Chapter 01
17
The First Divergence
At 17, I dropped out of medical college and moved from North to South India to study engineering. Not rebellion. Recognition. I was a builder, and the path laid out for me wasn't mine.
The Journey
A record of the unconventional choices — the drop-outs, the pivots, the founder years, the decade in adtech, and the pull toward applied AI. Every step was the same pursuit.
At 17, I dropped out of medical college and moved from North to South India to study engineering. Not rebellion. Recognition. I was a builder, and the path laid out for me wasn't mine.
That recognition kept pulling. Make A Difference, working for equitable outcomes for children. Coca-Cola India's Samvaad, youngest member, MMA Smarties Gold at 22, 24 national and international awards. Then Auroville, where money doesn't exist, to understand what drives people when external incentives disappear. At 24, France with no backing, researching how gender and pitch in smart speakers shape ad effectiveness.
Co-founded Podcash at 20, India's first marketplace connecting podcasters, advertisers, and guests. Built the platform from scratch with a 4-engineer team, worked with WebRTC and live-streaming, obsessed over real-time audio quality. It was acquired by Sochcast in 2021. That experience taught me what no corporate role could: how hard it is to build something from nothing, and how much you learn when the outcome is entirely yours.
A decade in adtech followed. S4M/Locala, where I learned programmatic buying and campaign optimization from the ground up. Ogury, leading Creative Studio and self-serve ad delivery across cookieless and ID-less ecosystems. Rakuten Viber, scaling monetization from $100K to $3M in 180 days across products serving 100M MAU. Every role was the same pursuit: understanding systems deeply enough to make them work for the people inside them.
Now it's applied AI, workflow automation, and frontier product work. Adentic, my own AI startup automating agency workflows, taught me why deploying AI in service businesses is harder than anyone admits. Beyond that, ongoing AI research experiments at the edge of what's possible. Not a pivot — the next expression of the same thing Jung was pointing at.
The unconventional choices weren't detours. They were the process of becoming.