August 15: The Country That Taught Me to Build Before I Had Permission

India turns 79 today, and I want to talk about what it gave me before any accelerator, investor, or market ever did.

I was born and raised in Rajasthan, in a large family, in a place where you learn early that resourcefulness is a survival skill, not a buzzword. Growing up in India teaches you a specific kind of engineering: making things work when the conditions say they should not. Jugaad gets dismissed as improvisation, but underneath it is a serious skill, the ability to see a path where the spec sheet says there is none. Every startup I have built ran on that instinct. Constraints first, elegance later, shipping always.

My daily life is American now, and my first company began in Canada. But the operating system underneath, the resourcefulness, the respect for education, the refusal to accept that something cannot be done, that was installed in India. I am still Indian by heart. My kitchen still smells like home, and I am raising my kid on Indian food, Indian culture, and the heritage of Rajasthan that shaped me. Some things you carry no matter how far you travel.

The India I see today is not the one I left

What makes this August 15 different from the ones I remember as a kid is that India no longer exports only talent. It exports architecture. UPI moves more real-time payments than any system on the planet. Aadhaar and the India Stack proved that digital public infrastructure can be built at a scale of over a billion people, and now other nations are copying the blueprint. The country that was once described as a back office is writing the reference implementation.

The trajectory is real. India is on a serious growth path, with policy momentum behind AI, entrepreneurship, and the builders and innovators who will define the next decade. The startup ecosystem is no longer a promise, it is one of the largest in the world, full of founders who are solving hard problems for a market of a billion people. I still have many peers and team members in India who help me build and grow my company every day. When I write about AI search or build for the next category, some of the sharpest feedback I get still comes from the India time zone. I know so many brilliant people there who simply outwork everyone, and it shows.

Honest about the hard parts

None of this means India is finished. It is a massive, complicated country, and it has real challenges and real problems. But every country does, including the ones people hold up as models. What matters is direction, and India is moving toward its problems instead of away from them. That is the part that gives me confidence.

What I want to do about it

My whole family is still there, and India stays close to me for reasons that have nothing to do with business. But there is a professional pull too. The ecosystem is growing fast, and I would love to be part of it. One day I want to build a product for India itself. It is a genuinely hard place to build and grow, the complexity is real, and technology adoption does not move the same way it does elsewhere. But that difficulty is exactly what makes it worth doing. Maybe the moment will come soon for me to build something made for India, and I want to be ready when it does.

Independence Day celebrates a country that decided to govern itself. For builders, the lesson generalizes: you do not wait for permission to own your future. You declare it, then you do the work.

Jai Hind. Now back to building.