From a village I left in tears.
Back to one I'm rebuilding with love.

The boy with a borrowed dream.

I am from Surendranagaram — a small village in Andhra Pradesh, the kind of place where the loudest sound in the morning is a temple bell, and the loudest sound at night is the wind through mango leaves.

I lost my father when I was seven. He left without saying goodbye to a boy who didn't yet know what goodbye meant. After that, it was my mother and me. She held our world together with the quiet, terrifying strength of women who have no other choice.

I studied in my village all the way through graduation. But somewhere in those years, the village stopped being big enough for the dream growing inside me. I wanted an MBA. I wanted a city. I wanted to come back one day with enough to make my mother's hands stop trembling when she counted money.

I researched colleges on my neighbour's phone. ₹98 for 1 GB of data — meant to last a whole month. I made it last. After weeks of digging, I found agencies in Bangalore that promised everything.

In 2016, I left Surendranagaram for the first time. I felt like the frog from the old folk tale — stepping out of the well for the first time in his life, certain the ocean would be kind to him.

The frog discovers the ocean is cruel.

For the first few months, Bangalore was a miracle. New friends, new food, new air. The frog had finally seen the sea.

Then doubt arrived, quietly. Will this college actually teach me anything? Will companies come for placements? I started watching my seniors. None of them had jobs. No companies were coming. The agency that brought me here had taken my mother's borrowed money and given me a brochure.

I had been scammed. And I couldn't tell anyone.

Around the same time, back home, our family lost a large amount of money to a land scam — money my mother had been saving as a cushion for our lives. Now I had a useless degree program, a hostel bill, a survival bill, more loans I'd quietly taken without telling her, and a kind of debt I couldn't say out loud — not to her, not to anyone.

I was nineteen. I was alone in a city I didn't understand. And I was sitting on a mountain that I knew, even then, could crush a family if I let it.

So I did something only a desperate person does. I made the biggest decision of my life without telling anyone. I dropped out. I told no one — not my mother, not the college, not the agency. I walked out of that program and into an internship at a Bangalore startup called Trell.

Because some part of me knew: risk is better than being stuck. Trying is better than giving up.

The house that taught me how to build.

Trell wasn't a company. It was a two-storey house pretending to be an office. No cubicles, no suits, no hierarchy — just IIT Bombay graduates who slept where they worked and worked like the world depended on it.

Pulkit Agrawal. Arun Lodhi. Prashant Sachan. Bimal Kartheek Rebba. I watched them and realised: I had no idea what real work was.

They taught me marketing not by giving me books, but by trusting me with a budget, a problem, and a deadline. They taught me to execute. To ship. To measure. To learn from what didn't work and double down on what did.

The marketer I am today was born in that house. Sleeping on desks. Eating instant noodles at 2 a.m. Realising that startups demand this grind from anyone who wants to build the next Apple or Google.

I didn't just work with people there. I made friends — Sanchit, Sahil, Shreya, Nirav, Namrata, Supriya, Pramathesh, Zaine — people who would still pick up my call ten years later. That's the real currency of a startup: not the product, the people.

And then, just as everything was finally working — I resigned. To start my own thing. A blunder? Maybe. But a necessary one.

The win. Then the plague.

In 2019, I went back to my hometown and opened a small offline digital-marketing institute. No investors. No fancy setups. A whiteboard, a rented room, and a belief I couldn't shake.

I taught MBA graduates during the day, made study material at night, and walked from college to college to find my first student. I barely slept that year. I didn't need to.

And then — my first student got a job.

In just four months, I placed 33 students in 17 companies. It wasn't business success. It was something deeper. It was validation that the village boy could give back.

Then came March 2020. COVID. The world shut its doors and my institute shut with it.

I went home. I locked myself in. I watched everything I had built disappear. I played PUBG for days because games are easier than mirrors. I told myself I was resting. I was not resting. I was disappearing.

The DM that saved my life.

One morning, mid-lockdown, I opened LinkedIn for no reason. There was a message from someone I'd never met — Sweta Jain from a company called Rizzle AI. She wanted to talk about a marketing role.

I joined as a Marketing Strategist, working from home, in May 2020. I had nothing to lose. So I gave everything.

Over the next four years, I onboarded creators one DM at a time, one phone call at a time. 10,000 of them. Then 100,000 students-turned-externs in our learning community. We climbed.

Rizzle ranked #3 in Social on the Play Store — next to Facebook and WhatsApp. We were #2 Product of the Day and Week #5 on Product Hunt, beating 1,157 global products including Google Gemini. We earned 25+ badges in global competitions.

I worked with a team that became family. Sweta, Sudheer, Ramya, Vamshi, Sathvik, Ajay, Adithya — and dozens more. We built something we were proud of.

But somewhere in late 2024, in the middle of all that success, a quiet voice started asking me: who are you when nobody is watching?

I didn't have an answer.

Following the people who shaped me.

Somewhere along the Rizzle journey, two people had become more than colleagues to me. Vidya Narayanan and Lakshminath Dondeti — co-founders of Rizzle, ex-Qualcomm, ex-Google, the kind of leaders who carry decades of engineering brilliance and somehow still answer your messages at midnight when you're stuck on something small.

I had never met two people more talented, more grounded, and more genuinely good. Vidya could break down a problem with the precision of a surgeon. Lakshminath could see five years into the future of a technology and quietly start building for it. Between them, they had built one of the most respected creator-tech products in India.

Then a chapter unfolded at Rizzle that wasn't theirs to deserve. The kind of corporate turn that good people sometimes endure when they're too busy creating to play politics. They moved on — with the same quiet dignity they had always carried.

For me, the choice was simple. I followed them.

I joined their new company, FinalLayer AI, because where Vidya and Lakshminath go, real work follows. I wanted to keep learning from them. I wanted to keep being shaped by them. Talent is a teacher, but character is a compass — and they had both pointing the same direction.

And the work spoke for itself. While the place they had left stayed stuck where they had once carried it, FinalLayer moved fast, monetised quickly, and started generating real revenue within months. Watching them rebuild from a clean sheet — calmer this time, but somehow even sharper — was a masterclass on its own. Talent doesn't ask for permission. It just keeps shipping.

FinalLayer was an incredible chapter. But all the while, in the quiet moments between standups and shipping, the voice from my Surendranagaram porch kept getting louder. You came home for a reason. Did you forget?

I hadn't forgotten. I had just been waiting for myself to be ready.

One evening, I sat with the question I had been avoiding: If I built one more thing in my life, what would it be?

The answer was not a product. The answer was a place. A way for the city to come home. A way for the village to stay alive. A way for both to remember they need each other.

The answer was Iperfarm.