Stepping away from startup journey, reflecting on AI and gaming.

Career Update: I’m stepping away from my startup journey. 💔 This may come as a surprise to some of you. We had just raised our pre-seed from South Park Commons (SPC) in March, spent the last 4 months in SF for the SPC bootcamp and GTM, and still had a decent runway. On paper, things looked good. ---- What happened? We went all-in on AI agent for playable ads. The insight was strong: playable ads drive performance but adoption was low because they were expensive and slow to build. We operated as AI-accelerated services for 3 months, building playable ads ourselves to learn deeply about the problem. Through this, we felt confident there was a gap in a large market, one that coding agents like Lovable and bolt.new weren’t solving. Joining SPC and talking to global gaming companies (Rovio Entertainment, Scopely, Wildlife Studios…) validated the pain but also surfaced the limits: faster creation wouldn’t expand ad creation because costs sat elsewhere, and the market structure meant it couldn’t scale into a large business. Before and after this, we explored other ideas too: voice agents for consumer research, AI-driven growth ops, hyper personalized emails for D2C, search traffic moving to LLMs and its downstream effects. But I didn’t feel the kind of founder–problem fit that makes you want to keep pushing for very long. ---- Did I want to start afresh again? I realized, starting up is at least a decade-long journey, more emotional than logical. The only thing that matters is how compelled you feel to do it. Right now, I didn’t feel that pull. That made the decision simpler, though not easy. Was this the right decision as an entrepreneur wanting to build a successful business? No. Was it the right decision for me as an individual at this moment? Yes. ---- Highlights and Learnings Looking back, two key highlights stand out: – We persisted to find a unique insight in gaming despite being outsiders. – I got to be part of SPC, one of the best technical and entrepreneurial communities I’ve seen. Along the way, I also got back to building (coding agents, game dev, applied AI experiments), learned that US GTM is less scary and more about relationships than it looks from India, improved my storytelling, and discovered the value of resilience through pivot hell. ---- What’s next? From this journey, I’ve grown especially bullish on voice agents, coding agents, AI companions, AI in gaming/consumer tech, infra for agent builders, and applied GenAI more broadly. I’d love to contribute to a global AI-native mission where I feel genuinely excited about the problem being solved. I’m grateful to my wife and family, my co-founder, and the SPC team for believing in me and supporting me. Friends and mentors helped me make decisions at each point of the journey. Thanks to our early design partners: Felicity Games, Mobile Premier League (MPL), Nukebox Studios and to all those who just showed up to help on a simple cold reach out or a warm intro.