The longer answer
The longer version of who you're dealing with.
Bengaluru. Building danadone, with mineOS running quietly underneath. Husband to Prathyusha, father to Agasthya.
I taught for six years at Insights IAS in Bengaluru: Indian economy, public administration, current affairs. Roughly ten thousand UPSC aspirants moved through those rooms. I sat the exam five times myself, cleared Prelims every time, never cleared Mains. That's the one I lead with, because it taught me the most: you can be inside a system, watch it work, watch it fail, and still believe the failure is your fault long after the system has stopped earning the benefit of the doubt.
The conclusion I came out of the classroom with became an essay: government exam prep is where Indian talent goes to die. I'm on the other side of it now, building, hiring, writing under my own name, and trying to redirect some of that hunger toward better risks.
Alongside all that, I ran a Telegram channel for a few years on learning, behaviour, and the odd contrarian idea. Four hundred-odd posts, a few thousand subscribers. That was where I learned to write. This site is what came after.
A few things that stay true, whatever the day.
i. I ship under my real name. Steadily, not in spurts. The credentials worth having are the ones anyone can check on the open internet.
ii. Most of my work runs through AI agents now. It's me and a handful of them doing what used to take a small company.
iii. My brain is non-linear. It costs me, abandoned projects, fights with my own calendar, mistaking interest for importance. It also gives me edges most founders don't have, and I'd rather work with the wiring than against it.
iv. Prathyusha and Agasthya come first. The family stays steady, and everything else is the risk I take around it.
v. I write almost everything down. I'm playing for decades, not quarters, and you can't compound what you let leak.
vi. A product, a company, a day, a life. I find myself thinking about all of them the same way. Same craft, different scale.
The edge, not the deficit.
I have ADHD. I treat it as how I'm built, not as something to be cured into a different person. The cost is real: years of fighting my own calendar, dropping projects three-quarters of the way through, mistaking interest for importance. The upside is real too: I think capture-first, I connect things that don't obviously go together, I'm comfortable with rotation, and I can sit in the ambiguity of early-stage work longer than most.
What works for me, in this order: sleep, exercise, nutrition, capture, ritual. Medication when it's needed, only as much as it's needed. mineOS is the other half of that, a second self that does the things I can't get myself to start.
The part that stays.
My wife Prathyusha runs her own professional brand; that's hers, not mine, and it stays off this page. Our son Agasthya is two. The family is the part of life that has to hold steady whatever else happens. It's the thing that lets me take real risks everywhere else.
What I'm trying to earn, not buy: a healthy, fit body; a calm mind; a house full of love. None of the three is for sale. If work ever starts competing with them, work loses.
A few identities, side by side.
Citizen of the world. Indian a little more deeply, probably from the patriotic films and the air I grew up in. Bangalorean. Telugu-speaking. Kannada-speaking. None of these stack into a single label; they just sit beside each other, and I don't think it needs to be tidier than that.
English, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi. Agasthya will grow up hearing all four.
The people I keep coming back to.
Naval Ravikant, for leverage and long games. Build specific knowledge, work under your own name, play long games with people who also play long. A lot of how I work comes from him, including the decision to write under my real name when an alias would be easier.
Nassim Taleb, for the defensive side. What you take away matters more than what you add. Safe bets first, risky ones second. Skin in the game as the only credibility test that counts. He's a big reason I fix the system before reaching for a quick fix, in the body, the family, and the company.
Charlie Munger, for clear thinking. Invert, always invert. Borrow models from every field and use whichever one the problem actually wants. I'm slowly re-reading Poor Charlie's Almanack right now; the chapter on incentives gets louder every year.
James Clear, for identity. Every action is a vote for the kind of person you're becoming. The point of a habit isn't the habit, it's who it turns you into.
What usually settles it.
A handful of things tend to make the call. I'd rather move than wait for permission. I take the bigger swing when the downside is survivable. I subtract before I add. And I try to leave whoever I'm dealing with better off than I found them. Most decisions come down to which one of those matters most this time.
Long games, with people I want to keep knowing, under my own name. A family that stays steady. A body, a mind, and a home that aren't for sale. If a name worth knowing comes out of all that, good, but that was never the point.