My last working day at my previous employer was December 13 2024. Tomorrow I complete one year of my journey towards becoming an entrepreneur.
I was not laid off. And it was not going bad for me at my job. In fact, I was at the highest point of my career in chip design software. I quit my job because I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I realized that, unlike a lot of successful entrepreneurs, I am incapable of starting it on the side. I also had the advantage of having a high-earning spouse, and I felt that it was a signal from above. The entire universe was pushing me towards the next thing in life.
Before I quit I was interested in AI but was skeptical about whether it made business sense. In October 2024 I had gone to a demo of the Generative AI collective, and discovered the SundAI Club. I was on their waitlist for a few months, and then I got in. And I literally got sucked into the AI hurricane!
I kept going to these hack sessions and kept getting mindblown by the latest things happening in AI. Till date I have gone to around 20 of them. I can confidently say that I wouldn’t have learned even a tenth of what I know now, if I did not get into the SundAI community.
Which brings me to the topic of what I learned. It isn’t a lot compared to what most college graduates know today. But I came from knowing absolutely nothing about modern software tech stacks. From there I learned how to build and deploy full-stack next.js web applications, how to run LLM inference, how flood risk prediction works, and how MCP servers and AI agents work. I also got to use a lot of AI models the moment they launched. The advancement in image and video models in 2025 has been phenomenal.
I used the lack of a day job as an excuse to put more time into other parts of my life. I have been learning Kenpo karate since 2022. This year I could put more effort into it, and I earned my green belt. I also started weight training for the first time in my life, and today I can clearly feel that I am stronger than I was a year ago.
You might be wondering - why am I not talking about the startup pitches, or the customer calls or whatever it is that happens in an entrepreneur’s life? Well, they haven’t happened yet. But I have made progress. I figured out the mundane details of LLC formation, business banking and self-employment taxes. I worked with a founder and built a web application for early child care for her. It taught me how hard it is to get early traction in the B2C space.
I eventually did form an AI consultancy firm with some other co-founders - we hope to start making noise in 2026.
Like countless people before me - I discovered that earning money is extremely hard. I have probably earned less than $2k trading my skills.
The good thing is that I was forced to learn to keep track of expenses, and do active trading. These activities helped me earn some pocket money.
I did build a few free software products, including a desktop app for finding out what is filling up your hard disk. The biggest product I built was a fork of VS Code. It is actually an indirect fork - my base was the open source Void project. My vision is to turn it into a ‘Cursor for writers’, but it will take some time before that happens. It feels nice to be able to build and use your own IDE - for example, right now I am writing this blog post in it.
Yes, there is going to be a year two! And a year three as well. Because I did realize in a few months that an entrepreneurial journey is a minimum of 5 years. Or maybe more.
What do I wish for in year two? It might come as a surprise - I want to fail. I want to fail faster, and harder. I want make many more mistakes than I have made in 2025. Because I am convinced that repeated failure is the only path to success - as long as I don’t repeat the same failures!