Me in grade school in Delhi. I had already begun to learn how to code and was obsessed with computers.

I grew up in Delhi, India (capital of India) and have always been fascinated with computers from the age of 6, which is when I started learning programming. I remember completing all the exercises in my computer science textbooks during summer vacation for most of my schooling and then chilling for the rest of the year. I was the top student in computer science on every exam and it came very naturally to me.

Throughout my teenage years, I always looked up to Bill Gates. All my books in school were about Microsoft Windows and how to use it. Gates basically taught the world how to use computers and Microsoft had empowered me to save time and automate repetitive tasks at an early age. In that sense, Gates’s technology had improved the quality of my life… and not only that, Gates had done the same for millions of people around the globe and created something useful and easy-to-use for the masses. I knew early on that I wanted to do something similar with my career- to create something useful to many people.

It always fascinated me how I could make dumb machines intelligent with just a few lines of code. I’ve always been a chess fan and I think the first game I built was an online chess game — it was so much fun to see my favorite game come to life on my computer screen.

Me in my dorm room coding away.

My confidence was at an all time high going into freshman year of college where I was a declared computer science major. Everything was going as planned in my goal to make the same global impact that Bill Gates had until I applied for my first internship during my freshman year at the age of 18. I knew that skills-wise I was the best in my freshman CS classes. However, as some of my peers started to look for internships by networking with cousins, uncles, parents’ friends, I knew I could game the system through technology and save myself the time and trouble. Similarly to how I had created a program to navigate the complex do’s and don’ts of chess, I wanted to automate the process of navigating the recruiting landscape in order to obtain an internship.

As my friends walked together in groups to career fairs dressed in suits with their hair slicked back, I hid in my dorm room and applied to 200 companies online in my pajamas, taking the time to find the email of each HR rep of each company I was interested in and then sending emails to each.

I was devastated when after my painstaking research, I only received 20 replies and only 5 interview calls compared to my more extroverted peers whose exam scores and coding skills were not even comparable to mine. Wasn’t the world supposed to reward the smartest and hardest-working talent? How was I going to make the same impact that Bill Gates had in the world if I couldn’t even secure an internship?

The feeling that I had after I received an unexpected number of rejections from recruiters.

Luckily, I was able to stand out in other ways to recruiters. In college, I created a Facebook application that automatically wishes your friends happy birthday on their birthdays. I had built this out of need — I had five friends to wish one day and I didn’t want to type the same message multiple times. After scripting and building an app, overnight I went from the sole user to having millions of users with people from all over the world started paying for it. It was one of the first applications built on Facebook in India.