The long way to work that matters

Eleven years ago I landed in the United States by myself, an international student with a suitcase and no real plan. I was here to go to college, but if you had asked me what I actually wanted to do with my life, I wouldn’t have had an answer. I just knew I wanted to build something of my own — I only had no idea what.

So I started with what I could reach: e-commerce. Dropshipping, to be exact. It was scrappy and unglamorous — sourcing products, testing listings, learning ads by burning my own money. But it taught me how business actually works from the ground up. Along the way I got to know a lot of suppliers and merchants, real people running real operations, and I learned more from those conversations than from any classroom.

Then the pandemic hit. Demand shifted overnight, and I leaned into it — expanding aggressively while the window was open. That was when I earned my first real pot of money. Not generational wealth, but enough to prove to myself that I could see an opportunity and act on it before it closed.

After that, life pulled me toward the more conventional path. I went deep into engineering at big tech companies — AWS, Microsoft, and others — grinding on hard, high-scale problems. I learned an enormous amount, and I’m grateful for it. But the busier I got, the more a quiet question kept surfacing: is this the thing I actually want to be spending my one life on?

The answer I’ve arrived at is simple, even if it took years to reach: the meaning of life is to do the things you yourself believe are meaningful. Not the things that look impressive on paper, not the things that pay the most — the things that feel worth doing when no one is watching.

So here I am now — out on my own again, building. This time I’m not the kid with a suitcase and no plan. I’m carrying everything the last eleven years taught me, and I’m spending it on work I actually care about. That, to me, is the whole point.