Why am I starting a blog?
July 20, 2025Hello reader, welcome to my first blog post. This post is about a brief introduction to myself and nayankote.com. Let’s jump right in:
Why am I starting a blog?
There are a few reasons why I am compelled to start my own blog:
- I am a fan of well-curated, tastefully written blogs, such as PG’s personal blog, Tigerfeathers, Dharmesh’s AI blog, etc. and I want nayankote.com to be in the same league
- I want to maintain a digital diary, documenting the progress of my life - for myself and whosoever might find value in these words
- (Most importantly) A lot of people I admire document their lives somehow, either through blogs, github repos, videos (shoutout Casey and Van Neistat, The Outdoor Boys) or podcasts (yet to PMF with this medium). They persistently claim that the only way to have net-new ideas is to create, not just consume, and these people have had many net-new ideas.
So, it is a combination of following in the footsteps of people I admire and inducing self-reflection as I figure out the next steps in my life.
Who am I today?
This is a tough question to answer. By profession, I work as an investment analyst at Accel India, a fairly prestigious, storied venture capital firm in Bangalore.
Previously, I graduated from IIT Madras with a Bachelors in Aerospace Engineering and Masters in Data Science, after which I spent two tough years at Bain & Company. I call them tough as I was an extremely poor fit for consulting and every day was more excruciating that the last. However, I met some of my closest friends there and it gave me the chance to work at Accel.
During my undergrad, I spent a bunch of time meddling with ML first, and then AI. I did some research around LLMs for low-resource languages, trained a few models at early stage startups during the summer breaks and also had a brief stint at Nvidia. While I had a fairly strong engineering bent of mind, I veered off the path and chose consulting. One (important) caveat that continues to bite me in the ass today is that I never shipped a single product during my undergrad. I have not yet experienced what it is like to deliver joy to a user with a tasteful product - this is a feeling I chase.
What can readers of this blog expect?
This blog will cover personal updates, thought exercises, book reviews, frameworks on investing/ building product and updates on a bunch of random projects I am working on. There will be a new post every Sunday, starting today (20th July 2025)
Closing thoughts
Today, I did my first bike workout as a part of my training for an Ironman 70.3 (event TBD). I drove all the way to Nandi hills, rode my bike for 1.5 hours and drove back - it was mentally and physically taxing, to say the least. On the way back, I was reminded of a quote that Timothée Chalamet said in a random interview (I don’t recollect which one), and it feels befitting to the way I feel today
You could be the master of your fate, you could be the captain of your soul, but you have to realise that life is coming from you and not at you. And that takes time.