Two Builders and the Year We Learned to Share a Brain

A year ago, we decided to start something together.

No signatures, no champagne, no big “founder moment.” Just two people sitting at a coffee shop in downtown New York, halfway between excitement and nausea, deciding to bet on each other.

It’s funny. We’d gone to the same college, the University of Washington, same year, same major, computer science. But we weren’t friends. We didn’t even overlap. Arjun was the person who knew everyone in the department and seemed to have memorized the faculty directory.

I was the opposite kind. I loved CS. I’d been coding since second grade, back when my school actually taught it, and I spent months after a terrible accident in seventh grade writing little programs in QBASIC on that blue terminal. So yes, I loved it deeply. But I was busy juggling economics and literature classes, doing case competitions, and writing for whoever would let me. I wasn’t avoiding my major. I just wanted to see the world beyond it.

So while Arjun went deep, I went wide. He built roots in the CS world; I built bridges out of it. When we eventually met years later, he introduced me to the startup world of tech, this system of bets and builders and decks and demos. And I, I think, reintroduced him to curiosity for its own sake, the kind that doesn’t always need a business case.

Diverging perfectly

Years later, we ended up at Google. He was a PM on YouTube, guiding billion-view products and monetization strategy, while I was a software engineer on Google Maps, building features used by people everyday: the kind of scale that quietly rewires how you think about users, reliability, and trust.

Before Google, I spent a year and a half at Goldman Sachs, writing code that priced risk and moved markets, watching in real time how money breathes. Looking back, our paths were diverging perfectly. He was becoming fluent in users and business, and I was learning to think in systems and scale.

When we met, Arjun was already itching to start something of his own. I was too. I’ve always known that my life wouldn’t end inside a giant company. My family runs a real estate business, and I’d grown up around people who believed in building things from scratch, sometimes literally. Google was never meant to be the endgame.

So we started meeting. Coffee chats turned into brainstorms, brainstorms into long whiteboard sessions. In those early days, I realized how much my relationship with my partner, my real partner, had prepared me for this. I’d already learned how to listen without trying to fix, how to pick battles, how to recognize when silence helps more than speech. Founding a company, it turns out, uses the same muscles, just in different rooms.

We spent six months ideating, rejecting one “AI for X” idea after another. Eventually, we hit on a problem that actually hurt us personally, and that’s when the gears started meshing. We realized we were both allergic to the idea of B2B. We wanted to build something for people like us, end users, messy humans with hopes and insecurities. B2C was home. We were aligning.

By that point, we had the luxury of betting on ourselves. Flourishing careers, significant savings, no reason to “wait until later.” The conditions were as perfect as they ever get in startup land.

The balance that keeps the company alive

And that’s when we discovered something quietly magical. We not only complemented each other in skills, but also in temperament.

I’m the hothead. Arjun isn’t. I’m the one who wants to move fast, break things, and fix them by midnight. Arjun’s the one who keeps the pixels perfect and the pace steady.

Somehow, that balance keeps the company alive. We divide not just tasks, but emotional load. When I’m frustrated, he levels the temperature. When he overanalyzes, I pull the trigger.

The funny thing is, where we’re similar, it works too. We both love having lives that aren’t just work. And we both believe that who you are outside the company shapes the company just as much as what you do inside it.

Why New York

Living in New York has amplified all of that. There’s something about building a startup here that feels alive. Everyone’s hustling, yes, but they’re hustling toward something tangible. SF startups often feel like ideas waiting for a Series A. NYC startups feel like businesses. SF has “structured spontaneity,” calendar invites for serendipity. NYC has actual serendipity: someone you meet at a dinner might not work in tech at all, and that’s exactly the point.

In San Francisco, everyone’s optimizing. In New York, everyone’s improvising. We thrive in that chaos.

People often ask what makes a co-founder relationship last. I used to think it was complementary skill sets or shared vision. But after a year, I think it’s something quieter: a shared understanding of how the other person moves through the world.