The kid who only studied
I grew up in India. The full experience. Study, study, study. Tuition classes after school. More tuition on weekends. The singular goal was grades, and I was pretty good at the game.
IB exams? Crushed them. National board exams? Top marks. Advanced Placements? Perfect scores. SATs? You get the idea. I was the kid parents pointed at and said "why can't you be more like him?" (Sorry about that, by the way.)
When I was 18, I moved to the UK to study Physics at Imperial College London. It was the first time I had ever left India. Not even a vacation abroad before that. Suddenly I'm in London, surrounded by people from everywhere, trying to figure out how the tube works and why nobody makes eye contact.
It was surreal. But it was also a chance to reinvent myself. I could be anyone I wanted to be.
The Ivy League rejection that taught me everything
Here's the thing nobody tells you about perfect grades: everyone applying to top universities has them. When I applied to Ivy League schools, I had the scores. I had the test results. I had all the checkboxes ticked.
And I got rejected.
Looking back, it's obvious why. When they asked me "what have you built?" I had nothing to say. When they asked "tell me about a problem you solved," I could only talk about exam problems. My interviews were... fine. Forgettable. I was one of thousands of high-scoring kids with nothing interesting to say.
If I had built something real, anything real, and talked about it with genuine excitement in those interviews, I would have gotten in. But I had only studied, heads down, for 18 years straight.
University: where I finally started building
At Imperial, something clicked. I got obsessed with this question: why can't people stick to journaling every day, even when literally everyone agrees it's good for you? (I love journaling. It's borderline concerning how much I love journaling.)
So I did something I had never done in my life. I talked to strangers.
200 of them. Random people. Friends of friends. People I cornered at events. Anyone who would give me 15 minutes to understand their relationship with journaling. I became that guy. You know the one. "Hey, quick question, do you journal?"
And then I started building. We called it Higher You. An AI journaling app that would actually get people to stick with it.
Version 1 was terrible. Version 2 was worse somehow. By version 5, I was questioning my life choices. We kept going. Version 8 showed promise. Version 10 got some users. Version 12 was actually good.
We won hackathons. We got users. We learned more about building products in those months than I had learned in years of lectures.
And then we shut it down. It wasn't working as a business. The market wasn't there. Classic startup story.
The twist: failing taught me more than succeeding
Here's where it gets interesting. When I started applying for jobs after university, something weird happened.
Nobody cared about my grades. Not really. They glanced at them, said "nice," and moved on.
But the moment I mentioned Higher You? Eyes lit up. Tell me more. What did you learn? What would you do differently? How did you handle disagreements with your co-founder? What was your biggest mistake?
I had stories to tell. Real ones. About real problems I had faced. About users who gave us harsh feedback. About pivoting when our assumptions were wrong. About shipping something and watching it fail.
I got job offers. Good ones. Not because of my perfect SAT score (nobody asked). Because I had built something and could talk about it for 30 minutes without running out of things to say.
Why I built First Ascent
My goal for 2026 is to become a competent founder. And right now, the best training ground I've found is working at an early-stage startup where I sit next to the CEO and learn how decisions actually get made.
But I keep thinking about 16-year-old me. The kid who was so focused on grades that he never built anything. The kid who went into Ivy League interviews with nothing interesting to say.
First Ascent exists because I wish someone had shown me how to build at 16, not 21. The skills that matter, the ones that actually get you into top universities and land you great jobs, aren't taught in school. They're learned by doing.
So here's the deal. I'll teach you what I learned. The hard way. The expensive way. The "I really wish someone had told me this earlier" way.
12 weeks. One real project. A story nobody else has.
Let's build something worth noticing.