27

I turn 27 tomorrow and I don’t know what to do with that.

Everyone around me has an opinion. Get established. Settle down. Come home. Open a factory. Get married. Plan. My parents call and every conversation is the same conversation. Relatives ask what Kush is up to and my parents don’t have a clean answer. I don’t have a clean answer either.

Here is what actually happened.

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At 22, I had raised $2.5 million for my startup. I had a team, a direction, investors who believed in something I was building. My parents were still scared, my mom would have been happier if I’d taken a stable job and done an MBA. But there was enough external proof that people mostly left me alone. The story made sense to them even if the details didn’t.

Then our treasury got hacked. Someone broke in and took what we’d built, and there was nothing I could do about it. That’s not a metaphor. That’s just what happened.

I was lost, everything that I called ‘life’ was just gone one morning. And I was putting my emotions aside to salvage what was left, figuring a way to pay the salaries of the team who depended on me, corresponding with police, forensic investigators, investors, and lawyers to somehow stay afloat.

Put on a smile in the evening to greet the guests who came for a get together when everything around me was burning, this was Diwali 2023.

I tried to pivot and recover but couldn’t. I closed the company in August 2024. I was 25.

Even though I put it behind me, I still carry the weight of it.

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What followed was the strangest, most disorienting, most formative period of my life.

I became a nomad. Not the aesthetic kind with a MacBook at a Bali co-working space (though I did this for a couple weeks). The kind where you’re couch-surfing at friends’ places, never fully settled, never with complete space to think or to curate my energy, always a guest in someone else’s environment (eventually feeling like a liability). I lived off my savings and watched my portfolio shrink and didn’t make a single penny for two years.

That sounds like madness when I read it again. But it didn’t feel like it while I was living it. To me it’s my journey, not a success, not a failure, just an arc which helped me grow.

I built things. Not for money, not for traction, for the joy of it. I taught myself new skills, followed my curiosity, learnt for the sheer pleasure of it. Things that helped me feel like myself again.

I built things I found cool and wanted for myself, local models, South Park episode generator, memory systems, personal assistants. I applied to YC. I got interviewed. I got rejected. A competitor launched what we were trying to build and went viral.

Felt like a missed opportunity, that I almost broke through but couldn’t, but at least there was some relief that my direction had potential, and I just wasn’t able to showcase it better, it didn’t work out but it showed me what I needed to work on.

I kept going.

In those two years I went from web3 to AI. Overcame my fear of starting over in a new field. I met founders, talked to investors, attended programs, reached out to people building things I admired. I read Dostoevsky and Kafka and the Bhagavad Gita. I thought about consciousness and what it means to build something that matters. I thought about what happiness actually is for me, not for my parents, not for the relatives asking questions at dinner parties.

And even though there were times I’ve felt like shit and found myself in a place where I wanted to bawl my eyes out but didn’t permit myself to do it just yet, I was happy. I lived how I wanted to live and I’m proud of it.

I aged five years in two. And I still feel like a child. With lots more to do, lots more to experience and a lot better to get.

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Here is the part I struggle to say out loud.

Sometimes it feels like I’m a one-hit wonder. Like the fundraise was luck and the hack was proof that I didn’t deserve it. Like I’ve been coasting on the fumes of something that happened once and might never happen again. That I just got lucky (which is something people have said to me on multiple occasions)

I don’t actually believe that. But the thought shows up, uninvited, usually when I’m lying on someone else’s couch at 2am wondering what I’m doing with my life and what I have to show for it.

My parents are worried for me. They operate from a world where risk is something to be eliminated, where the safe path is the only rational path.

They love me. I know that. They’ve been more supportive than I could ever imagine. But they worry too much and want me to be happy: are you established yet? Are you coming home? What’s the progress?

Maybe I’m wrong but is it so bad to want to make my own mistakes?

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People keep telling me to be “practical”. I hate that word. Practical to me means settling for what’s available when you couldn’t get what you wanted. Practical means admitting the thing you’re chasing isn’t real.

But I’m 27 tomorrow and I have no income, no stable base, no clear direction, and a savings account that gets lighter every month. So maybe practical isn’t the enemy I’ve made it out to be. Maybe practical is just the word that people who actually shipped something use to describe the process.

I have job offers I could take. That’s the thing nobody seems to understand, those offers only exist because of the two years of exploration they think I wasted. The skills, the knowledge, the way I see systems now, that came from the wandering. The wandering wasn’t the detour. The wandering was the education.

But it’s also true that I might have been using the exploration as a shield. It’s easier to stay in possibility mode than to commit to something specific and risk being ordinary. I told myself the greats don’t compromise. That learning everything is the goal. That settling on one thing is giving in.

That’s a beautiful story. But I sometimes wonder if it’s a commitment avoidance mechanism dressed up as ambition. To live in the possibility of my “potential” than my current “reality”.

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Here is what I know at 27.

I know myself better. And there is so much more to understand.

I know I’d rather go broke swinging than live safe and small. Living safe feels like dying slowly. I’ve made peace with that.

I know I might be wrong. I know I don’t have all the answers. I know the 40-year-old version of me might be broke and alone and scraping for rent. But I also know that version would still be trying. And right now I respect that more than the version who gave up at 27 because people told him to be practical.

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I’m not writing this to defend myself. I’m not writing this to convince anyone or to put the blame on anyone.

I don’t want pity, I don’t want validation, maybe I just want to be understood. I’m writing this because I spent two years with a whirlwind in my head and I needed to put it somewhere.

There is some shame associated with putting this out and that’s exactly why I wanted to do it.

This is where I am. Not where anyone wanted me to be. But here.

27. Still building. Still figuring it out. Still going.