If not this, what?
If not now, when?
Every aspiring entrepreneur has asked themselves this question – sometimes in passing, sometimes in moments that refuse to let go. For some, the feeling builds slowly. For others, it arrives all at once – piercing through the chest like a red-hot rebar shot from a Resistance crossbow.
And for some, it never arrives at all.
For me, it arrived last month.
The trigger
Caught between ruthless working hours, family health emergencies, and the quiet dread of letting a once-in-a-lifetime idea slip away, I felt a constant pressure building in my head.
Day after day, it stopped being abstract. It showed up physically: anxiety, restlessness, goosebumps, flashes of anger, even hives. My body was keeping score.
In late December, I joined Deel as a Technical Lead. It was everything you’d expect: large-scale systems, complex products, real engineering depth. The compensation was great, the equity meaningful. But what really pulled me in was the challenge.
And to be fair, it delivered.
Within a month, I had onboarded into two microservices and three monorepos, shipped a large backend feature end-to-end, and written enough documentation to help both teammates and AI agents navigate the codebase. It was intense, messy, and deeply educational – the kind of experience that leaves you sharper, with a few battle scars to show for it.
But the relentless pace, the quiet expectation to always be “on”, eventually caught up with me.
On April 10, I left.
I stepped away from the well-paved road I had been on for the last decade and took a turn toward something far less certain. A path that feels less like a highway and more like a trail through misty mountains – cutting across long marshes, brushing past something that looks suspiciously like Mirkwood.
Sounds crazy? It probably is. Maybe even preposterous.
But to me, it feels like a leap of faith. And right now, that’s enough.
The quest
Let me try that again.
On April 10, I didn’t just quit a job, I embarked on a quest.
A quest to understand what it really means to build and run a business.
A quest to be fully present for my family – not just physically, but mentally.
A quest to live life on my own terms.
A quest for health, for balance, for something resembling inner calm.
A quest to find out what I’m actually made of.
A quest to lean into my strengths instead of skirting around them.
A quest to stop leaving potential on the table.
A quest to see what lies ahead when there’s no predefined path.
What am I building?
I’m building a new way to think about online commerce, from first principles.
At a high level, I think of it as a context layer for modern commerce, something that rethinks how intent, discovery, and transactions come together on the internet today.
Right now, I’m focused on getting an MVP out into the world – something scrappy but real enough to test for product-market fit and, more importantly, to learn quickly. I’ll share more once there’s signal worth sharing.
And importantly, I’m not doing this alone.
I’m working with Gaurav Gandhi – a long-time friend, mentor, sparring partner, relentless researcher, and a seasoned entrepreneur who’s seen more cycles than I have. Having someone like him in the trenches with me makes this whole thing feel a little less like a free fall.
The road ahead
I don’t know how this story ends.
Maybe this turns into something meaningful. Something that outlives the initial idea and becomes a real business.
Maybe it fails quietly, teaching me lessons I couldn’t have learned any other way.
Maybe it leads somewhere completely unexpected.
But for the first time in a long time, that uncertainty doesn’t feel paralyzing. It feels… honest.
There’s no roadmap here. No performance review. No neatly defined next step. Just a direction, a set of beliefs, and a willingness to keep moving.
If nothing else, I want to be able to look back at this moment and know that I didn’t ignore the question when it mattered most.
If not this, what?
If not now, when?
This time, I chose to answer.