Picture this: it's 2022, and I'm completely obsessed with building things. Late nights at Nucast, shipping AI products, breaking things, fixing them, and doing it all over again. I had no idea that a random YouTube recommendation was about to change the entire trajectory of my life.
One night, I stumbled upon a video of Varun Mayya talking about this tiny startup called Induced that had just raised $2.3 million. Something about it just clicked. The vision, the energy, the audacity of what they were building—I was absolutely hooked. I immediately dove into their website, their careers page, everything I could find. I had to reach out.
Varun Mayya's podcast with Aryan on Induced's $2.3M funding
But here's where it gets interesting. Their DMs were closed. Twitter wasn't really my thing back then. So LinkedIn was my only shot—and I didn't even have Premium. A friend had shared their credentials with me, and guess what? It was expiring in four days. Four InMail credits. That's all I had.
So I did what any desperate, excited builder would do—I shot my shot. Sent messages to Aryan, Naman, and Ayush. Nothing fancy, no corporate speak—just raw honesty about what I'd been building and why I wanted in.
I sent that message at 1 AM, fully expecting to wait days for a reply (if one ever came). But then—at 2 AM, just as I was about to crash—my phone lit up. It was Naman. He'd actually looked at my work, and he liked it. He asked if I wanted to hop on a call. The catch? It would be 5:30 AM in India. Of course—SF time. Did I care? Absolutely not. I stayed up the entire night, heart racing with anticipation.
When that call finally connected, I found myself face-to-face with the most electric startup energy I'd ever witnessed. There was Ayush, locked in his room, completely in the zone, building something incredible. Naman was scribbling ideas on a whiteboard behind him. It wasn't just a meeting—it was like being invited into a secret lab where the future was being invented.
They gave me a project to work on. I poured everything I had into it. And here's the wild part—I finished it so fast that before they could even give me feedback, they told me to forget that project entirely and jump straight onto the main pipeline. Just like that.
Suddenly, I was part of a tiny founding team, owning the entire frontend of Induced. The pace was unlike anything I'd experienced before. We could dream something up in the morning and ship it by night. No bureaucracy, no endless approval chains—just pure, unadulterated building. It felt like magic.
Looking back, it still blows my mind. All of this—this incredible journey—started with a random YouTube video and four LinkedIn credits that were about to disappear into the void.
But more than anything, what made this experience truly special was the people. Hacking alongside Ayush has been one of the greatest joys of my career. He's genuinely one of the most brilliant, kind-hearted humans I've ever met, and I owe him more than words can express.