We applied to Y Combinator with an edtech idea. AI to help Indian students apply to US colleges.

The YC group partner looked at it and said it wouldn't work. Straight up.

Then he said something I'll never forget: "You guys are great engineers, so we're going to fund you anyway."

That's the power of betting on people over ideas. They didn't fund a product. They funded a conviction that two engineers would figure out the right problem.

Harj Taggar was the partner who kept us alive during that period. Without him, the company would not have existed. I mean that literally. There were moments where we had nothing, and he helped us see a way forward.

We threw out the edtech idea on the spot and started searching for the real problem. That search took over a year. It was brutal.

But that initial trust from YC, that willingness to fund engineers without a viable idea, gave us the runway to find what we were meant to build.