I first heard about Silicon Valley when I was 15. I have shipped something every single day since then. Twelve years later, I’m the cofounder and CEO of Shapes, the most popular platform where you can talk to AI with your friends. I started Shapes six years ago, when I was 21, even though I’ve never had a real job, reported to a manager, or had a performance review.
To date, I’ve never gotten a W-2 from anyone but myself.
So, how do you actually run a company without ever having worked at one?
Here’s my story.
I grew up right next to Delhi, India. I started making websites when I was ten: first for friends and family, then for clubs at my school, then for random strangers online. I remember thinking it was a cheat code that I could make money doing something that didn’t feel like work.
At age 11, I was on Upwork accepting gigs for making websites around the world. After making hundreds of websites, at 14, I got my own iPhone and became obsessed with apps. I taught myself iOS native coding and started publishing apps on the App Store. Turns out you could just make an app, charge for it, and people would buy it. I experimented with pricing from 99 cents to $100 per download and made tens of thousands of dollars over time. It was pure fun!
At 17, I built a sleep-tracking app called Sleepisle. It was one of the first apps for the Apple Watch. This was the first time I qualified for Apple’s prestigious WWDC scholarship. It was also the first time I met any of my closest friends in person.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was learning the job by doing the job. Here’s what I’d tell other founders skipping the traditional path:
1. The job is already there, just find your customers
Working with clients on Upwork taught me negotiating, professional communication, project management, prioritization, and how to advertise something nobody asked for—which is roughly the entire job of being a founder.
Working on apps taught me marketing. I tried everything. I talked to my classmates. I posted on Reddit. I found Twitter (now X, but permanently Twitter in my mind) and a dozen online forums. I growth-hacked my Facebook Pages to get 100,000+ likes.
I learned that you don’t need a job title to learn how to do the work, you just need a single customer to start.
2. Location isn’t a barrier if you can find your people online
No one around me was in tech. But I had the internet. My closest friends ended up being a 15-year-old in California, a 16-year-old in London, and other people who obsessed over the same weird things I did (like the number of ratings on your app store listing).
The catalyst moment for me was finding out about Twitter. I made so many new friends there (still do to this day!), and they’re the reason I learned about accelerators like fbStart and the WWDC scholarship. I grinded to get in. Once I got accepted, I got flown out to Silicon Valley and my in-person and online worlds converged into one.
If you’re early in your career, your peer group is the single biggest unlock you have. Nothing else compounds the way people do. Go find them before you need them.
3. If you go to college, go for the side quests
I picked Georgia Tech for its CS program. Nothing I learned in college helped me ship faster or become a better engineer. What I actually got the most out of were classes like literature, psychology, linguistics, computational neuroscience, philosophy, and design. I was usually the only CS kid in the room.
Discussions about “the self” in linguistics and philosophy classes helped me think about building a better user experience because they made me think about how to understand and discover user preferences. Computational neuroscience and psychology made me better at prompting AI; after all, LLMs are modeled after the human brain! And all of these classes helped me get better at communicating with my team and assessing two opposing ideas quickly.
I don’t think colleges are a good place to teach you how to get a job. For that, you’re better off dropping out. But if you don’t yet know what you want to do, college is one of the only places on earth where world experts in a dozen unrelated fields happen to be in the same building, ready to tell you everything they know.
4. Your “useless” interests are your edge
My company, Shapes, is built on things I learned zig-zagging through programs and classes. Many of the things I think about on a daily basis are similar discussions to past experiences:
- Why was it about the WWDC scholarship program that made me feel so celebrated? How can I ensure creators on my platform feel the same achievement?
- What’s the most sci-fi vision of the future? How can I build a company that participates?
- I don’t know how to migrate our infrastructure. Do I know someone on social media?
So how do you run a company when you’ve never had a job?
The same way I’ve always worked: find the customer, ship the thing, and follow your curiosity wherever it goes.
If you don’t know something, find five people who do. Then give it a shot. Keep trying until you crack it. You can become an expert on anything in three months.
Take your customers seriously. They have your best interests and keep your company alive. They can help your platform grow by using features in ways you never imagined. First, I thought raising one million dollars was the ultimate “you made it” goal. I’ve raised eight million since and learned the only thing that matters is making your customers happy.
Over time, I’ve watched my internet friends become fellow founders. The thing we all have in common is that we’ve stayed in the arena. Every day we ship something new and every day we talk to customers. If you get those two things down, the rest will follow.