. Preparing for the UPSC.
3 YEARSThree attempts, none cleared. Inside the same three years crypto quietly stopped being a hobby.
OroPocket — digital gold & silver
~2 YEARSCommunity Moderator to Marketing Head. Campaigns, a staking platform, YouTube Live AMAs.
KoinX — Head of Growth & Partnerships
~2 YEARSExchange partnerships that carried real volume, and the internal tooling that unblocked them.
Finosauras, then building on my own
ONGOING▌EiR at a fintech from zero, then nine products of my own. This one hasn't closed yet.
Three of those years were spent preparing for a life I didn't get. I don't count them as lost — they're where the rest of it came from.
Six things I paid to learn.
Tuition is a real line item.
I learned what a contract address is by sending funds to one. Nobody taught me any of this, so I paid for it in lost money — and that's precisely why I'm useful now. I didn't read about the sharp edges, I've got the scars. I know exactly where a new user is going to cut themselves, which is a growth skill that doesn't look like one on a CV.
The people you teach become your distribution.
For three years I explained crypto to friends one at a time, for nothing. When I finally put them in one room I hadn't started a community — I'd built my first distribution channel. Every growth job since has been a version of that: earn the attention before you need it.
Calling the top isn't the job. Getting people out is.
When the OroPocket token ran 15x on an exchange bug, I spent 2:30am on the phone telling people to sell, not to buy. I've never been the smartest person in a market. I'd rather be the one whose people got home safe — and that's the same instinct that makes me careful with a growth number somebody else has to defend later.
Three years of failing in public is a qualification.
The UPSC didn't work out, and I'd sit the interview with that on the table. Most of growth is continuing to work at something after the evidence stops being encouraging. I learned that the expensive way, over three years, in front of everyone who knew me.
If the tool doesn't exist, that's the opportunity.
My wife wanted alerts for any coin crossing a threshold. No such tool existed in the shape she wanted, so Antag exists. Users kept arriving from exchanges KoinX didn't support, so I wrote the converters instead of filing a ticket. The gap isn't an obstacle in front of the work — most of the time it is the work.
Ship into the gap fast, then let the data decide.
4XLsize took days and had no business working. It did about 4,000 impressions in a week. Plenty of my experiments went nowhere, and those get reported too. Being quick to ship and honest about the result beats being right in the planning meeting.
You're not hiring a candlestick.
Everything above is the work. This is the rest of me, and I've found the two are less separate than they look.
I write songs. Mostly in Telugu.
It's the one thing I do that has no growth loop, no metric and no funnel. That's exactly why I keep doing it. Telugu carries things English can't get to, and I'd rather write it badly in the right language than well in the wrong one.
I sketch. Rarely.
Very rarely, and I'm not going to oversell it. But it's the reason I can sit with a designer and be genuinely useful about spacing and weight and where the eye lands first, instead of just saying 'make it pop'.
Cooking — wake me from dead sleep, I'll cook.
This one isn't a hobby, it's closer to a reflex. My own recipes, not borrowed ones. It's the same instinct as building products, honestly: you taste, you adjust, you feed it to someone and watch their face for the real feedback.
The retirement plan is a restaurant.
Not a metaphor. An actual place, with my actual dishes, serving actual people who love food. Everything I'm doing now is the part before that part. Growth first, then a kitchen.
“Growth first. Then a kitchen.”
Now the part you can actually hire.