My first startup journey. 7 years of rise and fall

Hi, I’m Utkarsh. I’m an entrepreneur-engineer. 28 years old as of Jan 2025.

I am writing this post as a reflection of last 7 years. A symbolic way to shed my old skin, and to move on. This is more for me, and I’m not sure if it will be useful for anyone else.

I had a rockstar like start, even though it didn’t feel that way back then. I dropped out of college in 2018, and started working on my startup. Being a middle class Indian, this was insanity. My parents and relatives had almost shunned me.

Anyway, I started up with good friends of mine, and bootstrapped the company for 2 years, found some big customers, worked on decentralization and privacy technologies for AI on personal data, really cool stuff. And built a small team.

Then raised $2M from Accel in 2020, and expanded the team. 3 micro pivots during covid, from healthcare, banking, and finally landed on embedded lending as our beachhead market. Couldn’t travel during covid, couldn’t meet customers, zoom calls were not enough. That vertical didn’t survive the market crash in 2022 summer.

And then the LLM era began, and we started building for a new vision at the beginning of 2023. The vision was to integrate a user’s online data into a living persona, and recommend the right information to them. It was a new category, no established market, but we built early versions of this technology. The technology had potential for bigger purposes, but our desperation had us use it for a shopping recommender.

We built a shopping recommender throughout 2023, multiple versions of the same thing. A few users liked it, but we realized the faults in our approach, and decided that going for the big vision narrative was the right approach. By this point, everything had stopped working, everyone had crashed burnt out. I couldn’t rally a tired and confused team to believe in the technology and vision, I couldn’t inspire them to stay patient and build it with passion. Not everyone was against it, but not everyone was for it.

Eventually the company crashed and we had to let go of the team, and I started building the same thing again in 2024. But this time reality really slapped me in the face and I realized that I had to let go of my startup, and start a new journey.

This was not a lesson in entrepreneurship, but a lesson in psychology and understanding of human nature. Finding evidence for my own uniqueness among the many conflicting advice from others.

Earlier my belief system was that there is only one truth, and we should all work towards it, align our perceptions, and seek it relentlessly. Now I know that there is a single truth, but not everyone wants to play that game.

Some people want to retire early, some want to build a legacy. Some just want to have a reputation within their networks, and some want to be the best at what they do. That is their local truth, and they aren’t bothered by the global or universal truth. And that is okay. It doesn’t mean they are wrong, it definitely doesn’t mean that I am wrong, it just means that I need to find my own tribe.

So I hadn’t failed, we as a team had failed. My failure was not taking care of my health, to be obsessed with success so much that if I was failing, I was hurting myself through all the vices. Because mediocrity to me, is failure.

If there are multiple types of people, then it implies there are multiple types of entrepreneurs, but broadly speaking I can categorize them into two categories:

• Those who create something new and change the trajectory of the world. New categories and new markets. Science, Art and Technology are of the utmost importance here. Network, Reputation, and Status are secondary, and a means to an end. An innovator is likely to succeed here.
• Those who find a gap in the existing market, and fill it. Find a space for themselves in the market. Network, Reputation, and Status are important here. Technology is secondary, and just a means to an end. A businessman is likely to succeed here.

We need both kinds of entrepreneurs in the world. But I burned $2M dollars and 7 years of my life to learn that I belong to the first category. That I was not mad for thinking that I belonged to the first category. But the non ego part of me is put in a situation that belongs to the second category. So next phase of my life is about dancing on this fine line.

To be able to dream, is a function of money. And Indian ecosystem doesn’t have money so most people are afraid to dream. But there is another truth, bigger than this, to be able to dream is a function of agency. Belief in the self. The modern connected world, is a constant spiritual war between the self and the others. The memetics that push you to be the best version of yourself, and those that keep you in the cage of the status quo.

That is what defines the difference between an innovator and a businessman.

If you have no agency, your truth is defined by others, and your survival depends on approval of the market, and so the best you can do is to fit into the existing market.

But if you have agency, you define your own truth, and your survival depends on you expanding as a being, as a soul. You don’t need money to be able to dream, you need an honest heart and a clear mind.

And there are very few people who can do that, because our culture is failing and no-one is teaching the right principles, but there are people who are winning the spiritual war anyhow, with insane amounts of self belief that seems borderline delusional to those playing the status quo game.

And that is who I want to be with. Self believing dreamers who work sincerely and consistently. They are not focused and disciplined for the sake of it, they are focused and disciplined because they believe in their own truth and are slowly walking towards it. That is my tribe.

So the next part of the journey is to find my own tribe, and build for the future of internet, and how it integrates into our personal lives, and how it integrates into our society. AI is just a new technology, maybe the most important one yet, but Internet is a civilizational truth. It can take years, but I know I have to find my own tribe first.

Dreamers, Innovators, Truthful, Hard working, Honest builders. People who observe the world carefully, who work with love and care. You can’t have an army without structure, discipline and commitment. You can’t go on crusades if you don’t have a cause. The concept of tapasya in vedic tradition is more relevant than ever in this hyper connected, information super highway that we live in.

It sucks that I have to start again. Not being a millionaire at 29, no-one in the right circle knows me, and I don’t have easy access to San Francisco and the nerds and geeks there. But I will make it happen, whatever it takes. It will happen, there’s no way I stop expanding. Universe is the witness.

But if I have a powerful perception, and can see the world’s machinations, and I can see how to fix it, then it is a moral duty to do so. Like Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility”.

Here’s what I have learnt:

• Mind is the beginning and the end of everything.
• Learn from the greats, the experts, and the institutions, but build your own belief system from the ground up.
• Science is a knowledge system, the slowest but one of the most beautiful ones.
• There are other knowledge systems, and they are not wrong, some are more beautiful than science.
• Academic truth is a function of who funds it. Beware the minions of the church of science.
• Magic exists, and is waiting for those who seek it.
• Manifestation is a function of attention, intention and energy.
• There is no substitute for hard work. You can’t trick the universe.
• Be good, but be real.
• Regulate your heart, and your mind. The entity knows what is best for you.
• Attention is all we have, and all we need.
• I have the power in me to deal with any situation, and I will get up and build again.