My Story

I personally love learning about different people's professional journeys and why they did what they did. Here’s mine.

I started my professional journey when I was around 13. I published a fiction novel and back then became India’s youngest author. It was a kids’ sci-fi thriller book. I started typing a story I had in mind during the summer of that year. I never thought of publishing it, but as I wrote, I decided I should try. At the end of summer, I tried to back it up on a flash drive (old days) from an old windows pc we had, but ironically, the data got corrupted, and I lost it all—all my summer's work. The next few months, I believe, were the most crucial for me as a kid. That’s when I decided I had started a journey, and I better finish it. So I took a pen and notebook and wrote the entire book once again on plain paper, later having it typed by a typist. Eventually, after half a year, I ended up publishing it.

Now here’s when the transition began. I didn’t see myself as a writer for life, but throughout the journey, what I loved the most was “selling” the book—making trailers, posters, negotiating prices with publishers, handling agreements, going to book fairs, and continuing to sell despite hearing "No" most of the time. I loved the business part of it. So, here’s what I did: I took most of my earnings from the book and enrolled in a local web development firm to teach me programming so I can build something of my own some day. I was in my freshman year of high school, and back then, in my city, they didn’t teach programming in high school at all. Eventually, I was doing freelance web development work in my freshman and sophomore years. I know it isn’t a big deal now, young kids coding and building websites, but back then, in a small city in India, it was all very new and different. I realized that, and I started seeing how much extracurriculars like these were valued in Western nations like the U.S., and that’s when my first startup, Kidea, was born.

Kidea, a community for creative kids, was essentially a LinkedIn-like platform for students to connect with mentors for their extracurriculars. I got a team of around 10 people working on this, with me, at 16, being the youngest, and we shipped a great product. But I made every single textbook mistake possible, and the company eventually shut down. The primary reason was a lack of a viable business model. I failed to develop one in time while we were burning money, and we couldn’t raise funds, leading to conflicts among the founders. The shutdown was a mess. I could have kept it running and saved it short-term, but it would not have been sustainable. It was, to date, one of the hardest decisions I made. Thanks to some amazing mentors and the community at Georgia Tech (where I moved to do my undergrad in CS), I made an informed decision. I spent my entire freshman year doing 3-4 part-time jobs to make up for all the losses Kidea incurred and to pay back family and friends who had invested, even though I wasn’t liable. But now, it was time to move on to what’s next.

While at Georgia Tech, I decided one thing: this web and app-based space was too crowded, and I wanted to do something in deep or emerging tech, especially given that I am at one of the best tech schools in the world. Hence, I started exploring all emerging tech fields: Deep Learning, Quantum Computing, Blockchain, AR/VR—everything. I was taking courses and cold emailing a bunch of research professors as a one-month-old freshman with no valuable skills to offer. No one responded. I shamelessly followed up, and one professor did; he was into VR stuff. I always thought VR/AR was the future after seeing a trailer video of HoloLens 1. He replied, saying he needed someone with experience in 3D software like Blender or Unity and suggested I reach out next semester. I worked nights that semester, watched every popular VR/AR tutorial, built an entire portfolio, and reached out to this professor again first week next semester. He said he wished I had reached out earlier, but he was leaving the college. I was really disappointed, but he was impressed and started finding other professors for me to work with, and he succeeded. While all this was happening, I was also heavily involved in the startup community at Georgia Tech, building my network. When the time came for my first summer internship, I leveraged the only niche (non-web/app dev) skill I had, along with my network, and got an internship at a VR startup. I also rose to a leadership role in the entrepreneurship student orgs and decided to use those skills to start a VR/AR student organization at Georgia Tech, building my network in that space too. With all this—a research position in VR, a first internship in VR, and eventually starting a VR/AR organization—I was basically married to VR/AR. Each opportunity opened more doors, and I ended up researching with the pioneers of this field who built Google Glass (who transitioned me from VR to AR) and also ended up leading a national intercollegiate XR organization. And that’s how I got into VR/AR.

I loved building things, so one summer, when I wanted to lose some weight and do cardio, I was visiting home, and we had a treadmill. I thought, what if I make Temple Run but in VR using a treadmill and Oculus? I did just that, and guess what? I brutally injured myself. But I iterated and iterated, and version 8 or something that used mixed-reality passthrough was safe enough, so I put it on Meta’s app store. We were getting 3-4 organic installs every day from 10+ countries, and I was shocked. That was the birth of a startup I never intended to build: Third Dimension Fitness. I used everything I had learned and turned this project into a product—from storming people outside a Peloton store for customer discovery to talking to personal trainers, pretending I was interested in hiring them, and just talking and talking to customers until our weekly active users increased. Then I did something I hadn’t done with Kidea: I turned Third Dimension from a product into a company and made it profitable. I learned the true art of sales. I was basically telling people to get on a treadmill, strap a VR headset on their eyes, and pay me for it. It was a great three-year journey. Now, this was a relatively smaller market, and it would have taken at least five more years before VR/AR became mainstream. I wanted to build something platform-level, not just an app, so I thought maybe it was time to move on. We had some acquisition offers on the table while I was raising my second round. I knew if I raised this round, there would be no going back—I would have to drop out and commit full-time to make it THE fitness app for AR glasses eventually. Then, I got an email from Apple. They wanted to hire me for my dream job, doing R&D in their VR/AR division, something I thought was only an option for PhDs. They wanted me to stop working on this, temporarily for an internship but completely if I joined full-time. That’s when I made the call. I sold Third Dimension Fitness to a Singaporean company interested in our IP (our content and AI) for their education platform and they agreed to keep Third Dimension in business, albeit in autopilot mode. And that’s how I ended up getting Third Dimension acquired.

Hopefully a lot more to come...