The Unexpected Mentor Who Taught Me Magic—and Changed My Founder Journey

How catching up with a former classmate transformed how I explore new ideas

Feb 02, 2025

“I still laugh remembering this joke you made the last time we saw each other.” He has a great memory.

“And I remember one of the first jokes you told me: an introverted mathematician looks at their own shoes while an extroverted mathematician looks at YOUR shoes.”

We spend the first thirty minutes catching each other up on life. Outside of a group Zoom call during COVID, it’s been fifteen years since we’d spent any significant time together. When we were graduate students, Alex was the first person to teach me sleight of hand tricks. He founded a startup around the time I left Google, and he’s very open about his experiences.

“We spent a lot of time just vetting the right problem to go after with leaders in our domain. We hadn’t built a proof of concept or anything.”

Wait… what? “If you didn’t have a proof of concept, how did you get the meetings?”

“We’re mid-career, Krish. I just leveraged my experience and network, and it got meetings. You have a network and a reputation from 15 years of experience at Google. I’m pretty sure you could do the same.”

“And you go in with nothing?”

“I go in with my experience, and then I spend the meeting just listening and understanding what their problems are.”

“Of course, that builds trust.”

Both our heads are nodding now. Alex returns to something from an earlier part of our conversation. “It sounds like you had a lot of experience at Google socially engineering your environment to enable progress. That’s exactly the skill set you need to be using.”

The subtext? Sure, there are indie hackers out there, but that’s not how I can differentiate myself.

Within a few days, and with the help of my network and reputation, I’ve landed a meeting with a C-suite executive leading one of the most prestigious organizations in my target domain. Alex has taught me a new trick.

My friend and former colleague Varun has described the experience of CEO Founders as analogous to the hero’s journey popularized by Joseph Campbell. This newest trick is the Supernatural Aid propelling me forward.