[!warning] ok so quick warning, this one gets dark. if you're not ok atm I'd recommend to just skip it, come back some other time dawg, no worries. and if you happen to be down in that hole yourself while reading this, go bug an actual human about it, that's the bit that got me out.
So... picking up from where i left off in previous blog
Summer of 2025 might have been the WORST in my life thus far ngl. I don't wanna get into the details of this one but tldr; that summer there was conflict back home between India and Pakistan, and some shit happened that led to me basically losing all of my assets, I mean flat broke.
And the timing was almost fucking mocking me istg, because ✨ tuition ✨ was due in like two months, somewhere around 9k for that plus rent plus the minor inconvenience of having the human need to eat. This being quite shit enough wasn't enough, there's more: I'm an immigrant, so if I didn't pay I didn't just fail a semester, migri (that's the immigration department in Finland) goes bye bye and kicks my ass out, meaning the entire life I'd built up in part one, the network, the board seat, all of it, evaporates the second I can't produce a number I do not have. (Oh I'll rant about Finland and Immigration and shit in another blog mark my words y'all)
So I did the sane thing first and looked for work, any work, and I mean any, because I fired off like over 600 job applications and then stopped waiting on replies and started walking in the door at restaurants and Burger King and construction sites and factories, and I'd have washed dishes or hauled bricks or done anything with a paycheck attached, but nobody took me, six hundred applications and a dozen in-person asks and the answer was still this uniform, echoing no.
I spiraled. The rejections kept stacking up and something in me came apart. I'd swing from this burst of hope, straight back down into anxiety and despair. The days blurred together and I started to get suicidal. I walked around the ski jump tower here in Lahti and stood there and pictured myself going over the top of it. Heck I even mapped out a couple of euthanization centers in the EU to fly there and kms.
I was too scared to do it, and I'm writing this so obv you already know that.
And when jumping wasn't it, my broken brain found itself a different exit, because I figured okay, if I'm going to kill myself anyways, might as well make it mean something. During the time the Ukraine conflict was at its peak and they were taking anyone and everyone. I thought to myself: "Well, I know how drones work, so might be a chance to go there and be an engineer".
So I somehow got in touch with a recruiter and got myself drafted into the 4th International Legion (I still keep the draft invite framed on my wall), and I had about 700 bucks to my name, which was almost exactly enough for some gear and a drone kit and a ticket to Poland and a bus ticket to the Ukrainian border. So I started to pack and order shit. But before I decided to reach out to some of my closest friends and mentioned my... intent.
Never have I ever seen anyone so fucking angry at me. My best friend stormed over to the place I was at and talked me out of it. She gave me hope yet again. Spotted me some cash and helped me figure something out.
I somehow held on for a little longer and around this time, we had a LahtiES board meeting coming up. The board at LahtiES caught wind that I was drowning and we convened an actual full-ass board meeting about it, and one of the serious options we mapped out, whiteboard and all, was that I marry one of our board members on paper to keep my residency, so we'd have been a gay couple purely bureaucratically, and honestly I've never felt more held by a bunch of people than watching them earnestly plot immigration fraud (or embellishment of the grant funds we'd aim to get) to keep me in the country, we mapped the whole route out. I love them for that honestly.
I also had a shot at Forward by LUTES sometime around then and had to let it go, because the person who'd have shown up for it was not in any state to, and that one still stings a bit, but surviving came first, and then my uncle over in America stepped in and helped me get going with freelancing, and he's a good person, buuuut he's also (and I say this with love) a genuinely miserable human to work with, but both things were true at once and both kept me fed, and I scraped together a loan from a family friend for tuition and freelancing kept the lights on week to week.
Here's the part I still don't fully get about myself: I was still suicidal, that didn't just switch off the moment a friend caught me, but at the same time, underneath all of it, there was this absolutely rabid urge to make something, something big, something remarkable and exceptional and undeniable, like the only way I could justify still taking up space was to go build something that earned it.
So I did the only thing that's ever really made sense to me, I worked, like 18 hours a day, stopping basically just to sleep and sometimes sleeping in the damn office (more than sometimes tbh), which was CrazyTown Lahti, and Toni and Sini over there, thank you, you have no idea what it meant to have somewhere to be and people who were glad you showed up, and what I was building was this thing called queryables (more on this in another blog). I thought it was good enough to raise capital around and turn into a real venture, and I was about to bet everything I had left, which was mostly just hours, on being right.
And turns out I was right, just not in the shape I expected, because Jazen Cordero, our ex-Chair at LahtiES and my friend (told you, remember Jazen), heard what I was building while he was interning at Antler Helsinki and introduced me around, and it turned out Antler had a portfolio company called BotSpot building in the exact same domain I was, so I talked to them, and they liked me and liked what I'd built enough that they didn't wanna compete with it, they just wanted to buy it outright and bring me on as their Founding Engineer, so I said yes.
And that was September 2025, the first time since the summer that the ground under me felt actually solid, and I volunteered for SLUSH around then and found myself back in rooms full of people building things, except this time I wasn't performing being fine, I actually was, and the line started pointing back up, and this time it wasn't a setup for another fall, it was just... up.
And look, there's a whole lot more after this, the AI stuff and the memory stuff and the company I'm building now, but that's for other posts. This one had one job: to say out loud that I was as far down as a person gets, close enough to the edge to do the math on a one-way bus ticket, and I'm still here and still building, and not because I'm some strong resilient badass, but because a handful of people, my best friend and a board that literally plotted a fake marriage for me and my uncle and a family friend and Toni and Sini and Jazen, flat-out refused to let me disappear quietly.
So if you take one single thing from the two years I vanished, take that one, because wanting to build something is what pulled me forward, but it was people who kept me alive long enough to go do it, so please don't try to do the pit alone, man, because I almost did, and "almost" is the entire story.
Anyway, thanks for reading this far, genuinely, and reach out if you ever want to, because it's always better with company.
~ A.