I think I will win because I am having more fun than everyone else.
This is the most fun I have had in my life. I build things I want, learn whatever I get obsessed with that week, and do it with people I love. If there were no prize at the end I would still pick this.
The title is obnoxious. I know. Maybe I am trying to convince myself. I am also tired of pretending I do not believe it, so here are the actual reasons.
First: I like the work.
I do not just want to have built a great company. I like building one. I like the stupid early versions. I like learning something because the product needs it. I like showing a friend what I made and watching them find the one thing that is obviously broken. I like throwing it away and making it again.
ArcXiv went through six or seven completely different shapes before it became good. I made a reader, then stages, then flashcards, then chat, then summaries. A lot of it was shit. I was still having fun. Nobody had to make me return to it the next morning.
It is easy to work hard when the result is close. I can keep going when there is no result in sight, because I still had a good day. I am not waiting for success before I let myself enjoy this.
Second: I am smart. Incredibly smart, I think.
There is no tasteful way to say that. You are supposed to imply it and let somebody else say it for you. Fuck that. This essay is called Why I Will Win. It would be ridiculous to leave out one of the main reasons because admitting it sounds arrogant.
I learn fast. I can get dropped into something I know nothing about and find my way around. I can tell when I understand a thing and when I only know the words around it. I have good taste in products. I can build. More importantly, I know that none of those are permanent facts about me. If I stop doing the work, being smart becomes a story I tell at dinner.
I have met a lot of smart people who are mostly occupied with being seen as smart. They protect it. They avoid things they might be bad at. They develop very sophisticated reasons not to start. I do not want that kind of intelligence. I want the kind that ends up as something another person can use.
There is a ridiculous amount I do not know. Fine. I trust myself to figure it out more than I trust any beautiful plan I could write today.
Then there is Mony. This part feels unfair.
Mony is my co-founder. He dropped out of IIT Delhi after two years, and now we are joining EF together. He is genuinely one of the smartest people I have ever met. He went from never having written code to INOI top 60 in two weeks. His plan now is to go from knowing almost nothing about AI to being at the frontier of AI research before October. This is an insane sentence. He means it completely.
That is what I like about him. Around most people, conviction has to be translated into something socially acceptable. Around Mony, I can say exactly how large I think the future could be and he will probably tell me I am thinking too small.
He is also my social edge. Mony loves people. He wants to meet everyone, make friends, sneak into places, do something funny, and somehow get Zuck to talk to him when he is in San Francisco. I can build and explain what we are doing. Mony can make the whole world want to be part of it.
I could not get a better co-founder. We did not do a founder compatibility worksheet. We just want the same life: make a lot of projects, get very good at building together, fuck up early, learn, and have fun through all of it.
Some of the projects will be technical. Some will be stupid consumer ideas we find funny. Some will fail in two days. One of them might quietly turn into the company. The point is that we will keep making things. By the time the right thing appears, we will already know how to work together.
Mony wrote that we are going to build a billion-dollar business. I agree with him. But even before that happens, I get to wake up and build with my best friend. I have already won something important.
It is not only Mony. I got absurdly lucky with people.
I have the best friends. Forge made me realise how rare that is. I was living with people who were ambitious without being miserable, people who could talk seriously about a company and then spend an hour making the dumbest joke I had heard all month. I came away wanting to work harder, mostly because everyone around me made the work feel alive.
My friends are also one of the few protections I have against becoming full of shit. They know me too well. They know what I have actually built. I cannot turn one good week into a mythology around them. That is useful when you are writing an essay with a title this obnoxious.
I have the best investors. We spoke to Vatsal about the plan, and a lot of things we already believed became clearer. That is what I want from an investor. Not someone who replaces our conviction with theirs. Someone who can look at all the energy, ask the right question, and help us leave with a better version of our own plan.
I have the best mentors too. Dhilbar sent me Hamming after my first essay. That one message changed what I thought an important problem was. Good mentors keep doing things like that. A book at the right time. A question I cannot dodge. A standard that makes what I was proud of yesterday look unfinished today.
I do not think mentors, investors, or friends can do the work for me. That would be a very stupid way to read this. The advantage is that I do the work, and then I get to bring it to people whose judgment I trust. I can be wrong much faster. I can recover faster too.
So, yes. My hand is ridiculous.
I like the work. I think I am smart enough. Mony is the best co-founder I could have found. My friends make this fun and stop me becoming unbearable. My investors believe in us. My mentors make me notice when I am being stupid.
What am I supposed to do with that except go all in?
I am obviously not saying nothing bad can happen. Products fail. Markets move. People get unlucky. We could spend months on something nobody wants. We probably will. That is not losing. That is just the job.
Losing would be wasting all of this. Losing would be turning Mony and me into two people who kept talking about the projects we were going to make. It would be using my friends as an audience, my investors as validation, and my mentors as names I can mention in essays. It would be loving the identity more than the work.
I have written about larping before, so I know exactly how easy that is. You can have the website, the co-founder, the investor, the plan, and the right people around you. From the outside it looks almost identical to doing the thing. The only difference is whether anything real keeps coming out.
This is also the bad part of being this lucky: I have no excuse. I cannot say nobody believed in me, nobody taught me, or I had nobody good to build with. I cannot even say the work made me miserable.
I should not be able to fuck this up.
If I still waste this hand, that is on me. It would take a historic level of stupidity to have the co-founder, friends, investors, mentors, ability, and life I wanted, and still do nothing that mattered.
I do not think that is going to happen.
I am having too much fun.