The Conversation That Restarted Everything

I still remember walking into my first OpenAI event in Bangalore thinking, "Let's just see what kind of people show up here."

I travel a lot across India, and one thing I genuinely love about Bangalore is that everywhere you go, you find people trying to build something. Startups, side projects, crazy ideas, AI tools — everyone is working on something.

At that time, I was also thinking a lot.

Too much, honestly.

I had ideas in my head. I was freelancing, traveling, exploring, discussing startup ideas with people, but deep down I knew one thing: I was spending more time thinking than actually building.

Then at the event, I met Aparna.

We started talking randomly during the event, and somehow the conversation kept going the whole day. She had spent around 10 years in San Francisco and was now working in India again. She also shared that she had tried building her own startup before, and talked honestly about how difficult starting something can be.

That part stayed with me.

Not because it was some motivational startup story, but because it felt real. No fake "hustle culture." Just someone being honest about how hard building actually is.

I also shared my side: how I travel, freelance, keep exploring different cities, and how I had this strange idea in my head around intent-based networking.

And surprisingly, she found it interesting.

After the event ended, I went back thinking about one thing again and again:

Why am I spending so much time overthinking instead of just building the thing?

That conversation genuinely hit differently for me.

So I stopped almost everything else.

I moved to the next place like I usually do, took a break from distractions, and started focusing fully on building. I kept asking myself one question:

"How do I make this simple, useful, and different?"

That's where PresenceOS slowly started becoming real.

Not perfectly. Not magically. Just one messy step at a time.

A few weeks later, once I had a working MVP, I reached out to Aparna again and asked if she'd be open to seeing what I built.

She said yes immediately.

So we met again, and I showed her the product.

And honestly, that meeting helped me a lot too.

She gave feedback on the product itself, but one thing she said stayed in my head:

"A lot of founders start focusing on raising money before they even build something people genuinely want."

That hit me hard because I could already see how easy it is to get distracted by startup noise instead of focusing on users and product.

Now I'm preparing for the next phase of PresenceOS. More feedback, more users, more fixing, more building.

And honestly, I'm excited to meet her again too.

Because sometimes certain conversations don't just inspire you for one day.

They restart something inside you.

Let's see what happens next.