People make a lot of the age thing. Either it is impressive — you're so young, how do you do it — or it is a liability: what do you know, you've only been alive for two decades. Both reactions miss something.
I don't think my age is the interesting variable. The interesting variables are: the specific problems I chose to work on, the specific place I chose to work in, and whether I had the patience to stay with something long enough for it to become real. The age is just the frame around those decisions, and it mostly falls away when the work starts.
What Youth Actually Gives You
The genuine advantage of building young is not energy, though energy helps. It is not risk tolerance, though that helps too. The real advantage is that you haven't learned yet what is supposed to be impossible.
When I started thinking about ViberNet, I didn't know enough about the capital requirements for ISP infrastructure, the licensing complexity, the difficulty of recruiting technical staff in a market like Srinagar, the particular challenges of operating in a place where the regulatory environment is unpredictable. I just knew that the internet here was bad and that I had the technical capability to do something about it.
This is not the same as naivety. I am not arguing for ignorance. I am saying that there is a window, early in the process of understanding a problem, where you are free from the weight of what other people decided was too hard. That window is valuable. You should use it before it closes.
What It Doesn't Give You
What being twenty-one does not give you is wisdom about people. This is the real gap. The technical problems, the market problems, the financial problems — these are all learnable. The problem of knowing who to trust, when to hold firm, how to read a room — this is harder, and it comes slowly, from watching things go wrong in ways you didn't anticipate.
I have made hiring decisions I regret. Partnership decisions I regret. Decisions about which customers to take and which to decline. These are not technical mistakes. They are human mistakes, and they cost more than the technical ones.
I don't know a shortcut here. You learn about people by being around people, and the specific kind of learning that happens in a business context requires being in a business context. There is no substitute for having made the mistake already.
On Being Unhurried
The thing I try to hold onto is this: I am not in a race. The companies I am building — ViberNet, OpenLoop, StarterHost — are not venture-backed bets that need to show a return in three years. They are businesses in a real place, serving real people, and the measure of whether they worked will be visible in ten or twenty years, not in the next funding round.
This is not resignation. It is actually the opposite of resignation. It is the decision to build something worth building, at the pace that building requires, without pretending the timeline is different than it is.
Kashmir has taught me to think in longer arcs than most startup culture allows for. The valley has been here for a long time. The problems I am working on have been here for a long time. The solutions, if they are real solutions, will be built the same way.
Slowly. Carefully. Without shortcuts.