On Saturday, July 25, Mony and I woke up early because we had been invited to meet the partners of Grad Capital at their house. We also had a couple of other meetings lined up. By the end of the week we had three offers, had changed our minds twice, and had somehow raised exactly the round we wanted.
The first meeting was breakfast with Arya, a friend of Adi’s who runs an OF agency. Adi is the guy who runs Forge. For more context about Forge, read my previous essay.
Arya took us to a nice French place. We did not like the food, although the vibe was nice. We were getting late, so we got the rest packed and ate it in the cab. We reached the Grad Capital house at 11:10. We had a hard time finding the house and spent five minutes knocking on other people’s doors. Eventually we found it.
Inside were Abhishek Sethi, Prateek Behra, and Debamita Banerjee. It became the most fun conversation I have ever had in a meeting. They gave Mony questions to solve on a whiteboard. We solved them, of course, as the maths geniuses that we are.
Then we talked about the most random things in the world, including what would happen in a world where women did not exist, and vice versa. The questions were so hysterical that I forgot why I was there. We talked for almost two and a half hours. Then we had to leave to meet Caleb.
“Guys, can you come back after the meeting?” they asked.
“Sure, we can.”
Caleb was at Paper & Pie, already ordering coffee and a brownie. Caleb is from Runtime and is a partner at Odyssey. We sat down and talked for ten minutes. Then he pulled out his phone, put microphones on us, and started recording.
First Caleb gave us his history. He had done crazy, crazy things: dumpster diving, staying hungry for forty days, hitchhiking, making content, and becoming a VC. I was so fucking impressed. Caleb has lived almost everything a human can experience in a single life.
Then we started speaking about ourselves. Mony and I gave the most descriptive introductions of our lives. Caleb’s idea was to record a legendary conversation that would be sold for millions one day. I don’t know if that will happen, but the recording is now part of our history.
Caleb was getting late for Sarvam AI’s office. Sarvam is probably the biggest AI lab in India right now. We hit the road and kept talking while he recorded us. I fumbled a bit because I had barely slept. The conversation at Grad had already tired me out, and now I had to speak even more. I did not give a great intro. I was too tired.
We walked all the way to Sarvam. Caleb got some merch there, caps and T-shirts, which was very nice of them. He was there to record a video for their next event. They have a fun office and pretty cool people. That conversation with Caleb will be significant for us. You will know why.
Then we went back to the Grad Capital house.
We immediately started another random-ass conversation. Abhishek is one of the most fun people I have ever met. I did not trust a single sentence he said. Almost all of it was rage bait. He would say things like, “I’m 45 and I’m gay,” with a straight face. Some of it was so believable.
Abhishek was so over the top that I did not get as clear a read on Prateek and Debamita. They were all really nice people. The room was just mostly Abhishek.
By the end we said, “Okay, have a nice day,” and went outside to wait for a cab. Then Debamita rushed out.
“Cancel the cab. Let’s talk.”
We talked for another fifteen minutes. Then they said they wanted to give us an offer: this amount of money for this amount of equity, pretty standard terms. Mony and I went outside for five minutes.
“What the hell just happened?”
“Oh my God, we should accept it.”
We went back in and said yes. All five of us went to Bombay Brewery to celebrate. We had drinks. It was very nice. We were very happy. We went home in a cab carrying Grad Capital T-shirts.
Then the realisation hit us: how were we going to tell Vatsal from EF?
Vatsal is a principal at Entrepreneur First India and had been our point of contact from the beginning. Mony and I were not in the startup world at all. We randomly got into EF and met Vatsal.
Vatsal was much more than a mentor. Every time we were lost, Vatsal would push us. He is one of the best people I have ever met. He introduced us to people we had no idea how to reach. He listened when our thoughts made no sense. He told us when an idea was stupid and stayed until we had a better one.
The decision became a question of money, success, and Vatsal. We loved Vatsal. Vatsal also wanted our company to win, even if we did not stay in EF. When we told him about Grad’s offer, he described the choice as paisa or pyaar. We had a long conversation that I cannot write all of here.
EF made us an offer on terms close to Grad Capital’s. We still had doubts about the EF format. We did not like the cohort. It felt like school again. Mony dropped out of IIT Delhi and I dropped out of school so we could work freely. Now we were somehow in school again.
Stupidly, or maybe just excitedly, we had already started e-signing Grad Capital’s term sheet.
Vatsal’s wife is a lawyer. He asked us to send him the term sheet so she could check whether it was legally binding. It was not.
Things happen. We had shut off our brains for a day.
The next day we had a call with Aryaman. Aryaman is the founder and managing partner of Odyssey, the firm where Caleb is a partner and which owns Runtime.
We told him about the offers from Grad and EF. He listened to our introductions and said, “Cool, guys.” Then he booked flights for us to come to Mumbai the very next day and have dinner with him. He also booked us a room at the Taj Mahal Palace.
We were like, “Sure.”
We landed in Mumbai in the rain. Our plane did not have access to an aerobridge, so it needed a ladder. The ladder was wet. Apparently this meant we had to sit inside the plane for an hour before anyone could get off. Aryaman waited outside the airport the entire time. We had spoken to this guy once. He was so nice.
Then he took us for a drive. We rode around Mumbai for about an hour. He asked us questions and told us about his life, the things he had started, and what Columbia had been like for him. He went there for undergrad.
We went to Royal China, a very fancy Chinese restaurant, and had maybe one of the top three meals of my life. We were not talking about goals or the product. We talked about random things in life. Some of it was really, really private. It was fun.
After that we went to Leopold Cafe, near the Taj, where part of the 26/11 attack happened. We saw the shattered glass and bullet holes. It is a piece of history that carries a lot of trauma for people.
Aryaman had gone to Leopold before the attack. The owner recognised him after fifteen years. We sat down, talked, and then Aryaman said, “Guys, I definitely will give you an offer. Give me some time. Let me get back to you.”
He also said the next day’s headline should be something like, “A drunk investor met drunk founders and gave them a banger of an offer.” I don’t remember the exact line, but it was funny at that moment.
We went back to the Taj and sat outside at the back for thirty minutes. This time we talked about serious things. What did we want? What did we want from an investor? What were we trying to achieve? Everything, everything. Then he left.
The next day we came back to Bangalore. That evening Mony and I spoke to Matt Clifford. Matt is EF’s co-founder and chairman. He had recently stepped down as CEO, and Alice Bentinck, EF’s other co-founder, had taken over.
We did not like the call, kind of, because we thought we were going to take Aryaman’s offer. Talking to Matt felt unfair. We were hesitating and the call did not go very well. I think we offended him a bit because neither of us knew what to say. Lying is not our best strategy. It is also not our best skill. We could not sit there saying, “We are so excited to work with you,” while thinking we would leave.
Internally, we were very sad that leaving EF also meant leaving Vatsal.
After the call, we called Vatsal and said we were taking Aryaman’s offer. We would not go forward with EF. I said the words. The decision was done.
We still did not feel happy. We had made one of the biggest decisions of our lives, and we were not happy. It felt shallow. We hung around the whole night. I went out, did some stuff, came back at 5 a.m., and I was still not happy.
The next day was Forge’s demo day. Aryaman flew from Mumbai to Bangalore to meet us and attend it. He had a great time, talked to everyone, and discussed what the legal process would look like from there.
Bangalore traffic had already taken three hours from him going back and forth from the airport. He was exhausted. He still spoke to everyone. By evening, we were somehow still not thrilled about anything. I was sitting alone.
Then Mony called me.
“I have this idea. What if we take EF’s offer as well?”
EF had supported us from the start. They had introduced Mony to a member of Meta’s board. They had introduced us to Matt and Alice. It was our fault that we had not spoken to them properly, and we were insanely sorry about that.
“Yeah. Please, please, please, let’s do it.”
We instantly called Aryaman. Would he be okay with us taking EF’s offer too and raising a mega pre-seed round? Aryaman was okay with it as long as his terms did not change. We were okay with his terms. Everything went well.
This is another reason Aryaman is amazing. He had known us for days. In that time he had waited outside an airport for an hour, driven us around Mumbai, bought us one of the best dinners of my life, flown to Bangalore, spent hours in traffic, and started helping with our legal process. Then we asked to add another investor to the round, and he said yes.
We instantly called Vatsal.
“Please, please, can we still do this? We really miss you.”
He had to ask Rahul Samat, who runs EF India. Vatsal called us back within twenty minutes.
“Sure. Let’s meet.”
We met at Starbucks in Koramangala. We hugged. We talked. We shook hands. It was a winning-team reunion. All three of us were really, really happy. Vatsal gave us The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. I could not have been happier.
That was the happy moment. We were getting Aryaman, the best tactical investor for us. We were getting Vatsal, the best mentor. We were getting both of them as advisors. We were getting EF, its connections, and all its perks. EF gives us millions of dollars in compute credits. We were getting everything we needed to try to build the best company in the history of humanity.
I wrote about this in Why I Will Win. I have the luckiest trajectory of any human being. I am getting everything I want. There is no reason for me not to win. Having all these amazing people around me is really, really amazing.
I also want to thank Grad Capital. They are amazing people. I do not understand why their reputation is bad. They invest in very few companies and are very selective. Abhishek, Prateek, and Debamita are some of the coolest people I have met. It is bad that we could not do a deal with them. You cannot have everything at once. We chose what we thought would help the company become the next Meta or the next Alphabet.
We had raised the round without a deck or a presentation. It happened through maths on a whiteboard, the longest introductions of our lives, random conversations, a dinner in Mumbai, a bad call with Matt, and one phone call from Mony that fixed the thing making us miserable.
We were first-time founders. Raising a round of this size would already have been ridiculous. We did it pre-idea. There was no clean product thesis for everyone to study and agree with. There was barely a company to underwrite. The bet was Mony and me. Basically founder aura.
People watched Mony solve things on a whiteboard. They listened to us give absurdly long introductions, argue about the future, change our minds, and then move very quickly once we had decided. That was the evidence. They believed that wherever we started, we would keep moving until we found something enormous. It is a ridiculous way to raise money. It is also exactly how we raised ours.
After the deal, we went to Bohemians to celebrate. We video-called Rahul and Vatsal. We were all so happy that we were doing this.
The next day we had to leave Bangalore. Forge ended. Mony went back home and I went back to mine. We will return to Bangalore next month.
Honestly, it is surreal that we are doing this stuff. We are winning. We are actually fucking winning.