⚠️ quick warning, this one gets dark. broke, depression, the suicidal stuff, all of it. if that's too close to home right now just skip it, come back some other time, 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 part one ended with me feeling pretty much invincible, like I'd figured the whole thing out, and yeah, about that, because this is the part where it all comes apart.
I'm not gonna get into the details, but that summer there was conflict back home between India and Pakistan, and when the dust settled I'd lost basically all of my assets, and I don't mean "tighten the belt" broke, I mean flat broke, zero and honestly the wrong side of zero.
And the timing was surgical, because tuition was due in like two months, somewhere around 9k for that plus rent plus the minor inconvenience of needing to eat, and here's the bit that turns a bad situation into an actual vice: I'm an immigrant, so if I didn't pay I didn't just fail a semester, I got removed from the country, 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.
So I did the sane thing first and looked for work, any work, and I mean any, because I fired off 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 wanna be honest here, because part one was easy to write and this part genuinely is not, but I said I'd tell you the whole thing, so: I spiraled, the rejections kept stacking up and something in me came apart, and I'd swing from this burst of hope, this one, this one lands, straight back down into a flat gray certainty that it was over, the days blurred together, and I got suicidal, not in the abstract poetic way you get to write about it later, but in the way where I walked around the ski jump tower here in Lahti and stood there and pictured myself going over the top of it.
I was too scared to do it, and I'm writing this so obviously you already know that, but I want that sentence to sit there plainly instead of getting all dressed up, because if you've ever been at the top of your own version of that tower, I need you to know that some guy who built a life you might look at and low-key envy was standing right up there too.
And when jumping wasn't it, my broken brain found itself a different exit, because I figured okay, if I'm going out anyway, might as well make it mean something, and Ukraine was taking literally anyone, and I know how drones work so I could go be an engineer out there, so I actually did it, found a recruiter and got myself drafted into the 4th International Legion, and I had about 700 bucks to my name, which was, almost to the euro, exactly enough for some gear and a drone kit and a ticket to Poland and a bus ticket to the Ukrainian border, and I did the math. It fit. And honestly that's the detail that still fucks me up a little, that it fit.
So I started calling my friends to say goodbye, and one of those calls was to my best friend, who was the reason part one even had a best friend in it and is the reason part two didn't end where it was heading, because she talked to me, really actually talked to me, and then she spotted me some cash to keep me standing while I figured out anything else.
And around the same time this genuinely absurd and beautiful thing happened, because my 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 to keep me in the country, we mapped the whole route out lmao, and I love them for that and I'm never gonna stop telling this story.
I also had a shot at Forward by LUTES 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, 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, 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, which I'm not gonna explain here because it earns its own post, but the short version is 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, an arc I haven't even touched, the AI stuff and the memory stuff and the company I'm building now, but that's for other posts, because this one had one specific job, which was to say it out loud, on my own domain where I can't quietly delete it later, 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.
And if you're in it right now, actually in it, reading this from the top of your own version of that tower, then hear me out for a sec: it does not stay this dark, and I know, I know, that's the most worn-out sentence on the whole internet, and I know it lands like nothing when you're the one down there because it landed like nothing on me too, but I'm standing here as proof it's true, because less than a year ago the math on a one-way ticket fit in my budget, and today I'm building shit I'd have given anything just to be near, and the gap between those two points is so much shorter than it ever feels from the bottom, so there's always more hope left in the tank than the pit lets you count, and you just gotta stick around long enough to get surprised by it, please.
Anyway, thanks for reading this far, genuinely, and reach out if you ever want to, because it's always better with company, it always was.
~ A.