I was 19 when I built my first circuit at IIT Kanpur’s electronics club. A simple 0 to 9 counter. Nothing impressive.

But getting it to work after an evening of troubleshooting? Watching those numbers finally count up? That hooked me completely.

I didn’t build it because it was useful or because anyone asked me to. I built it because I couldn’t stop thinking about why the display wasn’t working right. Because figuring that out felt more alive than anything else I was doing.

That feeling, the pure joy of making something work just because you’re curious, that’s what I’ve been chasing for the last 10 years.

Every decision. Every pivot. Every “strategic move”. All of it trying to get back to that feeling.

And somewhere along the way, I lost it completely.

When Building Became Performance

Something shifted in tech. It happened to me too.

The game became about earning more. If you weren’t increasing your income constantly, you were somehow losing. It wasn’t about curiosity anymore. It was raises, appraisal cycles, climbing the ladder.

When I was curious? I didn’t have time. When I had time? I was exhausted.

I joined an early stage startup thinking I’d get back to building. Instead, I got the grind. It wasn’t building for the sake of building. It was “we need to raise funds.” “Launch this feature by Friday.” “The system is down, get it back up.”

Even when you wanted to take time to understand, to learn, the pressure drove you to just make the noise stop. Pick the fastest option. Get it done. Move on.

So I started my own company. Surely that would solve it, right?

Wrong.

Now it was constant pressure to stay alive. Talking to clients, convincing them to hire you for their next project just to keep the lights on. Performance for customers. Performance for hiring developers. Performance for survival.

And somewhere in there, tech internet shifted too. You used to share what you learned. Document your journey. It felt genuine because someone built something real and shared the unfiltered process.

Then something changed. Fake MRR screenshots. Engagement bait. People gaming algorithms instead of building real things.

I wanted to believe people were truthful. But except for a rare few, everyone was just selling the dream, not living it.

And I started performing too. Not because I wanted to, but because I thought I had to.

Don’t know the latest framework? You’re a loser. Nobody asks why. Nobody talks about tradeoffs. And if you dared to ask? You got booed off, taunted so hard you wouldn’t ask again.

It became performance all the way through. And if you weren’t performing, you weren’t winning.

I tried playing this game for five years. And honestly? I sucked at it.

Same five years I was trying to bootstrap a company, by the way.

Five Years of Building Everything at Once

Let me tell you what those five years actually looked like.

I hired interns remotely with the hopes I could pull off my bootstrapping dreams and build Vade AI, a no-code platform. How hard could it be?

Turns out, really hard.

And doing it while building a house, bringing a newborn into the world, with a team with less real world experience and a depleting bank account?

This is the closest to impossible I’ve experienced.

You know that advice about focus? About doing one thing really well? Yeah, I wasn’t following that advice. I was building roots and trying to grow wings at the same time.

The stress isn’t just about the product. It’s about the weight of being responsible for your team’s paychecks, your family’s future, and your company’s survival all at once. It crushes your ability to think clearly about what actually matters.

You can’t build something genuinely novel while in constant survival mode.

So I made a choice. Keep the dream, change the path.

The moment I decided to find work felt like both relief and defeat. Relief because I could finally breathe. Defeat because I’d spent five years believing that “real founders” push through no matter what.

And something unexpected happened: I finally got back to what I loved. The freedom to tinker. To explore ideas just because they’re interesting. To learn without the pressure of monetization. To build things because I’m curious, not because they have to work immediately.

Vade Bytes is the documentation of that curiosity.

What I Learned

I still think about that counter circuit sometimes. How simple it was. How alive I felt debugging it.

The truth is, you probably have your own version of that moment. Maybe it was your first program. Your first design that actually worked. That time you fixed something everyone else had given up on.

You remember how that felt, right? Before the performance. Before the hustle. Before you learned to measure everything by engagement metrics and salary bumps.

Through all those years of playing the wrong game, I finally figured out what actually matters. Here’s what I’m committing to with Vade Bytes:

Curiosity over performance - Build to understand, not just to monetize or impress

Space over speed - Mental clarity beats constant hustle

Exploration over perfection - Share the messy process, not just the wins

Questions over frameworks - Foster genuine curiosity, reject guru culture

Building over talking - Document what I’m actually making

These aren’t aspirations. They’re how I’m actually working now. And it feels like that circuit counter again.

Let’s Build Together

What if we just… went back to that? Not naively. We still have bills to pay and families to support. But what if we stopped pretending the performance game is the only game?

Vade Bytes is my public lab notebook. Building Vade AI, exploring LLMs, tinkering with whatever makes me think “wait, how does that actually work?” Failed attempts included.

No content calendar. No growth hacking. Just genuine discovery, documented in real-time.

If you miss that feeling - that pure curiosity that got you into this in the first place - let’s build together. Not to consume content, but to rediscover what it feels like to create something just because you can’t stop thinking about it.

Let’s figure this out together.