Nobody told me to start. That was the point.
By Shoryavardhaan Gupta · 21 Jun 2026 · 5 min read
There's a version of this story where I say I always knew I'd build things. That I was coding at eight. That growing up in Kolkata shaped me in some clean, narratable way. That version is tidy. It's also not what happened.
What happened is I was 14, bored in a way school couldn't fix, and I started solving problems I was actually irritated by. Not with permission. Not with a plan. Just because the alternative — waiting until I had a degree, a job, a title — felt like a waste of time I didn't have back.
The permission to build doesn't come from outside. You just start, and then you're a builder.
Building from Kolkata
Kolkata is not Bangalore. There's no startup ecosystem I accidentally wandered into. No senior engineer who took me under their wing. No incubator that handed me resources. The infrastructure for a young person with an idea is mostly people telling you to focus on your boards.
That turned out to be useful. When you don't have the ecosystem, you build differently. You build for real problems because you're surrounded by them. SarkarSathi came out of watching how civic complaints vanish into government systems that were never designed to respond. Buy4Chai came out of being an Indian developer who couldn't get paid by international supporters without a wall where Stripe should be. LiFi came out of thinking seriously about what happens to connectivity when the infrastructure fails.
When you don't have the ecosystem, the only thing you have is the problem. Turns out that's enough.
What building actually teaches
The clearest thing two years of building has taught me isn't technical. It's that shipping something — actually deploying it, having real users, getting 33 comments from people who have the exact same problem — teaches you things no tutorial reaches. Tutorials teach you how to code. Real projects teach you what to build and why it matters. Those are different educations.
I built SarkarSathi during board exams as the sole technical person on a 5-person remote team. It placed in the top 1,000 from 26,000+ India Innovates entries. I published AI planning research on Zenodo at 15. I open-sourced Buy4Chai and posted it back to the same Reddit thread where I'd confirmed the problem was real. None of this happened because I had extra time. It happened because I chose to use the time I had differently than I was supposed to.
Time spent building is never wasted even when the project fails. Time spent waiting for permission to start is just gone.
What's next
I'm 16. I have no idea what the next five years look like except that I'm going to keep shipping things and seeing what sticks. Some of it will fail — quietly or loudly. Some of it already has.
But the thing about building in public is that the record is real. The GitHub commits exist. The Reddit thread has 9.4K views. The India Innovates result is what it is. You can't fake your way to those things. You just have to do the work, earlier than anyone told you to.
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