Exactly two years ago today, on February 12th, 2024 — I was meeting my mentors. One at 5 PM, another the next day. The mood was light. The drama, the struggle, the lies — all of it felt like it was behind us. We had a new life. My nephew had just been born, bringing light back into the family. My father was happily planning the 21st-day naming ceremony.
Everything felt like it was finally okay.
A Little Background
Rewind seven months. I had just left my job — what was, by every measure, the peak of my career. A dream role. I was leading multiple platforms across data, AI, operations research, and a brand new retail suite. I'd built almost the entire team from the ground up. A brand new SaaS platform launched for real customers in just a year. Architecture, engineering, management — I had donned every hat possible.
But I had to leave.
My father had to take a long, unpaid leave from his government job to help resolve my matrimonial issues. What followed were six brutal months — drama, social pressure, betrayals from people we called family. All of this while my sister was pregnant at home.
We got through it.
Come December, I went to Rishikesh. A beautiful Himalayan trek. I came back rejuvenated, eager to get back to work. My nephew arrived — everyone was happy. In January, we filed the mutual divorce. A week later, my father convinced me to move back to Bangalore. "Focus on your life," he said. "A fresh start."
February 12th, 2024
I had just taken an afternoon nap.
My sister called, crying. "Dad is not breathing."
He had just come back from our hometown — bags full of gifts, sarees for the naming ceremony. I called the ambulance. Called every friend nearby. My brother-in-law. Everyone reached quickly. They got him to the hospital in twenty minutes.
It was already too late. His heart had already stopped.
The doctor confirmed: cardiac failure.
I started crying and headed to Hyderabad. Couldn't stop for hours. Not until I had said goodbye to him. And then — a new feeling. A new emotion. A new state of mind I had never experienced before.
Naked. Absolutely naked. No other word for it. The world looked different. Insecure. Unwelcome. Familiar faces carried different emotions. People showed different angles. Everything I thought I knew had shifted.
What Failed His Heart?
The difficulties and the people — they were never new to him. That was his daily life. Stress, pressure, being the shield for everyone else. That was just Tuesday for him.
If you haven't already, read his full story on the GVR Unity Foundation — then come back here to continue mine.
But what broke something inside me was what came after.
Relatives started inventing reasons to explain his death — and to deny the reasons that were visible right in front of their eyes. Then the rumors from the other side: "The divorce — the injustice to a woman — that's what killed him."
Thanks to his phone recordings, we know exactly what happened in his last week. We know what he went through. And from that, we found some peace.
Facing Life
It was new for me. But it's life for everyone, every day, somewhere.
Suddenly, the shield was gone. The guidance. The true, unconditional love. I couldn't cry. I couldn't process grief. Too many emotions triggered by too many simultaneous challenges — pulling my mind in a hundred directions at once.
If you've watched Son of Satyamurthy, it was like living a version of that story. And my father — he was more like Rajendra Prasad's character in Aa Naluguru. He helped people far beyond our family's means. And after he was gone, people started showing their true colors.
Debts he had guaranteed — people began defaulting. My divorce issue came roaring back — this time with more confidence from the other side, because his support was gone. Defamation started. Threats started. A showcase of power. Personal vendetta from his department boss to delay his pension. The bureaucracy — babudom — kicked in. True faces of relatives started appearing. The space I was given — or maybe forced into — was overwhelming.
April – May 2024
I tried to bury the grief under work. Maybe by sheer volume, I could numb it.
I built an algorithmic trading platform from the ground up — India-scale. Wrote the Terraform. Set up the K8s cluster. This was before Cursor existed. Before "vibe coding" was a thing. GPT-3.5 Turbo was the best we had, and it was way more expensive than today's models.
I just built. Non-stop.
June – August 2024: Antharmathan — The ADHD Revelation
In June 2024, I recognized something I had been masking for years: I have ADHD.
It had always been there. But the heightened self-awareness that grief brings — that raw, unfiltered state of seeing everything clearly — made it impossible to ignore.
I immersed myself in every book, every research paper I could find. This went on through August. I built multiple agents, multiple products — scripts, tools, prototypes — fueled by hyperfocus and a desperate need to understand myself.
Trust me — when you finally see it, you start mourning your past. Because suddenly everything makes sense. Every impulsive decision. Every unfinished project. Every relationship that confused people around you. ADHD explains a lot. A lot.
Meanwhile, I was drowning in existential questions. In Maslow's ERG hierarchy, I was down to bare existence. What's my purpose in life? Do I just get a job — the loans are manageable, I could consult? Or do I pursue entrepreneurship — and if so, why? Top-down opportunity? Or solve something real? Am I even ready for it? What's my founder fit?
I left money on the table. I didn't take co-founder opportunities that came my way. Because nothing felt right. Not yet.
Mental health — trauma kept resurfacing. But habits I'd picked up were starting to help: yoga, running, journaling. Slowly, something was shifting.
The Product Storm
Products started arriving in tracks, each one pulling at a different thread of who I could be:
100skills.ai — my personal project from before I resigned. The thesis: every human action can be modeled as a neural network, with skills forming each layer and values as gates. The more skilled you become, the denser your connections, the more options you have to deal with any situation. Values aren't easily learned — they form early and stick. But skills, by definition, can be taught. So what if we identified 100 essential skills for everyone — not to make money, but to make life better? Should I pursue this as a venture?
AlgoMaverick — the algorithmic trading platform. Already built. Already working.
SaasGPT — my most beloved creation. Run an entire SaaS business using AI. I'd been using it myself for a year.
NyayAI — a legal AI assistant, born from watching my family get crushed by the justice system.
Life Script, Emotionnista — more ideas, more threads, more ADHD-fueled prototypes.
Or — become a monk. I visited ISKCON very, very frequently during this period.
I read different versions of the Bhagavad Gita. The Mahabharata — Bibek Debroy's translation. Revisited the Ramayana and Mahabharata retold by Chaganti Koteshwar Rao. Read contemporary biographies — Elon Musk, Naval Ravikant. And re-read my idol: the Steve Jobs biography.
The Grief Returns — And Brings Gratitude
Then I gave myself a break. And suddenly, grief hit again — harder than before. The loss of GVR became even more painful.
But from that grief, gratitude emerged.
I saw clearly — he was always what I wanted to become. And he gave us a life beyond his possible capacity. To put things in perspective: he never even asked me to get a milk packet. He gave me my own space. Let me go through my own journey, feel my own emotions, take my own calls, make my own mistakes. And then gave specific, targeted support — to me and my sister — based on exactly what we needed. Not what he thought we needed. What we needed.
Maybe that's what I've been uniquely given — experiencing poverty, discrimination, bias firsthand. And maybe it's time I work toward bringing those same values to the world.
AI had become my companion in the absence of GVR. And from that companionship, AIQuity Life was born.
The vision was bigger than any single product. Multiple domains, multiple products, all under one umbrella — AIQuity Life.
Experimentation — September to November 2024
Now it was time to choose. What kind of founder am I? Top-down market play, or pure bottom-up?
Can I just launch AlgoMaverick? The product is ready. It's already good. Business pitch decks started taking shape. I met my mentor — but I confessed: I'm not able to focus on just one thing. I want to pursue 100skills.ai too. And SaasGPT keeps pulling me back into the mix.
So I created DSAlgoLabs — the experiment. Let's pick something good. A small market. Something that can succeed without requiring my full-time effort, while I figure out the deeper question: which one deserves my entire life?
SaasGPT (now SaasPulse), AlgoMaverick, KalpaNest, 100skills.ai — or maybe all three if I'm capable. Who knows?
I started building. Enjoyed coding after a long time. I kept building what I thought would take two weeks — it took two months. Reality hit: government formalities, compliance, the sheer weight of actually starting a company. And I made myself a rule: I will not raise funding or hire anyone until I'm convinced I'm going to work on this for the next ten years, come what may.
India's Judicial System — Firsthand
Come November, I attended court for the second divorce hearing.
I witnessed the bias. The working of lawyers. Judges. Middlemen. The entire machinery.
This hit hard. Very, very hard. It brought back the trauma from the first hearing — raw, unprocessed, violent.
I had started the experiment with DSAlgoLabs. But destiny had other plans. NyayAI was calling. And it couldn't just be a wrapper or a legal chatbot. Justice is not just legal.
Then, on December 6th, the Atul Subhash suicide case shook the country. It made me even more convinced — this is the problem I should completely focus on. I stopped everything else. This was it. Let's solve it.
I wanted to choose. But destiny chose for me. I wasn't picking a problem — the problem was given to me.
December 2024 — Divorce, Kashi, and Clarity
The divorce was finally complete — the way I wanted it. A just mutual consent. Done.
And then — I went to Kashi to immerse my father's ashes and complete his final rites. My friend and uncle who accompanied me said something I'll never forget: "You smiled — after a very long time." I could feel it too.
Places carry history. Kashi had already shaped many of my decisions. And it would again.
I was sitting on the banks of the Ganga. A sadhu approached me — unprompted, unsolicited — and said:
"Bhole, tujhe ek saathi jaroor chahiye. Shiv ji ko bhi Jai. Aap ki priya Krishna ki behen — jyada soch na mat. Pehla kartavya pe dhyan do."
He advised me to visit Mathura and Ayodhya. We did. Then I made my way to Delhi — to visit the Supreme Court.
January – May 2025: Research, Product, Ideation
NGO or Private Company or Open Source?
This is the question I pondered for a very long time.
At its core, injustice is everywhere. Seen every day. Not just in courts — it only lands in courts when it's extreme. Like the ICU for health. But healthcare doesn't mean just ICU care, right? Preventive care, primary care, community health — that's what actually saves lives.
The same applies to justice. But how do you build that?
Hunger, clean water, healthcare — these have been partially solved through massive government spending and billions from global philanthropies. So the model became clear to me:
Let's make money. Invest in others who do the same (VC). And help governments and NGOs who are already doing the work through philanthropy.
I joined a VC fellowship — to understand the venture capital ecosystem, and to lay the groundwork for a future fund of our own.
Very quickly, my founder fit and market fit were validated. All I needed was the right fundamentals to build the business.
And from that clarity, two things were born:
GVR Unity Foundation — the philanthropic arm. Named after my father. His values, institutionalized.
AIQuity Life — the corporate arm. The engine that funds the mission.
Every penny I make goes to GVR Unity Foundation. As I tell people — in a humorous way — the 9s belong to GVR Unity Foundation. If AIQuity Life makes a trillion dollars, I get to keep one dollar. Cool, right? Take the mind off personal wealth. Off personal luxury. Focus on the mission.
But let's make that trillion. And make AIQuity Life even bigger. Making significant impact in the world. Simple, really: let's make everyone skilled, healthy, wealthy, let's fight for their justice — their dignity — and help them live the life they want to live. Self-actualization. Your Dharma.
NyAI-Nest — Justice Needs Community
Back to NyayAI. It had evolved — and was now becoming NyAI-Nest.
Because justice isn't something AI can deliver alone. You need every part: experts, community, peers, seekers — all helping each other. It has to be a community effort. AI or a single person can never fulfill the complicated, multi-dimensional needs of a justice journey.
But building a social network is one of the most complex problems on earth. You can count the successful ones on your fingers.
So I started pitching to angel investors I had personal connections with. Got good ideas. Extremely important questions. The kind that sharpen your thinking.
The team was already forming. My former colleague and a very dear friend Archana joined. SK supported from outside. Which meant we needed a lot of freedom and peace of mind to navigate the ship in the right direction. A VC round at this stage — close to a million dollars — felt wrong.
We took the call to skip it. The team deferred salaries. I sold my house. My mother's jewelry. Whatever it took.
June 2025 – January 2026: Renaissance and Peace
Seven months in the rabbit hole. Discovering more and more problems. More dimensions. Stretching every limit. But enjoying every bit of it.
I dream about it. I live it. It's my lens. It is my life. The AIQuity Life.
I saw light in January — a lot of happy tears. Seeing the vision materialize into a product. The cognitive-somatic gap — that tough phase where you know exactly how it should look and work, but building it and making it better in UI, UX, and every detail... takes time.
What AIQuity tries to solve, and how it solves it — that's reserved for the launch keynote.
February 12, 2026 — Two Years Later
As I write this today — two years since GVR's Swargasthi — I think he is in peace.
The family moved on. Showed courage and resilience in tough times — in his stead. And I'm on my path of Karma Yoga. I'm not sure I've become a karma yogi. But I will walk the path of Karma Yoga until my last breath and improve every single day.
A life I wanted. A life GVR wanted to have — for which both he and my mother sacrificed and suffered through a lot. And we hope AIQuity Life gives the same to all the aspiring students, the sacrificing parents, and helps the organizations and professionals who are already doing great work.
I'm on my path to finding inner peace. All the anger, pain, and trauma — channeled into purpose. Content with both success and failure.
Though it originated from my pain, and was inspired by GVR, and though I'm the founder of it — it's not about us. It's about the world. It's about the pain everyone goes through. There is no place for our identity inside it.
So next time we speak — we talk about AIQuity Life.
If you want to know the man behind all of this — my father's full story is on the GVR Unity Foundation.
Until next time.
Sai Tej, s/o GVR.