today i had a very chill discussion with shyam murugan who was one of the co-founders of bharatx which was like a white labelling buy-now-pay-later company that provided credit services to whoever may need it in developing countries. This was way back when i think they started in 2019 and got into the w22 yc batch which is pretty cool for a 19-something founder building from india from his college room.
he co-founded the company with his friend at NIT trichy which is like the top NIT in india and for a very long time, all my academic achievements and test scores (jee mains) were benchmarked against cut-offs to get into any meaningful branch in that college, because why not.
so i'd actually reached out to mehul first (mehul nath jindal) he was the ceo of bharatx i think via a cold email following his post on twitter for hiring for a few roles in person in sf-blr. I knew that i would have college and hence wouldnt be able to commit to an in person role but i thought, why not, let me just go ahead and try it out. So i sent the mail, and a few days later he replied. I actually had not done much research on mehul, just a bit on the role and the company he was hiring for, it was aurorax- basically they position it like an api for the offline economy. Like the app just calls a lot of businesses for you in parallel to accomplish your requests made to the app.
I sent the mail and forgot about it, until one day i got a reply- "wanna try an internship- 6 months in blr?" at first when i saw the mail i was pretty confused, who was offering me an internship, because id sent and forgotten, but on reading the email thread i suddenly remembered that i had sent that mail and i meant every word of it. Damn.
So this is when i did my research on these guys, what they've done and why are they offering ME an internship or even think im remotely interesting?? But kudos to them i read they sold bharatx to flipkart which is pretty cool. And now they were onto the next thing and i would so love to be a part of that.
Then i saw, the role they were hiring for, that was pretty cool, because it was right up my alley- voice AI, fine-tuning, prompt engineer, exactly everything id done previously and knew a little about. So i brushed up on my basics, revisited what id built and just hopped on the call.
Shyam was a pretty chill guy we spoke about my projects and about ai in enterprise, he helped me think in directions i hadnt explored previously and it was overall a very good learning experience.
Then we got to the technicals- how do we train a model, technical problems i'd solved before, tricky situations id found myself in and how i got out- everything. And before i knew it we'd been speaking for almost and hour when he popped the real question- "i see you're still in college, how do you plan to make this work", or something along these lines.
Id spoken to my dad about how id gotten to interview with these guys and how i was super pumped about it. Hed just told me one thing- be upfront with them about doing college side by side and thats non-negotiable.
So it was clear what i had to do- i told him. I also told him how i would have a lot of free time to explore, like id been doing the entire summer and i would learn and give it my all and proposed decent working hours and let that sink in.
Then he said he'd get back to me, most probably with a build assignment live or another call. And well that was 5 hours ago. Im so excited i had to channel it somewhere and write about it. Well here it is. Ill keep posted on this blog !!!