Three small companies
In college I started things because the people around me were starting things. Chandigarh in those years had enough of that energy to be contagious and not enough of it to be a scene.
Adware was paper cups with ads on them. We sold a lot of cups and made a little money. It was a real business in the sense that cash came in. It was not a company I knew how to grow, and I did not pretend otherwise for long.
SquareFeet was student housing. The pitch was simple: landlords get a managed tenant, students get a room that is not a scam. We signed a few properties. The model needed inventory we did not have the cash to hold. Lease-on-lease looks clever on paper and mean in the bank account. I shut it down. I still think the problem was real. I was not the person, and we were not the balance sheet.
CodeCrafts was freelance software for small firms, some of them in Canada. We shipped work. We did not have a reason for the next ten customers to arrive without me hunting them. I was the analyst, the designer, and the person who sent the invoice. That is a job, not a firm.
None of this is a tragedy. It is also not a montage. I learned that “founder” is a word you can put on a poster while the unit economics are still a wish. I learned that I like the hunt more than I like maintaining a mediocre product. That is not always a virtue.
The one story I still tell without flinching is small. We needed print for a campus event and had no budget. I asked a restaurant that lived off students to pay for the print in exchange for their ad on the back. They said yes. We got the flyers. They got the footfall. No equity, no brand, no lesson about changing the world. Just a trade.
I went to LSE for a summer, then back to JPMorgan, then to crypto. I do not have a clean lesson. I have a list of things that did not last, and a better sense of when I am pretending.