I Don't Stop
At The Recommendation.

I studied Civil Engineering at NIT Trichy. What actually shaped those four years happened outside the syllabus. Festember had me running 30+ live shows and webinars for a thousand first years before I had finished second year. Then 180 Degrees Consulting, where I ended up heading client acquisition, cold mailing my way to 15 strategy projects across startups and NGOs, and delivering four of them myself. Somewhere in there it stopped being a side activity and started being the thing I was actually good at.

180 Degrees Consulting took fourteen people out of more than three hundred applicants, across five rounds. I thought that was the hard bit. Then I had client exposure inside the first month, which mostly meant learning in real time how much I did not know, in front of people who were paying attention. Within a year I was leading a project. Eventually I ran client acquisition: a team of five, cold mailing and LinkedIn until we had closed 15 strategy engagements across startups and NGOs, including companies backed by Y Combinator, Java Capital and Titan Capital. I delivered four of them myself. NPS 95 and up, and work that touched around 15,000 lives. It was the first time I understood what I was actually good at, and it was not Civil Engineering.

The internship the summer before had gone well enough to turn into a pre-placement offer, top three of thirty interns. Full time meant Health Transformation, US health systems, real budgets. The project I remember from that first year was an Excel and VBA build for a major US bank, a system that auto generated C suite reports straight into PowerPoint and Word. I had not written anything like it before. But I have liked building things since I was a kid, and this was the first thing at work that was entirely mine to own, so I learned it as I went. When it shipped it took out more than ten hours of four analyst effort every week, somewhere north of $100K a year. First time I properly noticed the difference between analysis you present and something that keeps running after you hand it over.

Some friends from college floated Ladakh and I said yes before I'd thought it through, which at the time was not how I did things. Umling La sits at 19,024 feet. Getting there is ten hour riding days, altitude sickness that doesn't care how fit you are, and single lane corners with trucks coming the other way, where one bad decision isn't a bad day, it's the rest of your life. I'd only ever ridden in a city. I was out of my depth for most of it.

What I brought back wasn't the summit. It was the realization that I'd spent most of my life optimizing for the safe version of every decision, and that the safe version had never once given me anything like this. Everything I've built since started on the other side of that.

It started as curiosity about what AI could take off my plate, the same itch that made me write that first macro. That turned into a fully functioning AI receptionist for US hospitals, real stack, end to end, shipped rather than prototyped. What I had not expected was how much more it mattered at the smaller end. Not a global program with a steering committee, just a practice that stops missing calls. Seven years after walking into Trichy with a Civil Engineering seat, the instinct has not changed. Stop describing the problem, go build the fix.