If I had to sum this year up I would say: frontal lobe development.
As I entered my last semester of college this past January I made it my mission to say yes to as many things as possibly, and that manifested in many different ways even beyond graduation, which I will touch on later.
I’ll touch on different parts of the years in phases, starting with:
Last Semester of College
With my post-grad job secured, I felt truly free for the first time in my life since second semester senior year of high school. Classes were bummy; my main goal was to cram a lot of life into 3 months.
Every day I would be open to hanging out with people, learning new things, and this manifested in the form of activities where we would regularly go:
- bowling
- skiing
- throwing the pig skin in the diag
- trying new food spots in downtown Ann Arbor
- going to the golfing range with friends
I had a lot of firsts and I realized I enjoyed being a beginner. I was averse to skiing because I’ve been snowboarding since 5th grade and thought skiiers had no steeze but when I was comfortable with looking like a beginner in front of my friends I truly had the time of my life.
I also DJ'd a college party, thank you to everyone for coming through and showing love.
I started investing as well, trying to be more financially literate as I would soon have a lot of disposable income and made some nice bets in Jan that have been giving me beer money.
Running has always been this daunting task to me, like why would you deliberately go through the pain of breathing just to burn like 300 calories, just don’t eat another donut, but I decided this was gonna be a year of firsts so I ran my first 5K after St Patty’s and ran it in 29 minutes. Needless to say this was the spark that has resulted in me now running regularly 2-3 times a week now.
While there were a lot of fun moments, while all this was happening I was working on AgentMail alongside Haakam and Adi in between classes during the day. We floated the idea of working on this more seriously during Thanksgiving of 2024 but during the winterbreak we met almost everyday brainstorming. And during the semester it was mostly building.
And on March 12th 2025 we got our first paying customer. This was a very big moment for us as this answered the question of “can we do it”?
We attended YC office hours which was a 30 minute grill session rather than office hours and the piece of advice we received was to get 1 paying customer, and we did. More on this later.
Post-Grad
Then I graduated, and that was the end of college. It was hard to wrap my head around on the fact that there is no rulebook, no one to tell you what to do anymore, its literally just life.
Like blank canvas where you have the agency to just decide to go to the bahamas and pick coconuts for a living or move to new york and start a boutique charcuterie board business. So I buzzed my hair as well lol.
The freedom was scary, but it fizzled out when we were fortunately invited to do the interview at YC headquarters in SF. I was originally going to stay at home before my post-grad trip, but we quickly booked our flights and we flew to SF and did the interview. Here is seconds before our interview.
After less than 24 hours in SF I was on a plane to India for my post-grad trip with a couple of friends from freshman year when I got a Facetime from my little saying that we got in. Wow. This was life-changing. But I had a daunting decision to make.
I would need to choose either to go to my full-time job at Meta, or go all-in on the startup and forfeit my $209,000 a year offer at Meta.
The Decision
There were so many things going through my head during the trip. I was on a monkey tour deep in thought about what this would entail.
My main issue was immigration troubles as I am an international student trying to make it out the mud without needing to marry a US citizen.
And I realized ultimately its hard to come across an opportunity where you have the highest risk tolerance, working on an idea you truly believe in with the boys you truly care about, and I think once I realized these things the decision came super easy.
And ever since I made this decision I never turned back.
I feel like making big decisions is much like a neural network. You will have biases and weights that you have accumulated from your time living, but the ultimate answer is a best guess, and that comes from instinct. Usually your gut feeling is the sum of your life experiences telling you something and I’ve learned to trust this gut more and more.
Post-Grad trip
Did a lot of fun things, but now that we were in YC I was working during a decent amount of the group activities so we can get in a good position before the batch.
For the times I could participate in the activities I did enjoy. Couple of highlights:
- Walking through street food market in New Delhi
- Collective group defecating excursions post-curry in India
- Visiting the Taj Mahal in Agra, India
- Visiting the red light district in Phuket
- Elephant tour in Phuket
- Going out in Hongdae with the Boys
1 / 4
I think traveling is one of the most important things you can do as a person because a wide world view opens you up to diversity in thought and culture. It can at times fundamentally change the way you think about things subconsciously. I've noticed being in the know with how other people in the world live and approach certain things has helped me think bigger as I build the startup now as well.
1 / 3
YC
YC was one of the most fast-paced grindy times of my life, and I’ve had some pretty bad semesters during college.
Our days would comprise of rolling out of bed, doing work, ordering Door-dash everyday all 3 meals, going to bed, and doing it all over again.
Nevertheless this was an immense time for growth when it came to building, shipping, and growing a company. If theres one thing I’ve learned so far theres a distinction between being a good engineer, and being a good founder. Insight: a good founder’s skill set is the super set of a good engineers.
Reflecting on my senior year and YC, I was glad I was able to finish college and go through all 4 years and the phases and mindset shifts it comes with, because then you become a more seasoned decision maker. There is a lot of diversity when it comes to the backgrounds of founders that join YC such as but not limited to school, age, experience, and so on. Anecdotally almost all come from very strong schools (think Stanford, MIT, Ivies), ex-FAANG or ex-founders in some capacity.
Very proud that 4 of the companies in this batch were from the University of Michigan (Go Blue)!
Closing
I just turned 22 last month, and I genuinely feel the frontal lobe development starting to kick in. This thing we call life is so ephemeral I’m beginning to cherish more things like friends and family.
Life is no longer lived by next year, next semester, its about what I do tomorrow. Thus I would like to be more deliberate with how I spend my days. What you do a bunch of days is a year, and a bunch of years is your life, so I believe living everyday how you want your life to look is the highest leverage thing you can do at all times.
List of Firsts in 2025:
- DJ’d first party
- picked up skiing for the first time after snowboarding since 5th grade.
- started actively investing. who knew money could just come in like that.
- attended winterfest for the first time in 4 years of college
- visited new york for the first time (there is more to life than AI startups)
- started bowling more regularly
- going to the range more frequently
- taking a beat making class.
- ran first 5k
- New countries visited
- portugal
- went to india
- shat in india
- thailand
- switzerland (first time in scandanvaia!)
- gave my first speech at github hq
- sky-dived
- hosted a hackathon
- first hole in one on a golf simulator