Over the years, I’ve often been asked how I went from having absolutely nothing to building a net worth that crossed a million dollars. The journey wasn’t glamorous, and it certainly wasn’t overnight. It was a slow, year-by-year evolution filled with pivots, risks, sacrifices, and an insane amount of focus. It all began in 2017, right after I finished college and returned to Mumbai. Like every fresh graduate, I started hunting for a job through Naukri and Monster, hoping to get into either investment banking or management consulting. Consulting required exams I hadn’t taken, so my path naturally shifted toward investment banking. My first role paid me around ₹50,000 per month, translating into a six-lakh CTC, and after deductions my in-hand came to roughly ₹44,000. Since I lived with my parents, I didn’t have rent or major expenses, which helped me save a lot. I also put about ₹2.5 lakh into crypto during the 2017 ICO boom. By the end of that year, my net worth stood at only about ₹2.5–3 lakh — nothing extraordinary, but a foundation nonetheless.
Everything changed in 2018. That year, I met Varun Maya — my cousin, and eventually my co-founder. He had just exited his startup Jobspire and was ready to build something new. He convinced me to quit my job and join him, and together we started Avalon Labs. We were a tiny bootstrapped company with zero revenue in the beginning, doing whatever services we could: websites, marketing, content, and even business plan decks. Thanks to my finance background, I ended up making high-value pitch decks for clients in the US and UK, sometimes earning ₹3–4 lakh per deck, although none of it came to me personally — we reinvested everything into the business. Later that year, we raised a small funding round that valued Avalon Labs at one million dollars. Because of that, my personal net worth on paper jumped to around ₹1.5 crore. I still wasn’t taking a salary, but this valuation changed my financial life far more than a regular job ever could.
In 2019, Avalon Labs entered its second year. We grew aggressively, expanded to nearly 50 employees, and finally moved into a proper office. The work was fun and fulfilling, but financially, my net worth stayed flat. We reinvested every rupee instead of paying ourselves well. Salaries were intentionally kept below market because growth mattered more than personal income. By the end of that year, despite all the excitement, my net worth was still at the same ₹1.5 crore mark. However, it was also the year we realised that pure services wouldn’t scale the way we wanted. As the influencer economy gained traction, Varun started growing his online presence and I began creating my own content as well, even though my earliest YouTube videos were embarrassingly bad. But these experiments eventually shaped the direction we would take next.
Then came 2020 — the year everything changed again. We launched Avalon Meta, an edtech initiative that evolved into India’s largest education community on Discord with around 50,000 members. We ran multiple cohorts and pro-league programs with various mentors, including myself. The business started taking shape, and we closed another funding round of about $420k. That pushed my net worth from the stagnant ₹1.5 crore level to nearly ₹5 crore. For the first time, I saw what exponential growth actually felt like: nothing for two years, then suddenly a massive leap. Even then, both Varun and I continued taking below-market salaries so we could keep pouring money into the product, the team, and the long-term vision.
The momentum didn’t stop there. In early 2021 — the same month I got married — we closed another major funding round for Avalon Scenes, our community-building platform. The valuation was significantly higher than before, pushing my net worth well past the one-million-dollar mark. Even after hitting that milestone, we stuck to the same discipline: take only what we need, avoid greed, and invest everything back into the company. We hired exceptional engineers, expanded the team, and focused on building Scenes into one of the strongest community platforms in the country. By the end of 2021, my net worth had climbed far above the million-dollar threshold, even though we still maintained modest personal salaries.
When I look back at the journey, the pattern becomes extremely clear. In the early years, the progress was painfully slow: almost nothing in 2017, a sudden jump in 2018, zero movement in 2019, and then massive leaps in 2020 and 2021. If I had stayed in investment banking, my salary might have increased from ₹6 lakh to perhaps ₹17–18 lakh after four years, maybe ₹25 lakh in a very optimistic case. But reaching a net worth of a million dollars through a traditional job within four years would have been nearly impossible. Entrepreneurship, high-risk decisions, disciplined reinvestment, and strong co-founders made all the difference.
Becoming a millionaire isn’t overnight magic, and it’s definitely not just about putting money into the latest trending coin and hoping for a lucky break. It takes time, relentless hard work, and a sharp eye for opportunities. Most importantly, it requires a solid team — without the right people beside you, scaling is incredibly difficult. I’m now in my late twenties with decades of work still ahead of me, and this phase is just the beginning. Wealth grows slowly at first, then suddenly all at once, if you stick to the grind long enough.
Now that the 2021 chapter has closed, I'm excited to see what 2022 brings — not just for my personal net worth, but for Avalon Scenes as well. The real purpose of sharing this journey is to help you understand how wealth compounds over time, how opportunity builds on top of hard work, and how strategic decisions matter far more than quick wins. Your own path may look different, but the principles remain the same: patience, discipline, risk, and consistency are what create long-term wealth.
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