From a first HTML page in 2020 to YC in 2026

Every portfolio has a bio that makes the path look inevitable. It wasn't. Here's the version with the detours left in.

2020 — HTML, CSS, and a lot of broken layouts

I wrote my first real website in mid-2020. Plain HTML and CSS, a JavaScript file that mostly did things it didn't need to do. It was bad. It was also mine, and I could open it in a browser and show someone.

That's the only thing that mattered from that year: I found out I liked the loop of writing something and immediately seeing it work. Everything since is that loop, at higher stakes.

What didn't matter: which tutorial I followed, which framework I "should" have started with. I've since worked in React, Next.js, NestJS, Django, FastAPI, Go, Rust and a dozen others. The first one is irrelevant. The habit of shipping is not.

2022 — Pronexus Tech

I founded a small software studio in Bangalore and started taking client work: web apps, mobile apps, SaaS products for people who had a business and needed software to run it.

This is where I learned to finish. Client work has an invoice attached, and "the architecture is elegant" doesn't ship. Over the next couple of years Pronexus launched ten-plus products, I managed a real team for the first time, and I built the deployment pipelines and engineering standards that let a small group move fast without leaving a mess.

It also taught me the thing nobody tells you about consulting: you learn ten different domains a year, shallowly. Useful. Not the same as depth.

2023 — NammaSuraksha, and the security engine

Team ByteCrew, the NammaSuraksha national cybersecurity hackathon. We built an AI-powered scam and phishing detection system — links and messages across web, email, SMS and social, with a Next.js dashboard, a React Native app and a Chrome extension for live alerts.

I architected the security engine. We won.

I won two more hackathons over 2023–24, and around the same time I was running VisionX, a student community that grew to 3,000+ members and ran 50+ technical events with partners like Google and Microsoft. I also started speaking — cybersecurity, full-stack, startup scaling, at ten-plus industry events.

None of this is the thing I do now. All of it is why I could do the thing I do now: it's where I learned to build under a deadline in a team, to explain technical work to a room, and to be responsible for something bigger than my own laptop.

2023–24 — the projects that were actually products

Somewhere in here the side projects stopped being toys.

Gitjet — an interactive Git CLI. 500+ stars, 1K+ developers using it. First time strangers adopted something I built.

SEOScale — production SEO automation, Go microservices, 100K+ monthly requests, real Stripe billing. First time I ran a system that cost money when it was down.

Skillment — AI proctoring for remote assessments. WebRTC, face detection, 1,000+ concurrent sessions on Azure. First time I built something where a bug had consequences for a real person's exam.

Dub and Once UI — open source. Contributing to a platform used by 50K+ developers and running backend systems for a design system serving 1M+ monthly requests taught me what "production" means when you don't control the users.

2025 — CTO at Percify

Ten months. Empty repo to acquisition. I owned the technical vision for an AI avatar platform: modular monorepo, NestJS backend, background workers, AI generation pipelines, Stripe billing, real-time analytics over 100M+ daily events.

The thing I'm proudest of isn't the acquisition. It's that the deploy went from two hours to fifteen minutes, we shipped 50+ features, and 95% of bugs got caught before production. Boring numbers. The boring numbers are why the company was worth buying.

2026 — Tsenta, YC S26

I joined as a founding engineer in March. I own the backend and the ATS integrations: 200,000+ applications a day across 25+ recruiting platforms, most of them reverse-engineered because they have no API. I built the iOS and Android apps and the Chrome extension too, and cut the time-per-application from fifteen minutes to thirty seconds.

Along the way we cut infrastructure costs 40% while holding 99.5%+ uptime.

I took a smaller title than "CTO" to get here, on purpose. After Percify I knew what breadth felt like. I wanted to find out what depth felt like.

What actually moved the needle

Looking back across six years, the pattern is embarrassingly simple:

1. Ship something real, early, badly. The 2020 website was terrible. It was also the start of everything.
2. Take on responsibility before you're ready. Founding a studio at nineteen, architecting a hackathon winner, running a 3,000-person community — every one of those I was underqualified for when I started.
3. Chase the shortest feedback loop. Client work → hackathons → my own products → a startup → a YC startup. Each step, the distance between "I built this" and "a real person hit it" got shorter.
4. Finish your degree anyway. I'm at Presidency University, CS, graduating 2027, GPA 8.4. People assume the startup work and the degree can't both be real. They can. It's just a lot of 2am.

What's next

I don't know, honestly, and I've stopped pretending to. What I know is that I'm going to keep picking the problem over the title, and keep going where the loop is shortest.

Keep moving. Don't settle.