The Journey
From a small village in India to architecture, filmmaking in Beijing, building hardware in Shenzhen, and an 8-year journey at Logitech.
Chapter 1: Where It Started
I grew up in a small village in India where everyone knew everyone.
Until I was 15, I attended a small Catholic school nearby. I was a curious kid, although my grades didn’t always show it. What fascinated me most was physics and mathematics—perhaps because they offered a way to understand how the world worked.
I once heard the line, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” It stayed with me—not because of its philosophy, but because of the simple physics behind it.
After high school, I moved on to study science at one of the most competitive higher secondary schools in the state. For the first time, I was surrounded by some of the smartest students I had ever met.
The school had brilliant teachers and almost no basic infrastructure. Our toilets had neither roofs nor doors. That tells you almost everything.
Every day, I woke at 5:30 a.m. and took two buses to school. The journey took about two hours each way. Extra classes began at 7 a.m., regular classes ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and another session followed from 5 to 7 p.m.—six days a week.
It was two years of hell and beyond. Truly hard.
But it was also fun. I went to science fairs and arts festivals, and I made friends I’m still in touch with today. Looking back, those years taught me endurance long before I had a word for it.
Chapter 2: Choosing Architecture
I graduated with a score of 93% and found myself at a crossroads.
Honestly, I don’t think a 16-year-old is ready to make a life-defining decision. Still, I had to choose something, so I chose architecture.
Why architecture? Mostly because I didn’t want to become an engineer or a doctor—and architects seemed to have style, creativity, and passion.
The next four-plus years became my education in much more than buildings. Architecture school taught me how to work hard, consistently, for a very long time. We would stay awake for two days straight, meticulously drafting designs, only to stand in front of a jury and have every decision questioned.
Over time, I became better at presenting ideas, accepting rejection, and leading teams. I represented my college through a national student organization, and leadership came naturally to me. I didn’t worry too much about grades because I was enjoying the work—and, without realizing it, learning how to turn vague ideas into something real.
In the fourth year, we had to complete an internship. I started applying in India, but soon wondered: Why not look outside the country?
With very little knowledge of how any of it worked, I decided to go to China. To me, China was a black box—and that was exactly what made it interesting.
Somehow, I figured out the visa, immigration paperwork, flights, and money. These things may sound ordinary, but I was a kid from South India whose family had never traveled outside the country, even for a day. Everything was new.
Visa. Paperwork. Money. Airports.
I was going to China.
Chapter 3: China—and a Much Bigger World
When I landed at Beijing airport, I was starving. I didn’t know you could eat on the flight.
I remember sitting in a chair at 1 a.m., wondering what I had gotten myself into. I couldn’t speak Chinese. My phone barely worked because many services required a VPN. My credit card didn’t work either.
I sat there until 7 a.m. At some point, someone helped me buy a sandwich. It contained pork—the first pork I had ever eaten. All my life, I had been told I would go to hell if I ate it.
As I finished the sandwich, I thought, Well, there that goes.
China was hard, but it was also one big adventure: a new country, new people, and new ways of seeing the world.
I spent my 20th birthday with friends from London, Mexico, California, and Spain. I remember looking around and realizing that they weren’t so different from me. Their experiences were different—and because of that, the possibilities they could imagine were different too.
One friend told me that Stanford allowed students to take a year off to travel. They called it a “gap year.”
My immediate reaction was: Nobody told me I could do that.
I spent six months in China. For the first two, I worked as an architecture intern. Then one of my personal videos became a Vimeo Staff Pick—Vimeo was the platform for creators at the time—and that unexpected moment helped me land a job as a video producer.
I was earning about $1,400 a month. I spent my first paycheck on a camera and my second on a lens. I loved making videos.
Eventually, I decided to complete my final year of college and my thesis remotely so I could stay in China. My path was already moving away from the one I had originally planned—and I was learning to follow where it led.
Chapter 4: Hong Kong—and Finding Home
In 2016, I moved to Hong Kong as a student.
My room was about three feet wide and ten feet long. I called it the Apple Dorm. I lived there for nearly a year while attending a school filled with students from around the world. There were perhaps ten Chinese students in the program, and the rest of us had arrived from everywhere else.
Because it was only a one-year program, we bonded quickly. We also had the privilege of studying in an extraordinary building designed by Zaha Hadid. The contrast between my tiny room and that sweeping, futuristic campus was hard to miss.
A year later, I joined a startup founded by one of my professors. We were trying to use natural language processing to understand the sounds made by children between one and six years old.
Yes—natural language processing for baby sounds.
The idea was simple: what children hear shapes the sounds they make. If we could understand what they heard and correlate it with their vocal patterns, we might gain a useful way to measure cognitive development.
To build the hardware, I moved to Shenzhen. Ryan, Victor, and I stayed in China while other members of the team went to the United States to pursue funding and participate in Stanford’s StartX program.
That year became a crash course in building a real product. I worked on everything from designing circuit boards to running around Huaqiangbei searching for the right pogo pins for charging. We created test jigs for quality assurance and built a small puck that could be attached to a child’s clothing or placed on a nightstand.
The device listened continuously, then used natural language processing and basic cloud infrastructure to analyze the audio. We wrestled with battery life, connectivity, uploads from the ESP32, and the constant challenge of finding reliable components.
Being in Shenzhen changed what was possible. In seven months, we moved further and faster than we could have almost anywhere else. We built early units and sent them to investors and potential partners, including Target.
Eventually, I had a falling-out with the founder and decided to leave. We disagreed about how to move forward. I felt we needed to ship what we had, learn from it, and begin version two. The requirements kept changing, and I believed we were being too cautious.
We had different ideas—and sometimes that is enough to end a chapter.
Chapter 5: The Corporate-ish Journey
Next, I joined Logitech.
It became the longest chapter of my professional life: eight years, as of this month.
I had started as a curious kid in a small village, became an architecture student, moved to China without really knowing how international travel worked, made videos, lived in a tiny room in Hong Kong, and helped build experimental hardware in Shenzhen.
None of it followed a clear plan. Yet every chapter taught me something I would need in the next one: curiosity, endurance, storytelling, design, leadership, and the courage to enter places I didn’t fully understand.
The Logitech journey—and how I accidentally became a product manager—is a story for another day.