my summer of no rest or relaxation
on leaving Wikimedia, starting NET-POSITIVE, and spiritual realignment
The older I get the more I appreciate the end of the year. The days grow shorter, but time swells like an ocean in which I can swim. I wake up and play with my nieces. I have lunches with my parents. My sister and I lazily drink chai and chat in the afternoon. My fiancé and I read from pages of a travel book, in a bedroom glowing with warm, yellow light.
If my fall is a soak in soapy water, my summer was a cold shower.
leaving a job but remaining committed to the work
I left The Wikimedia Foundation because I felt I was not solving the problem of misinformation with urgency. I was malcontent.
(Possibly Harry Potter and Disney conspired to give me a sense of grandiosity; that I am the hero of more than just my life, I am the hero of yours. I have a yearning for a grand adventure where I vanquish evil and emerge victorious. And while I can reluctantly accept that I am normal, I will never be able to accept that life is normal.)
I did not know what I would “do” after Wikimedia, which I didn’t divulge to anyone. People have an odd way of responding to uncertainty. I can see how it makes them squirm, hence it felt right to keep the matter private. I didn’t even tell my parents or sister.
(This may not seem like a big deal to some Americans, where children become adults at 18 and visit their parents twice a year, but our family is from rural South India. We think and move as a collective, for better and for worse. In my heart of hearts, I do not conceive of myself as an individual, but as a being defined by relation. To not tell the collective was a break in our nature. A purely selfish act, but I had to do it. I could not exert energy explaining why I needed to leave because the reasoning was wordless. It was an embodied feeling that had reached its crescendo. I needed to act and the words would come later.)
Lost in thought while I wandered North Beach, I considered my options. If I was running away from a lack of agency, perhaps I should run towards its abundance?
the summer (and startup journey) begins
The universe was kind and coincided my chess move with one of a close friend, roommate, and former colleague. Kye and I had, for some time, discussed the possibility of starting a company together. Over coffees and teas at Blue Bottle in Jackson Square, we chatted excitedly about the future of AI consumer technology and the need for positive, healthy products.
In my Substack titled farewell Wikimedia, hello entrepreneurship I wrote
If my 20s were about observation, my 30s will be about participation. I want to build, innovate, experiment, learn, document, and share. I’ll be rolling up my sleeves and getting into the proverbial “boxing ring”…
Was being a founder was my calling, I thought. A summer of no rest or relaxation ensued. Early in the morning I would madly dash out the door for brainstorming sessions and meetings. Ready when you are was a periodic 7AM text I sent to Kye. We completed sprint after sprint, testing hypotheses and learning as quickly as we could, honing in on that golden egg of an idea, laid at the intersection of market trends, venture scale, user need, and our expertise.
We took the YC mantra to heart. Our only desire was to make something people want. We were so principled in finding a real need that we eschewed other goals like being founders of an impactful tech startup. This led us to NET-POSITIVE, and it is not venture-backable. It fills a real need, connecting tech professionals with nonprofits to provide the social sector with much-needed technological and design support, for free, and I am proud of where we landed.
It is not at all what we imagined we would find at the end of the summer, but like magic we arrived at a concept which is, itself, not static. NET-POSITIVE is an experiment. To me this is the beauty of the design process. You cannot, and should not, be biased towards a particular outcome. You must, instead, embrace the entropy of constant experimentation and iteration. There is no end and no perfection. There is only forward motion.
what did I gain?
Kye and I went through a kind of holy sacrament together, on the other side of which we emerged as kin. What does it mean to really listen to someone else’s ideas? To be so dazzled by their brilliance, you are okay forgoing your own?
What does it mean to hold hands and enter the abyss of the unknown with another who is not your family member or your romantic partner, but a curious third-party. So no, I did not raise millions of dollars, I did not find the glimmer of product-market fit, but I found an honest-to-God friend.
Perhaps, in Silicon Valley, this is the unicorn.
solving misinformation, but not how you think
Wikipedia plays an invaluable role in modern society, and it is one of the most positive and beneficial uses of technology we have created. What does it mean to be committed to a mission, but not necessarily any particular organization? I left The Wikimedia Foundation, but I remain committed to the idea that our world is more compassionate and just when people are well-informed and taught to think critically.
I believe that in this age of information overwhelm, helping people make sense (and meaning) of information is as important as producing, sorting, and presenting accurate information. This is partially the role of journalists, but it is also the role of artists.
In the last six months I learned that my design practice and writing practice are two sides of a coin. One exists in the realm of technology, the other in the realm of language and stories. Both serve a singular mission of making meaning from feelings.
commitment to art
Since high school I have denied who I really want to be. Each day that I wake up and cannot create art is an exhausting fight against an inner compass. Have you ever felt this, dear reader? If so, I want to hear from you, in your own words. What about yourself are you denying? Is there a destiny that you are avoiding?
These questions of self have been diluted by orientalist stories like Eat Pray Love when, in truth, the practice of self-knowledge is ancient and essential. In Hindu Dharma self-knowledge is known as understanding one’s ātma, or soul. One discovers their soul through meditation, reading the Vedas, and other practices like ahimsa (or non-violence).
My June through November has been a spiritual realignment. I have been reading Parva, a novel by Kannada writer S.L. Bhyrappa that retells the Mahabharata through personal reflections of the main characters. While I have not sat and meditated, I have taken long, meditative walks, sometimes while listening to lectures of writers I admire like Ocean Vuong and Zadie Smith.
We all lie to ourselves at different stages of life, but for the child of immigrants the estrangement from self starts young. Aishwarya, you will pursue math, science, or engineering. Outside the home you will speak English and interact with a value system that is alien to what you know. You will go to an elite school where you will morph into someone that is even less recognizable than before. You will not be encouraged to seriously pursue, or even consider, what actually interests you. Brick by brick, you will build the American dream for yourself, our family, and your future family. This is not at all to blame immigrant parents. They start at the bottom and on the outside. They are simply tasked with finding a way up and in, which they teach to their young.
My summer lasted until December. There was no rest or relaxation, but it is not as it seems. I am not referring to the time and energy exerted on exploring the startup world. I am referring to the unraveling it required to elevate my self-knowledge.
It happened almost as an aside. With more flexibility in my schedule, I read and wrote more this summer than I have in the past four years. To paraphrase Celine Nguyen from her article “the divine discontent”, I didn’t just want to read Bhyrappa, I wanted to be Bhyrappa.
Since Stanford I have felt ambition to be a grotesque term. Career ambition felt like a coffin where the soul goes to die. It felt like capitalism trying to consume my being. Every atom in my body protested. But this summer I kept returning to my dad’s comment one rainy evening while driving to the Portland airport. Rise to great heights in your field.
Not once did he say become a tech executive or make millions of dollars. The directive was clear. Dear reader, have you heard the song Rise by Solange?
Fall in your ways, so you can crumble
Fall in your ways, so you can sleep at night
Fall in your ways, so you can wake up and rise
On one of my walks along the San Francisco Bay I heard Ocean Vuong say, Artists are not meant to win the status quo. They are meant to upend it.