On December 25, 2024, I walked into Deepinder Goyal’s farmhouse for what I thought would be a conversation about a Chief of Staff role at Zomato.
An hour later, he offered me a job building something that did not yet have a company, a team or even a fixed idea.
Two minutes after leaving his farmhouse, I sent in my resignation from my job in Toronto.
The job post everyone thought was ridiculous
In November 2024, Deepinder had published what became one of the most controversial job posts in India.
He was looking for a Chief of Staff. The person would receive no salary during the first year and would instead have to pay ₹20 lakh for the opportunity to work with him.
The internet understandably went insane. People called it exploitative, elitist and a publicity stunt.
My reaction was different. The moment I read the post, I knew I had to apply.
The 200 word note
I initially approached the application like I would any other job. I started going through every requirement and mentally ticking boxes. What did Deepinder want to hear? Which experiences should I highlight? How could I compress my life into something impressive enough to survive thousands of applications? I realised that it was probably the worst possible way to apply. He had asked for a genuine, honest 200-word note.
So I gave him my life story. I wrote about how, for as long as I could remember, I had been trying to build things.
My father passed away when I was 13. I ended up taking over his textile business for several years and grew it profitably while I was still figuring out algebra. Years later, I went to the University of Toronto and landed what I thought was my dream job. I also turned down a six-figure opportunity in New York for one slightly irrational reason: the H-1B visa made it incredibly difficult to build something of my own. And building was the thing I kept coming back to. Three months after graduating, I had built Opportunest in Toronto to 14,000+ users, helping students across Canada and the US build their careers for free.
None of these things were particularly connected. Except for one pattern. I had spent most of my life finding things I didn’t fully know how to do, and then figuring them out.
So when I saw the opportunity to work with Deepinder, I didn’t really think about it as a job. I thought about it as access to a learning curve I probably couldn’t manufacture for myself. That felt more valuable to me than another conventional job ever could.
So I wrote it, and sent it.
What followed were weeks of some of the most interesting conversations I’d had, all virtually, with different people across the Zomato team.
Final Interview Day, Dec 25th 2024
I happened to be travelling to India to surprise my mother. And the timings matched such that, on Christmas Day, I met Deepinder at his farmhouse.
I had expected a conventional interview. Instead, we spent roughly an hour talking about businesses, life, ambition and what I wanted to do with mine.
To date, it remains one of the most fruitful conversations I’ve ever had. At the end of it, Deepinder asked me to go to his office and collect my offer letter. The offer was to join a company that didn’t have a name yet.
Before LAT was LAT
The high of getting the job lasted about as long as you’d expect. The first few days were confusing.
I had gone in thinking I had earned this role. That I had made it through the interviews, gotten the offer, and now I would start the job. Except there wasn’t really a job to start.
We didn’t even have a stable answer to the most basic question: What exactly are we building?
And very quickly, I realised that this was the job. Not executing someone else’s plan. Figuring out what the plan should be in the first place.
What followed became the most confusing, intense, and probably the most formative period of my life. I spent hours, days, and weeks trying to understand aerospace. Across more than 100 conversations, we explored one thesis after another.
We spoke to pilots, engineers, manufacturers, and almost anyone willing to patiently explain why our latest idea was either impossible, uneconomical, already attempted, or based on a misunderstanding of physics. We would spend several days becoming convinced that we had discovered the right opportunity, ask one more question, uncover a more fundamental problem underneath it, and begin again.
Every answer improved the question.
And soon, the aircraft vision began solidifying, and the work changed quickly.
Some days, I was discussing the economics of regional aviation or learning about blown-wing aerodynamics. On other days, I was hiring, finding office space or ensuring that basic operational/supply-chain work did not fall apart.
When LAT started taking shape
Very soon, we went from roughly 5 people to around 55. And every few weeks, there used to be doubts, fear, and confusion.
But Deepi repeatedly pushed us to stop overthinking, behave more like a toy company and get something flying. Basically build hardware at the pace of software. Build, break, learn from it and return with a better machine.
2 more lessons that have fundamentally changed how I will build:
- Done is better than perfect.
- Progress depends on sequencing uncertainty. This sounds super easy until it's actually time to make hard decisions - what must be proven before anything else matters? What can safely remain unresolved? Which ambition has been earned by the previous result, and which one merely feels exciting because it allows you to avoid the uncomfortable test directly in front of you?
Why I left
Leaving after that should have been difficult.
LAT had become one of the most unusual aerospace companies being built in India. I had access, responsibility and a story that looked extremely good from the outside. Staying would have been the safer and more defensible decision.
Somewhere inside me, the thirteen-year-old who had once ended up helping run a business because life gave him no alternative still wanted to build one by choice. I had spent much of my life playing the game within boxes, but they were still boxes created by someone else. I figured that I had learnt to game this system and I wanted to find out who I was without borrowed momentum. And, as Paul Graham says “starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working.”
I kept telling myself that I should stay longer. There was more to learn, more responsibility to earn, and more certainty to accumulate before attempting something alone. All of those statements were true, which made them especially useful as excuses. If learning becomes the prerequisite for beginning, the beginning can be postponed indefinitely.
What am I doing now
Parallel to everything happening at LAT, I had started spending more and more time building with AI agents and voice systems. The more I tinkered, the harder it became to think about anything else. Software could now understand context properly, speak naturally, take action across multiple systems and remain responsible for an outcome over days, not just answer a prompt. Voice had become good enough to be an interface, and the cost of coordination was beginning to collapse. That opened up an entirely new class of companies. Large consumer categories that had resisted software because they relied on conversations, judgment and constant human coordination could now be rebuilt as AI-native services. Real estate kept pulling me back. It is one of the largest consumer categories in India, yet there has never been a company that truly owns the consumer relationship. Most products help you search, list or transact. Very few understand you, represent you and stay with you through the entire journey.
For the first time since joining LAT, I felt the same pull I had felt after reading Deepinder’s Chief of Staff post.
I knew I would regret not pursuing it. So, I quit :)
Now I am back at another super exciting space. Only this time, it is mine.
I am building Homeie, a generational consumer proptech company starting with renting in India. Over time, Homeie should own the resident relationship end to end, from finding and moving into a home to payments, services, maintenance and the next move. We are now building out the founding team across AI engineering, product and operations, and growth. If this is the kind of company you would be excited to build from day zero, I would love to chat.
