At 18, I moved to Bangalore with just two things: my mother and a dream. I wanted to do animation and VFX, while my mom wanted me to be called an engineer after three years.
After the first semester, the cost of living entered the chat and I had to look for opportunities. Being an extrovert and theatre enthusiast, I was part of the college student union. A senior asked if I knew someone who could use Adobe Illustrator for an upcoming marathon. I had never used it, but when he said it was paid, suddenly I knew Adobe Illustrator.
My first assignment was recreating a lost event logo while the team sat beside me. I learned the tool in public and delivered it in two and a half hours. That internship lasted four months. It did not pay, but it taught me reusable templates, production pressure, and the startup habit of glorifying late nights.
Getting paid for the first time
Two weeks later, someone I met during that internship offered me a paid role at an F&B company connected to colleges across Bangalore. The salary was ₹8,000 a month. I started freelancing alongside it, designing logos, brand guides, brochures, business cards, and whatever else the work needed.
I still remember handing that first salary to my mother and seeing her cry. It was probably the first time I did not feel bad seeing her cry.
Upskilling on the fly
A contact running an agency in Singapore needed a website designer and asked whether I knew Adobe XD. I asked for the deadline, learned the basics, and delivered the site in three weeks.
That pattern kept repeating: an opportunity appeared slightly ahead of my current skill, and the only honest path forward was to learn fast enough to meet it.
The Nvidia opportunity I could not take
At 19, I received an offer from Nvidia to travel to event locations, edit footage on site, and deliver before each event ended. The salary was ₹25,000 a month plus travel, food, and accommodation.
I could not take it because my mother would not let me travel alone. At the time I did not know how to explain how large the opportunity felt.
Transitioning into product design
By final year I was leading my college theatre club and freelancing. My department head recommended me to an EdTech company for motion graphics. I knew After Effects from VFX, learned from a senior artist, and soon picked up graphic design and marketing work too.
When the co-founder needed someone to design the mobile app in Adobe XD, I stepped in. He was a UX researcher and mentored me in the foundations of product design.
COVID, job loss, and project management
COVID-19 halted funding and I lost my job in May 2020. I joined a Hyderabad startup remotely as a motion graphics artist on an EdTech product.
When the developers were occupied, I wrote and shipped an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript website in fifteen days. As the core team struggled with funding and execution, I was asked to oversee projects. Range turned into responsibility, and I became a project manager.
The fintech journey and beyond
In December 2020, a fintech recruiter found a motion graphics video I had posted on LinkedIn. I joined an early-stage company, revamped its website, made product videos, designed dashboards, and eventually received an intern to help with the workload.
Six months later I moved into an Associate Product Manager role. It had taken two years to reach the salary Nvidia had once offered, but the path had also given me a much broader practice.
Entrepreneurship, stand-up, and agency life
I left for a film commitment and assembled a team for an indie project. The project ended painfully after the director disappeared and the producers lost money, including ₹2 lakh of mine. Running out of savings, I returned to work.
Outside work I was running stand-up shows and organising events with comedians. The comedy room remained a place to improvise, recover, and keep moving.
The chaos years
An ex-colleague offered me a Head of Product role while I simultaneously worked as a UI/UX consultant for an automation company. I was doing product management and interface work at once.
Later, I became the first hire in another startup and helped set up hiring, policies, an office, and infrastructure. I hired an HR who eventually fired me, so I now get to say: I hire my fires.
Agency life followed, then a part-time product role at an HR-tech company where I carried out user research with organisations including Myntra, Dunzo, and Bajaj.
Open source, focused work, and learning to align
A Hyderabad-based open-source product management startup found my Behance work and brought me in as a designer. The environment was deeply focused and the team shipped quickly.
I learned that I thrive by going broad before going deep. A narrow role is not inherently bad, but alignment matters. The experience still taught me a lot about product management, open-source systems, marketing, and working with a supportive manager under pressure.
The takeaway
Across eight years of work, three overlapping with college and five fully in the corporate world, every company became a chapter. I have been fired, quit, watched companies close, and stayed longer than I should have. Each one added something.
The hats include marketing, graphic design, motion graphics, VFX, product management, product design, web design, development, UX research, recruitment, sales, event organising, and stand-up.
I rarely waited for permission to learn. I did the thing, picked up what it required, and kept the confidence internal rather than outsourcing it to approval.
If you were not ready, you would not have the opportunity. If you were not capable, you would not have the desire.
This is not every chapter, but it is the essence: keep learning, keep the comedian alive, and do not let corporate life remove all the mischief from the work.