The Wrong Competition
My mother ran the experiment
My mom was convinced I would end up in sports.
She was also not going to leave it to chance. She ran a real experiment, over years. Swimming. Archery. Skating. Football. Cricket. Origami. Painting. If a class existed in Pune, she found it and she put me in it.
Sit with what that actually cost her. Her time, her money, her evenings spent waiting outside a pool or a rink for a kid who would probably quit in 3 weeks. She was wrong about the answer 7 different times. She never once treated being wrong as a reason to stop.
And she was not trying to make me good at something. She was trying to find out who I was. She was willing to run the search 8 times to get there.
Then, in 6th standard, a class called "Basics of C."
That was the moment. By 11th grade I could write C, C++, Java, and Python - not well, but well enough to know I did not want to do anything else. I picked Computer Science at Symbiosis International University and never seriously reconsidered.
Here is the part I did not understand until much later. My mother had already solved the problem this entire essay is about.
She never sat me down and explained passion to me. She never told me to think harder about my future, or to want it more. She just kept changing the room I was standing in until one of them caught.
My mother was wrong about sports. She was completely right about the method.
Everything after this is me running her experiment on myself.
The thing that actually drives me
Somewhere along the way I picked up the sentence that runs my life:
If you think you're just as smart as others and putting in same efforts as others, you're an average.
I know how that sounds. But sit with the arithmetic for a second, because it is not motivational filler - it is just true.
If your intelligence is roughly the intelligence of the people around you, and your effort is roughly their effort, then your outcome is roughly their outcome. That is what average means. It is not an insult. It is a prediction, and it is usually accurate.
Which leaves a problem. I am not smarter than the people around me. I have never believed I was. And "work harder" has a ceiling that everyone else is also pushing against.
So if I cannot out-think them and I cannot meaningfully out-work them, the only variable left is what I am standing in. Not my brain. My room.
That is the whole thesis, and I wrote it out properly once:
The belief
Smart kids from good schools usually don't take big risks because
- Overachievers that get into Ivy Leagues are used to winning competitions and value them heavily
- The default "competition" at Ivy Leagues is who can get the best Consulting/FAANG internship the fastest.
The math competitions and debate tournaments of high school, at any university, are the most "prestigious" careers.
What's more is that once you're in this environment, it's almost impossible to escape the competition, despite you thinking it's not true.
Everyone likes to pretend that they don't care what everyone around them thinks, but LMFAO if you think you're the exception.
If you surround yourself with 10 people who won't stop talking about their McKinsey internship, you'd be insane or lying if you said it didn't influence you at all.
The truth is, it will be almost impossible to change yourself, but it is very very possible to change your environment. And this is actually the only certain way to rewire your brain.
The ONLY way to make sure that you're actually headed in the right direction is to surround yourself by people who are at a later stage of YOUR dream life.
And be careful when deciding what your dream life is.
Is it really to be a 29-year old senior SWE at Google having only ever experienced working at big tech?
Don't you WANT to live a life full of risk-taking? To make a dent in the universe and have people acknowledge you for changing the world and to really spend your 20's and 30's building something meaningful?
Many want this, but very few will make the decision to change their environment.
The only way to change your life is by changing your environment. Take a risk.
My version of McKinsey was LeetCode
I did not go to an Ivy. I went to Symbiosis, and then to the University of Washington. Nobody around me was talking about consulting.
The mechanism does not care. Every environment has its prestige competition, the one thing that quietly becomes the only definition of winning, and mine was LeetCode and the same 5 company names, over and over.
That is the part people get wrong about this idea. They read "Ivy League" and "McKinsey" and decide it does not apply to them. It applies everywhere. The room just changes its accent.
So here is what it cost me to actually believe it.
Acting on it, badly
The early results were bad, and I want them on the record.
In January 2021, some friends and I registered an actual company - SAYITSOCIAL PVT. LTD. I entered 2 startup pitching competitions: 3rd place in one, knocked out in the first round of the other. We started Dezenix, a community project building a library for designers and frontend developers. I did 4 months at FairShare IT Services building an end-to-end e-commerce app in React and Firebase. I put money into crypto and stocks, lost some, made some, lost some again, all before the age of 19.
At the end of that year I wrote something I still find funny and slightly painful: "I know I didn't do much in 2021 as per my potential."
I had not achieved much. But I had started choosing rooms, and that turned out to be the part that mattered.
In 2022 it compounded. I founded the Blockchain Club at my undergrad university SIT Pune - my friends and I - running guest lectures and training juniors. I also started an Opportunities Club specifically to connect students with founders and help them find internships. I became one of the top 5 project admins at SWoC an OpenSource Competition. I built Charity DAO, and wrote a research paper with 2 others, on how charitable funds actually get spent. I built a website for the Vasundhara Foundation (Non Profit). I was the Captain of the IT Dept. kabaddi team and we lost in the semi-finals. I went to what felt like every web3 meetup in Pune during the Blockchain bubble.
That last one looked the least like work and did the most.
The meetups were never really about blockchain. They were about being in rooms with people who build things, repeatedly, until that stopped feeling exotic and started feeling like the baseline.
That is the mechanism. Not inspiration - recalibration.
By the end of the final year at my university, I had an offer from StoneX, where I interned from January to July 2023. In the same stretch, Greenie - the background verification startup my friends and I were building - crossed 4,000 users. That one came straight out of the belief: it existed because we decided to build something instead of waiting to be picked.
In September 2023 I moved to Seattle for my Masters at UW Bothell.
The test
A belief you have never paid for is not a belief. Here is where I paid.
My sister told me, "You have to do LeetCode. You'll regret it later." My brother-in-law was blunter: "Why aren't you doing LeetCode? Don't be a fool."
They were not wrong, exactly. They loved me, and they were describing the path with the best-understood odds. That is what good advice usually is.
But this was the exact situation the whole philosophy was about, now pointed directly at me. And I want to be honest: I was not immune. I did LeetCode sometimes, mostly out of anxiety. I felt the pull constantly.
What I could not do was talk myself out of the pressure. What I could do was change what I was standing in:
- Cold emailing and messaging founders on LinkedIn, X, and in person
- Building projects and putting them in front of people
- Participating in hackathons
My job applications ran about 9:1, startups to big tech. Not as a protest. I had just decided which later-stage life I was aiming at, and it was not in the other pile.
The offer, and the rule
In November 2024, it worked.
I applied to Alex AI through YC, cleared 4 rounds, and got the founding engineer role. In SF, California.
Then I hit a wall that had nothing to do with my ability. UW told me I could not work outside Washington state before graduating - an F1 visa restriction on a pre-graduation start date that required relocating. There was no clever way around it. I had done everything right and the answer was still NO.
The job was gone.
I will not dress that up. It is the worst professional moment I have had. I wrote in my notes at the time that it was "an extremely sad moment," and immediately after, "now determined more than ever." Both were true, in that order, and the second one took a while to mean anything.
10,000 emails
So I did the only thing I knew how to do, at a volume that was frankly unreasonable.
I cold emailed YC founders, startup CEOs/CTOs, and every startup I could find. Over 10,000 of them. Hundreds replied. I interviewed in a lot of places. The timing never lined up with graduation date.
I postponed graduation twice.
In that stretch I picked up 3 internships and a full-time job. I competed in the UWB Hacks AI hackathon. I built Socraitive, an AI interview platform with voice-agents. I built a site for the Entomon Institute of Invertebrate Zoology. I built the portfolio you are reading this on. I earned a LinkedIn Top Voice badge in frontend development. I spent a summer at a stealth Seattle startup on an audio-ML project.
None of it was the thing I actually wanted.
Underneath all of it, I wanted to work on hiring and jobs. Ask any of my friends and they will tell you I am the first person to send them an opening they never asked for. That is not a strategy. It is just what I am like - wanna see my friends succeed.
So I kept following up with Aaron and John at Alex AI. More than 15 times over a year.
That sounds deranged without context, so let me be precise: it was not spam and it was not desperation. It was a steady, low-volume signal that I had not changed my mind, and every message carried something new - something I had shipped, something I had learned.
On October 7, 2025, John replied.
We talked. I reinterviewed. And almost exactly a year after they first picked me, I joined Alex AI - properly this time.
What I actually think now
5 internships and 2 jobs, across both big companies and startups.
I have never passed a LeetCode-style interview, because I rarely had to sit one.
I am not smug about that, and I am not telling you to skip it. Plenty of engineers I respect came through exactly that door, and if it leads where you want to go, go grind it. That is the point, actually - it is a door, not the door.
What I want you to take is the thing underneath. The competition surrounding me was real and legitimate and not mine.
It took me years to understand that losing a competition you never chose to enter is not losing.
3 things, all learned the slow way:
- Consistency beats panic. 10,000 emails did not work because 10,000 is a big number. They worked because I was still sending them in month 11 after being ignored.
- Belief in yourself beats doubt, but only after you have moved rooms. Belief inside the wrong environment is just a more pleasant way to feel bad.
- Your path does not have to look like anyone else's. Mine cost a lost offer, 2 postponed graduations, 10,000 follow-ups, and trying out every environment I wanted to try. I would not recommend it. I would not trade it either.
Every one of those is my mother's method, run on myself.
She enrolled me in activity after activity to find the one that fit. She never talked me into loving computers. She just kept changing the room until I found the thing I would not shut up about.
She has been right about this since I was 11 years old.
It is still the only method I trust. Love you MOM <3