The Year of Rewards, Regrets and Redirections - 2024
January 01, 2025
January 01, 2025
I’ve been doing extensive year-end reviews since 2021 and try to keep it as real and raw as possible (which is also why I keep it private). But 2024 was unique, it was the year of maximums - a year of maximum change, maximum uncertainty, and maximum regrets. Which is why I thought of writing a public account of how my year fared. I did choose to ignore a couple of details that shaped how the year progressed but let's for your sake and mine assume that this essay is comprehensive.
This was the year when I transitioned from being a student to being a student again. That is to say, I completed my undergraduate degree and was all set to start my Work Career before I got an accidental opportunity to do an MBA from IIM Calcutta. The entire year was incredibly tumultuous with life-altering choices presenting themselves every month. From varied job offers to MBA applications to Entrepreneurial Ventures - this year had it all. I wouldn’t be too wrong in saying that this year I faced the toughest decisions and while on the face of it, it seems that life has been relatively calmer, it couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I’ll set the base for how 2023 ended so that you have a better understanding of how things played out in 2024. As of 2023 end, Writee AI had been acquired, I had given my GMAT (got a 750/800), I had also given CAT (got a 99.90%ile), and was applying seriously to the Top 7 B-Schools in the US for their deferred MBA program. In the deferred MBA program, I can secure admission to the standard MBA program as a final year student but would start my degree after 2-5 years, gaining quality work experience in these 2-5 years. So, along with an MBA admission, I was also looking for a job and after much thinking, I had found a fascination with the Venture Capital and Private Equity investing world. Thus, I was also actively looking for entry-level roles in VC firms in India.
The year began with me submitting my applications for the Stanford Graduate School of Business. This was one of the few B-Schools that really tickled my fancy. There was a lot about its ethos that strongly resonated with my belief systems and I very excitedly started the year by submitting its application form.
Immediately after doing so, I flew to Bangalore (on a flight that was delayed by 12 hr) to attend my best friend’s brother’s wedding. It was in an ultra-luxurious location in Bangalore and I wanted to spend the last couple of months before I started my career enjoying as much as I could, so who could refuse such an offer? I spent 3 days enjoying cuisines from all over the world and vehemently discussing family politics all while playing dress-up. On the last day of the wedding, I received an interview invite from a mid-tier VC firm for a final round of interviews. They wanted me to present my thesis for a sector the firm should consider investing in, and I had only 1.5 weeks to prepare.
The wedding wasn’t the end of my trip year-beginning trip. From Bangalore, I flew to Mumbai to spend 2 weeks with my cousins and my aunt. My eldest cousin had flown in from Canada for a couple of months and I wanted to spend some time with him. With me being out of the city, it was difficult for me to focus on creating the thesis document for the mid-tier VC and I massively messed up that interview. While I take the easy route by blaming everything on me not being home, it was a blunder on my end - I took things too lightly there.
The personal highlights of my trip to Mumbai were watching Entourage for hours at an end with my cousin, playing squash for the first time, and walking around main-city Mumbai. Even though I know I am not supposed to like British architecture and that it is a symbol of colonialism and oppression, there is something about legacy and legend that makes these things very attractive. While I was in Mumbai, I also met a senior from my college who just happened to be my father’s friend, or was it the other way around? I was telling him about my desire to work in Venture Capital and potentially even checkout Private Equity practices and he was kind enough to refer me to a couple of firms. It is always extremely difficult to get a foot in the door at these places, and having someone do that for you is a privilege of the highest order.
I had an interview with 3 PE firms - a domestic fund, a multi-national fund, and one which was a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Canadian fund. As with almost all PE firms, these 3 firms had small, tightly-knit teams. As I went in for interviews at these places, I realized that these funds had no intention of hiring a 21-year-old kid with no full-time work experience. They were very interested in meeting the person who built & sold a GenAI company in 2023 and were confused as to why this person wanted to join Private Equity. My meetings with all 3 firms were instructional and I still carry some perspectives from those conversations with me.
This brought my 3-week long trip to an end. I landed back in Kolkata and started reaching out to VC Firms aggressively. I secured 4 interviews in February and attempted them with varying levels of success. Of these 4, one of the interviews was with a very high-quality VC Infra company founded in the US. I was interviewing for a role in the company’s India team. Let’s call the company ALI for future references. I had 3 interviews with the ALI team and after a nail-biting 1.5 month long process the team extended me a full-time offer. Hilariously, I reacted exactly how I respond to every major event in my life - find that one minor thing that isn’t perfect and over-index on that. There was a hairline difference between the pay they offered and my expectation but given the quality of work I was expected to do, pay would have eventually been the least of my concerns. After a battle of pros and cons in my mind, when the dust had settled, I was overjoyed and very excited to start work.
My job role at this firm was unique. It was a perfect mixture of the investing side of a VC firm and the product end of a high-growth Tech start-up. The role perfectly blended my 2 passions - one for a variety of unique ideas and the other for hardcore implementation. With a full-time job in hand, I restarted the application process for International B-Schools towards the end of March 2024.
These were arguably the most tumultuous months of 2024. They say that there are decades where weeks happen and then there are weeks where decades happen - these were a set of those weeks. It wasn’t that I was doing too many things in these 2 months but somehow a number of different threads of life merged into a single big decision for me to make and live with for at least the next couple of years. But let's not get ahead of us and continue the story with B-School applications.
I entered April with an interview with IIM Calcutta. It was the only IIM I had an interview with and since I am a resident of Kolkata, my interview was on the campus itself. I dressed up in all formals, learned a couple of formulas from engineering, and gave a mock interview with my girlfriend all in a span of 1.5 days. With all this prep under my belt, I went into the interview room expecting pressing questions and intense grilling only to be asked to sing a song for the panel. The interview lasted all but 10 minutes and I left the room with the standard toffee that all IIMs offer their interview candidates.
While I was hard at work with my B-School applications, I had also started the onboarding and knowledge transfer sessions with ALI. I could foresee some interesting and high-impact work in the future. During this time, my girlfriend was interning at Jefferies in Mumbai. I was relatively free in this period with most of the work happening in spurts of a couple of hours, so on an impulse, I decided to plan another trip to Mumbai. This would be an incredible opportunity to explore a new city together as a couple and would be super fun too. My cousin from Canada was also still in town, so I planned an extended trip to Goa with them as well. This was a 2.5-week long trip, with me spending 1.5 weeks with my girlfriend and another week with my cousins. These were arguably the most fun I’ve had in 2024. In Mumbai, we went across town from super fancy restaurants to street hawkers & flea markets. We also spent an hour doing the most couple thing ever - sitting on Marine Drive looking at the sunset. It was very difficult for Goa to match the high of the first leg of the trip but it did try hard. My cousins and I drove overnight from Mumbai to Goa and this was my first time doing a 12-hour long road trip where I drove for 4-4.5 hours. In all previous road trips, I either drove very little or was merely a spectator. Another highlight of the trip to Goa was Scuba diving. I enjoy nature and wildlife a lot, and the experience of going underwater was exhilarating. All this while, I kept submitting applications to the various B-Schools as and when the deadlines approached.
With the experience of a lifetime, I came back to Kolkata to take my last set of exams for engineering. There were a myriad of emotions running through my body. I was excited about my undergrad at Jadavpur University ending and equally excited about the possibilities that the future held. As I took my end-sem exams for my 4th year, I received an email from IIM Calcutta - I had been accepted into IIMC’s flagship MBA program, the university and degree that people across India strived to get into. You’d assume I would be overjoyed looking at that email but I surprisingly was incredibly sad, I was almost hoping to not get in. I was very excited about my upcoming job at ALI and was very apprehensive about the culture in B-Schools in India. I hate a culture of subservience to a system set in stone a decade ago and that is exactly what the IIMs propagate with all their might. Now, I was stuck with a very difficult decision to make - should I join IIMC and leave my job at ALI or should I stick with ALI and work my way to wherever I want to go? There was a 2-week long battle in my mind but I ended up choosing IIM Calcutta, and I am almost sure I didn’t make the optimal choice. There were no bad decisions there, but there was a major question of fit and I think I didn’t make the decision that fit me.
After I made the decision, I had to communicate it to the team at ALI which was a fairly difficult thing to do as well. I had all but become a part of the team in the 1 month of onboarding and the team seemed very excited to have me as well so this sudden change in plan just 5 days before the joining date was not the most pleasant thing to communicate. This interaction did lead to some bad blood with the folks over at ALI but after they understood my viewpoint, they were supportive of the decision and wished me well.
Even though I was fairly distraught with everything that went down with ALI and IIMC, I took my last exam at Jadavpur University and partied with friends on the last day of my engineering life. I had a couple of different farewell parties and each of those was the best party I have ever had. I especially have very fond memories from my farewell organized by my juniors at the Chemical Engineering department. It was the first time I was truly drunk and I could afford to do so because I was in the company of people I thoroughly enjoyed being around.
While the above were the highlights of a very long, emotionally taxing, mentally challenging 2 months, there was another project going on on the side. This project will become relevant in the months to come and thus it is important to introduce it here. My university somehow got a contract from the Indian Football Association (IFA) to develop a League Management System for them. The association in Bengal still maintained league records in the paper-pen format and that led to a number of management issues. They were looking for a system that could manage an entire league for them. My university has asked me to take up this contract pro bono for the association in lieu of future paid projects. I do not know why but I ended up accepting the project in April. It took a total of 3 months to develop and get approved (there were 12 major revisions requested), and in the end, they decided to keep the software to start using later because the one person in the office who was adept at using a computer had left. This is every thread of my life till May 2024 - my life before I joined IIM Calcutta and started my MBA degree.
I joined IIM Calcutta in the first week of June and in the first few hours there I realized that this was not the place for me. The culture of the university shouted placements and while I understand the point of it, I like to follow Rancho’s philosophy of life at least to some extent in life. I enjoy the pursuit of knowledge, the energy from fiery debates, and just a general sense of enjoyment in life which was shockingly absent from the campus. The place smelled of legacy but as time passed, this legacy institution turned from a haven of business to a mark sheet printer. In this description, I am a little too critical of IIM Calcutta and I also understand how my sentiments might not represent what the institute means for a number of people, but these are the emotions that were evoked in me in the very first week.
Given my realization of not a fit for the university, I tried to find ways to leave. I reached out to ALI again asking for my job back. I didn’t receive a reply to my first email which was more matter-of-factly and had to send a more heartfelt note a second time to receive a callback. The team at ALI was apprehensive of the multiple changes of mind that I had and said that they’d have to think through my request. I asked about when I should follow up and was told that they’ll get back to me by the end of that week and I don’t have to worry about a follow-up. They did get back, but that was in August which is a thread we’ll pick back up in August.
In the meantime, I also applied for an internship opening at Blume VC and received an offer from them to join in part-time. This was happening in parallel with the second ALI application. I asked the Blume team to give 2 days to get back to them which was a day more than the day I was supposed to hear back from ALI. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I didn’t hear back from ALI on time and I missed the 2-day deadline by an extra day. Blume had offered the internship to another person. I was completely dejected then. Things just didn’t seem to work out. You’ll be hearing a lot more of that phrase in the upcoming paragraphs.
With all of the thoughts I had above, I decided to get back to entrepreneurship. That was something I knew the fundamentals of and something where I did not need anyone’s permission to start. During that time, I saw someone’s post on LinkedIn mentioning Entrepreneur First residency registrations were open for just one more week. I had read about EF in an article earlier in the year and had faint recollections of it. On EF’s website were some very big brands, both in terms of companies and mentors, so I decided to apply. Within a day, I was invited to an interview which was a pretty fun conversation, and then invited to an all-expenses paid 2-day hackathon in Bangalore. This entire thing happened over just a week.
I flew to Bangalore on a Friday morning and took a room in a hotel just 300m away from the EF office. There was a mixer on Friday evening followed by the hackathon on Saturday. It wasn’t a traditional hackathon and was more focused on co-founder matching techniques and idea-generation processes. This was a one-of-a-kind experience in a setting that I enjoyed very much. I teamed up with some incredible folks with a very strong Biochemical background and we decided to work on an idea around increasing predictability in wet lab experiments. We were barely able to scratch the surface of even a prototype but the idea was fairly unique with a clear market. We pitched the idea to the EF team on a Sunday afternoon, had some snacks, and left for the airport to catch a late-night flight back to Kolkata.
The next week, the EF team scheduled another call to assess me which was again a very interesting conversation. Most of the EF team were ex-founders who had exited their companies after varied levels of success and thus had some very interesting perspectives to share that you would otherwise not get to hear. A week after this call, I received an acceptance email from Entrepreneur First. If I chose to accept, I’d have to drop out and join EF in August. The team had developed a strong liking towards me for which I am very grateful. They worked with me through the decision-making process and in the end, we zeroed in on the fact that I had to reject the EF offer at that moment.
I presented a fairly emotionally charged decision of my life in an uncannily dry way and I apologize for that. While I have unpacked the emotions going on at that time in mind, it is impossible for me to present it unless I do a deep-dive into what was going on at IIMC at the time and then that diverts from the purposes of the essay. However, I’ll add a small side note, I also received an offer from an MIT + Stanford GSB graduate to join his company as a co-founder and CTO which for hilarious reasons I had to reject. June & July were months where I received numerous opportunities, and had a number of different starts but was unable or unwilling to convert any of them.
By the end of July, after the whole Entrepreneur First saga, I had rejected the possibility of joining any other such accelerators. I was determined to start a company again on my own, without a co-founder if necessary. I had an idea a couple of months ago that I started researching seriously. I called it Ektosa. Ektosa helped businesses save up to 90% of their costs spent on SaaS software through the power of Open Source Software. This was an incredibly difficult product to build as it required knowledge at the intersection of many fields of computer science. I decided to try my hand at gaining some users first by offering this as a service instead of a product while I built the product in the background. As I contemplated these plans, I heard back from ALI - they had an opening for me.
When I finally settled down with a new plan of action after waiting for weeks, I got sucked back into the same conundrum. After a day’s thought, I decided to forego this opportunity and try my hand at this new idea. This is another one of those super emotionally packed decisions that are difficult to unpack without giving hours' worth of context. To put it simply, I wanted to give myself the opportunity to build a company again and drop out for something larger now. I had the luxury of time by virtue of being a student at IIM Cal and thus the decision to not take up an opportunity I so desperately wanted just a few weeks back.
During this period, I received another massive project from Indian Football - they wanted to develop a Virtual Assistant Referee indigenously starting with the goal line technology, and they wanted me to develop it for them. My girlfriend loves ideas at the intersection of tech and sports so I roped her into the project. She led the team while I took more a supportive role in this project. This diverted my attention from Ektosa. I was almost certain that like the league management system, this would also eventually just sit on a computer somewhere without people using it actively but the Indian Football Association decided to preemptively call a press conference with a prototype we had developed. That press conference achieved a certain level of virality and we were covered by state and national news organizations like Zee News and Telegraph. This was the first of hopefully many times getting featured in the news and it was incredibly thrilling. In the hubbub of daily life, I tend to forget this incident but whenever I think back to it seriously I am overtaken by a sense of immense joy. In August, I also gave my 4th year of music to enter the final year of a 5-year degree in Bachelor of Music.
As August ended with these events, I entered September with an internship interview shortlist from Bain & Co. The internship season was in full spree at IIM Calcutta and while people were very excited and scared about their prospects, I was incredibly indifferent. I wanted to build my company to a level enough to drop out and thus was not very concerned with jobs. But, given the fact that I was in IIM Calcutta - the best MBA institute in India - I decided to apply for an internship at just 3 firms - McKinsey, BCG & Bain. For reasons that are very easy to explain, I did not get a shortlist from McK and BCG but received one from Bain.
In September, my girlfriend was again away for a month for her internship. This time I was unable to visit her unfortunately and we were relatively sparingly in contact too. I am not sure how but I managed to start slipping into a rut akin to depression. I typically do not like to say that I was depressed without medical certification which is why I will refrain from using that term but I was incredibly unhappy during that period. I had almost given up on my thoughts and desires at the time. The fact that I was at a B-School and not someplace doing something exciting was constantly bothering me. To not lock myself up in a room, I decided to do some case prep with people in my hostel at IIMC. I know doing more of the thing that made you unhappy in the first place is not the most intelligent way of dealing with things but at least this way I was interacting with people. It was essential to be out there in the world to not succumb to unhappiness. My undergrad university again came to my rescue with a small 2-week-long development project and they were paying me handsomely this time too. That and case prep took up a lot of my September. There was a constant sense of despair running in the background but I tried to do things to get out of it or at least not fall deeper into it.
My girlfriend returned back to Kolkata after her internship as we entered October. There was apparent some tension in the air. I had my theories but wasn’t completely sure what the reason was. The worst part of it all was the fact that I was too mentally occupied to work on this distance that I felt. This was also the month when I had my interview with Bain. I expected it to be a stressful, intellectually stimulating interview (much like I expected the IIM Cal interview to be) but was disappointed when I was asked to list out ways in which GenAI can be used in Real Estate. The interview went on for about 20 minutes, and Bain extended an internship offer for the summer of 2025. There is a concept called employer branding and the MBBs of the world have mastered it. It always feels surreal being accepted into an MBB for some reason. But as you might have guessed till now, I was not too overjoyed yet. I now had a decision to make - to job or not to job?
Two days after I got my internship, my girlfriend and I broke up. We are still very close and connected. Both of us believe that we had a great time together but sometimes too much intensity, too early in life does not work out. When 2 passionate individuals get into a relationship too early, there tends to generate some friction and we do believe that it is okay for each person in the relationship to take some time out, build themselves, and figure out if things are meant to be again or not. That was a very convoluted 2-sentences and I urge you to decipher its meaning. It’s an interesting thought and one that I believe in strongly.
With the break-up, the internship offer, and the utterly sad month of September, I gave up for a bit. I decided to take a break for the next 2-3 months. Re-evaluate life, figure out where I am heading, and where I want to head, and learn some skills on the way. In the battle of to job or not to job, to job won the first hand.
I entered November with a plan to not really do anything substantive. My goal was to try and enjoy life as it came, explore the world of IIMs, and potentially learn a couple of skills as the month came towards an end. I’ll give you a spoiler, this isn’t what I ended up doing. The first 2 weeks of the month were calm with no real movement, but it was in the 3rd week that things started to turn towards action again.
My birthday was on the 18th of November and I ended the day with not too much happiness towards how I was living life. It was that week that the CEO of a listed company put out an erratic post asking for applications for a job. I was on the call with my best friend from school then and he pushed me to send in an email to the said CEO. We weren’t expecting a response and I had a penchant for shooting my shots - I have a hard time saying no to opportunities when they present themselves. I sent the email just 2 days after my birthday and received a reply 2 days post that inviting me for an interview. I had 2 interviews successively then, one with the VP of HR and another with the CEO himself. Post that, I was invited to their headquarters for an interview in person. This was on the 3rd of December. The entire saga took up most of my bandwidth for the 2-weeks till 3rd December.
Post the 3rd of December, the Dean of my undergraduate institute personally invited me to help them manage an international conference on Near-infrared spectroscopy. This wasn’t a subject that I had much knowledge in but I had created a reputation for managing things and the Dean wanted the peace of mind that came with that reputation. This was a 3-day conference with participants from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, China and Spain. I spent most time through the day making sure the presentations went on without glitches, the Chinese participants who joined online were audible and visible to the participants, and the Japanese found the efficiency of Indians up to their made-up standards. There was a girl from South Korea who I was particularly smitten by (not too much really but it was the first time in a while that I did not have a girlfriend) but my ex-girlfriend was also at this conference - she was anchoring the conference - so I ended up spending most of my time with her. In hindsight, it was a lot more fun than talking to the South Korean girl. I unknowingly also ended up having a minor fight with a Japanese lead at the conference. The guy looked like a college kid but he turned out to be the vice-chairperson of the symposium. It was at this conference that I most appreciated the beauty of having a global perspective. People from different parts of the world have vastly different outlooks toward life, the things that are considered rude and not rude in different cultures are incredibly different, and the ability to interact with such varying viewpoints is enriching.
As the conference came to an end, I was expecting to hear from this listed company that I went to interview with. I was almost expecting a rejection. I had messed up the final interview at their headquarters. That was an hour-long interview with a number of probing personal questions and an equal number of pointed business questions. I generally find conversations of such nature very satisfying and energizing but I still somehow ended up fumbling the interview. While the conversation was still refreshing, I realized that it had been a while since I was truly intellectually stimulated. A lot of my confidence and self-worth is derived from intellectual stimulation. While this might not be the healthiest thing in the world, it was important for my mental health and happiness to find ways to keep myself busy with things that challenge me. This set the course for the rest of the month. There were a couple of indie projects that I had been planning for a while. I decided to go all in to build them in the December so that I could deep dive into marketing and sales in 2025. I spent time building Manuscript AI and NotoStack through December. I hoped to launch on 1st January 2025, but unfortunately I missed the deadline by a complete week or so.
This still wasn’t the highlight of December. On 24th December, Jadavpur University hosted its convocation ceremony and this year, I received my Bachelors in Chemical Engineering. It was a rather emotional event as the weight of it struck me while taking my degree on stage. My time at the place that built the foundation for my future was officially over. Jadavpur University is based on principles of love and rebellion. My department, Chemical Engineering, is the oldest chemical engineering in Asia (102 years and counting) and was born out of the freedom struggle with a move towards India’s self-reliance. JU’s approach to this rebellion is through a path of community building and human respect. JU pushes its student to be fearless and fight for what you think is right in your professional, personal and social life. I was privileged enough to grow in an environment driven by these human values and I only hope to imbibe them more and more as I go through life. I’ll always owe any success I get to the foundation laid at JU. And will forever respond to the patented Andolan slogan (even though I’ve been to zero andolans) - Amra Kara JADAVPUR
This was my attempt to take you through a raw, almost unfiltered story of one of the most tumultuous years in my life. I took you through a journey of my year with almost every major incident explained with varying levels of details. I tried to give you a high-level overview of how I made major life decisions. I also made an effort to give you a glimpse into how my emotional state transformed as I faced each day after another. I do acknowledge that as I progressed through the months, my description of the events that unfurled shortened. It was due to 2 primary reasons - one that things got a lot more mechanical with a sense of emotional unhappiness as the months passed, this is a lot less exciting to write about and second that I was burnt out from the depth of the content, it took me more than 5 hours to write this piece. There are many emotional and logical complexities that I did leave unexplored through the essay and I apologize for that. Some of these thoughts point to the very core of me as a being and it feels extremely difficult to articulate them into a succinct paragraph.
On a concluding note, what stands out most in this year isn't the opportunities I missed or the ones I chose, but rather how each decision, regardless of its outcome, taught me something about myself. As I think back to every day of the year, I look at major learning about both my shortcomings and my strengths. I have a deeper understanding of me as a person and that is a greater achievement from the yer than anything that I could ask for.
Did I make all the right choices? Probably not. The ALI decision still weighs on my mind, and there are moments when I question my fit at IIMC. But I'm beginning to understand that there are no "right" choices - only choices that force us to re-align and that is at the core of life. Like an airplane flying, we need to course correct at every given step until we reach our destination. Unfortunately, unlike an airplane the destination isn’t fixed either. As I step into 2025, I carry with me not just the lessons from my successes and failures, but also a newfound appreciation for life's detours. After all, it's these unexpected turns that often lead to the most interesting destinations.