Our first order was a book called "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World." We were leaving Amazon to change India. The irony wasn't lost on us.
My father told me — don't ask me for money. Whatever you make, make it from the market. That was the best advice I ever got.
I applied for 30 jobs and got rejected from all of them. I applied to KFC — 24 people applied, 23 got accepted. I was the only one rejected. So I applied to be a police officer — five people applied, four got accepted. I was the only one rejected.
I finished college in two years because I had something to prove. Everyone told me I wasn't smart enough. So I decided to prove them wrong as fast as possible.
I left Samsung because I realized I would spend 30 years building someone else's dream. I wanted to spend 30 years building my own — even if it failed.
I flew to Tokyo after the Mt. Gox hack and saw the mess firsthand. That's when I decided — someone needs to build an exchange that actually works. That someone might as well be me.
I read a Vitalik blog post about automated market makers and thought "I could build that." Six months of coding later, here we are. Sometimes the best businesses start with a blog post and naive optimism.
I got laid off from Siemens, taught myself Solidity in a few months, and built the most-used decentralized exchange in the world. My career counselor did not predict this path.
I spent 13 years at Qualcomm working on systems that process millions of operations per second. Then I looked at blockchain doing 15 transactions per second and thought — this is embarrassingly slow. I knew how to fix it.
I got ripped off on foreign exchange fees during a holiday trip and thought — this is insane, why is this still happening in 2015? So I built a company to fix it. The best businesses come from personal frustration.
I was coding at 8, running a web business at 14, and had 25 employees in high school. My parents had no idea what I was doing. Neither did I, honestly. I just knew I wanted to build things.
I never went to university. I taught myself to code as a teenager by hacking phone systems. Some people learn from professors. I learned from dial tones and error messages.
We sold Alando to eBay for $43 million, 100 days after we launched it. One hundred days. That taught us everything about speed. If you can build and sell a company in 100 days, you can do anything.
We started Infosys with $250 between seven of us. Today it's worth $80 billion. The lesson is simple: you don't need money to start. You need an idea, a team, and the willingness to work harder than anyone else for a very long time.
I saved $100,000 by age 25 on a nonprofit salary. Not because I'm a genius — because I had a system. Automate your savings, invest consistently, and stop buying things you don't care about to impress people you don't like.
We started Near as an AI project. When we realized the infrastructure for decentralized AI didn't exist, we pivoted to building the infrastructure. Sometimes the best companies are the ones that solve the problem before the problem they wanted to solve.
My parents both died by the time I was 15. I had nothing. So when people say starting a battery company in a borrowed factory was risky, I ask — riskier than growing up with no parents and no money? Perspective changes everything.
I started Redwood in my garage in Nevada. People ask why the Tesla CTO was working in a garage. Because that's where you start when you're solving a problem nobody else is working on yet.
I started with one restaurant. Every empire starts with one thing done well.
I started with five products and one thousand dollars. Every big company was once small. Do not let your starting point define your ambition.
We started HCL with six friends and the equivalent of fifteen hundred dollars. The only asset we had was belief.