You can follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram. Here is a timeline of my life so far:
1993 | Born and raised in Kochi, Kerala in South India |
2011 | Ranked in the top 0.1% in India and joined IIT Bombay at age 17 |
2014 | Visited the US for a paid internship and published first paper at age 19 |
2015 | Moved to the US at age 21 to pursue Masters + PhD in Astrophysics at UIUC |
2016 | Pioneered AI in Astrophysics and won $90,000 in fellowships and awards |
2017 | Figured out how to work in industry during PhD making a six-figure income |
2017 | Co-authored 80+ publications with 50,000 citations (1000+ as first-author) |
2018 | Got MS at age 23 and finished PhD one year later at age 24 |
2018 | Hired by Google X in Silicon Valley as an AI scientist to build moonshots |
2019 | Met my future wife at work (also an AI scientist who got her PhD at 25) |
2019 | Started investing and trading stocks, made over 100% returns in one year |
2020 | Hired by JPMorgan, the biggest firm on Wall Street, at age 26 |
2020 | Began traveling and living in hotels with my wife while working remotely |
2021 | Got rid of all my possessions except for 10lb (4.5kg) of stuff in one backpack |
2021 | Started hacking points and hotel statuses (saving $100,000 over 3 years) |
2021 | Reached my first one million dollars in savings at age 27 |
2022 | Became a US non-resident and sold stocks paying $0 capital gains taxes |
2022 | Awarded the extraordinary ability O-1 visa to work in the US |
2023 | Lived in 27 countries in 3 years, spending less than $35,000 per year |
2023 | Retired at age 29 after reaching financial independence (FIRE) |
2023 | Became CEO of an AI startup that I co-founded with 3 of my friends |
2024 | Moved to Palo Alto, raised several million in funding at $30 million valuation |
Pics
This is what ChatGPT thinks I look like given a link to this blog as the prompt (which is surprisingly quite accurate except that my backpack is smaller in real life like in the bottom pic).