Venturing into the Unknown

It’s honestly a terrifying decision, but i feel like it was a no brainer for me. It’s not terrifying because i’m conflicted if it’s the right decision, but because i’m venturing into the unknown without a safety net.

The past 4 months at ignosis have been great, but it was really exhausting. We wokeup around 9-9:30, reached the office between 10-11, came home from the office around 7 and then worked on GAIA till around 3-4 am, barely getting 5-6 hours of sleep everyday and surviving on coffee and redbulls. It’s extremely stressful constantly being under the pressure of trying to run a startup while also juggling a job. These past few months have taken a toll on our health too, there have been instances where we’ve fallen sick bcz of burnout. Working like this is just not sustainable for the long term, from both a health and creativity/productivity standpoint. Although, it is true that i’ll always value these days of the grind when i look back on them.

I was hoping i’d get to learn a lot but the opposite was true. I feel like a company that is in the between of being a startup and being an MNC is the worst of both worlds. They’ve lost the execution speed and rawness of a startup, yet employees still have the pressure that doesn’t exist in an MNC. They use outdated tech unnecessarily, the developer overhead and experience (in terms of CI or platform setup or just architectural decisions in general) is truly horrible. It’s not really the companies fault that there’s not much for me to learn. I think desperate times call for desperate measures, and in the age of LLMs everyone is rightfully rushing to ship code so there’s a lot more emphasis on building and shipping rather than an opportunity to learn, i don’t really mind this tho. I did learn a lot in terms of fine tuning my vibe coding workflows which is a massive plus i guess.

I also don’t think fintech is for me, I already did kinda know that but now it’s solidified. The problems that Ignosis is solving just don’t excite me that much. Sure working on things and looking at things from a product perspective and seeing real world impact is exciting and meaningful but when you don’t resonate with the core problem it’s another issue entirely. Working on CRUD software and simple REST applications is reasonable only when you deeply care about the problem at hand. On the other hand, the work we’re doing at GAIA is extremely exciting for me. It’s not just the fact of ownership that this project is mine, it’s that the possibilities for exploration in this new industry are endless. The amount of things we can build, the opportunities to expand, the endless parts of our vision, working on truly difficult and new problems, on top of that the feeling when someone uses something you’ve built and finds joy in it is just delightful. The future is wild, it’s difficult, it’s uncertain, it feels like something straight out of a sci-fi film and it’s exciting. And the amount of learning that’s possible just by being a founder and trying different things is immense. In the short time we’ve been working on this, it has taught me and Dhruv more than our entire careers before working on this. I’ll get to build a generational team, fulfill my vision, i’ll meet people, and there’s so much for me to learn on the way and infinite knowledge to gain. I just don’t think this is possible doing a job.

It’s not all bad though. I should be grateful for the culture they have and are trying so hard to inculcate. Employees and interns truly have an opportunity to create an impact through their work from day one. I should feel lucky that I got the opportunity to work here. It’s quite a shame tho, i suppose in another world where I didn’t have something else to work on, I would actually be trying my best here.

I suppose making the decision was quite easy. I’ve had a couple of breakdowns in the past few months where I’ve felt frustrated and lost. I had sort of planned or thought that I’d stay in this job for at least and at most a year but over the months it was apparent that I wouldn’t be able to be here for long. I’ve been working on my startup with my co founder for about more than a year now, and when I think about it, I don’t really have a reason why i chose to take this job which is shocking to say the least. I’m a builder by nature, and being confined by rules in an environment like this just feels unnatural. I’m truly grateful for having supportive parents who understand all of this and choose to support me regardless.

I feel like this is the best time after the dot com bubble to build a company (the ai bubble) and I really should make the best out of this time. I’m young (20), I have no financial obligations, my parents are practical and understanding, i’m driven and ambitious, I think the best decision for me would be to just burn the ships and take the leap. I just cannot see myself doing a job, as a kid too i’ve never seen myself working a job as an adult. I don’t think i could ever feel fulfilled working a job my entire life. I’m a creative person, I’m a builder, I want to create, I want to lead, I think the best work for my persona type to do or for my self fulfillment will only come from starting something of my own. And in the worst case scenario, if all turns to shit, I could go anywhere in the world because i’m lucky enough to have british passport, and I am pretty confident that i’m skilled enough to get another job and work in someplace like a startup.

I really think we’re headed in the right direction. Dhruv and I have grown so much in the past year, regardless of external success we’ve made so much progress with understanding what we’re doing and the direction we should be going in. We truly believe with the direction the world is going in, we are really doing something right. A couple of competitors to GAIA would be products like OpenClaw and Poke (by The Interaction Company) and even still, they’re not mainstream or even widely known by the masses. There’s a massive fucking gap to fill where everyone in this world can have their own proactive, insanely powerful personal assistant that can virtually do anything.

I’ve never felt this way about anything before. It’s an exhilarating feeling waking up every day with the same thing on your mind and going back to sleep with the same thing on your mind. I feel blessed and even more so, priviliged, to know what excites me in my life. I’m extremely bullish in the vision of the products we will be trying to build in the future.

I know it’s going to be hard and it’ll take some time, but building generational companies takes years often decades. What comes off as overnight successes are almost always the result of years of hidden, consistent effort finally meeting opportunity. I’m in it for the long run, and I think the answer needs to be obvious when one is asked “Is this something you can see yourself working on a decade from now?”. Companies like Notion, Figma, Linear truly inspire me in terms of taste and the chart below showing how long it takes to go from idea to product market fit really resonates with me and gives me a lot of hope.

Play Long-term Games With Long-term People - Naval Ravikant

How long it took for companies to go from idea to product market fit.
Credits to Lenny’s Newsletter

TO BE CONTINUED