I ate frozen pizzas so I could buy bitcoin. That's why Settle is bootstrapped.

I lived in Los Angeles for most of my twenties. The pay was American, the rent was American, and so was the cost of pretty much everything else. But I had a habit nobody at work knew about. Most weeks I'd skip dinner two or three times and eat a frozen pizza when I got home. Not because I couldn't afford food. Because I'd already decided the money was going somewhere else.

The money went into bitcoin.

That sounds dramatic in hindsight. At the time it was just arithmetic. A close friend, one of the sharpest people I know, had been pulling me into a long conversation about money for weeks. The dollar wasn't unique, he said. It was one of many ways societies had agreed to count things, and there were better ones now. Then COVID hit, the printing presses opened, my paychecks felt smaller every month, and the arithmetic suddenly looked obvious.

I started buying.

The first one

My dream was specific and small. I wanted to own one bitcoin. One whole coin, full stop. Not because I had a price target or a thesis-deck. Because owning one whole bitcoin felt like a marker. A line in the sand that said I noticed what was happening and I did something.

It took longer than I thought. Months stretched into a year, then more. Some weeks I'd put in a few hundred. Other weeks I'd put in everything left after rent. The frozen pizza weeks are the ones I remember the most, not because I was suffering, but because they felt like the cheapest possible price for a kind of conviction I hadn't known I was capable of.

Eventually I got there. One coin. Then, slowly, more.

On-chain, in public

My friend kept pulling me deeper. Ethereum next, then DeFi: pools, vaults, the strange and beautiful arithmetic of money that moves itself. I started writing about it. Not in a thoughtful long-form way. In threads, mostly. Half-baked observations. Trades I'd just made. Ideas I'd just lost money on.

The account grew. I won't share the handles here, but they got reasonably big in a particular corner of Crypto Twitter. The thing that worked, I think, wasn't that I was right more often than other people. It was that everything I posted was on-chain. The good trades, the dumb ones, the times I bought a top, the times I caught a bottom. Every position was visible, and there was nowhere to hide. I didn't try to.

That kind of transparency, when you're losing money in public, teaches you a different relationship with being wrong.

Twenty years in months

Somewhere in the middle of that run, I made my twenty-year salary in a few months. I want to be careful about how I phrase that, because saying it like that makes it sound inevitable, and it wasn't. The market was generous, my friend was generous with what he knew, and I was young enough that I could afford to put nearly everything I had at risk. None of that is replicable advice. It was a moment in time, and I happened to be standing in it.

The money mattered for one specific reason. It bought me the receipt I needed to leave my job.

Long Tail Ventures, and what I learned by trying to raise

After I quit, I started a small fund. I called it Long Tail Ventures. The thesis was straightforward. Early-stage cheques, founders working on weird and specific things, hold longer than most funds want to hold. I'd done enough investing on my own that the muscle was there. The discipline of a fund was new.

I tried to raise a small first close. It went the way most first-time-fund raises go without an existing institutional track record. People were polite. The meetings were warm. The cheques were small. I learned, somewhat painfully, that being a good investor and being good at raising a fund are two completely different jobs.

I'm still proud of the deals. Twenty-five companies, around $1.3M of my own capital deployed, a handful that look like real outliers now. But I converted the fund into a passive vehicle within a year and stopped trying to raise it. Forcing it would have been a worse use of my time than building, and I was a builder at heart. The fund had been a detour.

Before Settle: BharatNiti, and the holographic problem

Settle isn't the first thing I've bootstrapped. Before this, there was BharatNiti.ai.

Same playbook. My capital, no outside money, full ownership, a small team I trusted. The idea sat at the intersection of civic technology and Indian policy. I cared about the problem space. I had the time and the reserves to chase it. We built. We shipped.

It didn't work.

Not because the team was wrong, not because the build was wrong, not because the timing was wrong. It didn't work because I was the wrong person looking at the wrong thing from the wrong angle. I'd come at it from the markets. I'd been spending all day reading capital flows, watching policy ripple through prices, thinking about how the country actually clears. From there, it looked like a gap was sitting in plain sight. But sitting closer to it, the gap dissolved. There was no specific user dragging me toward a specific pain. We were trying to force ourselves into a market.

I have a word for that kind of problem now. Holographic. A problem that looks solid from a distance, that you can describe in a slide and nod about over coffee, but the closer you walk to it, the more you realise nobody is standing on the other side of it asking you to solve it.

So we killed it. Cleanly. No long farewell post. No pretending the metrics were better than they were. The reserves had bought me the option to walk away, and the right move was to use the option.

Settle is the first thing I've built where the opposite happened. An operator walked us through a workflow and asked us to fix it. The work pulled us forward instead of us pushing it. That contrast is most of why I'm sure about this one, and most of why the bootstrapped structure is the only one that fits.

What the desk looks like now

The public-markets side of my life looks pretty boring from the outside, which is how I like it. I'm one of the larger individual holders in a few Indian micro-caps. Names like Shree Refrigerations, Yash High Voltage, and Techera Engineering. Names you've probably never seen on a CNBC ticker. The pattern is the same one I've used my whole adult life. Read everything, talk to operators, take a concentrated position in something I understand, hold longer than is comfortable.

I trade a smaller book on the side, mostly for the love of the game. It isn't active income and I don't pretend it is. The next year looks good from where I'm sitting, but the only honest version of that sentence ends with “we'll see.” Zerodha's verified-profile link is the closest thing Indian retail has to an audited statement, so I'd rather show the page than describe the numbers: console.zerodha.com/verified/036658fe.

The same way I ran the Crypto Twitter account, on-chain and uncurated, I run my balance sheet now. If a position goes sideways, you'll see it.

Why this matters for Settle

I'm telling you all of this for one reason. Settle, the company I'm building right now, is bootstrapped. We've taken no outside capital and I don't plan to.

People sometimes assume that means we're too small to raise, or that we tried and couldn't, or that we're being precious about ownership. None of that is true. The reserves I built over the last nine years bought me one specific thing, and I think it's the only thing actually worth buying as a founder. The freedom to refuse money I don't need.

A funded company has to scale. It has timelines that aren't its own. It has to make problems bigger than they are because the cap table needs the upside. Bootstrapped looks like a smaller version of the same game from the outside, but it's a different game entirely. The questions are different. Is this worth doing? replaces Is this venture-scale? The bar for shipping is different. The bar for notshipping is much higher, because the only reason to keep working on something is that it's still worth solving.

I'd rather work on a real problem at small scale than a fake problem at big scale.

The clearest version of the thesis

I'm not settling for money. I don't need it. I want to solve a problem.

If the problem I'm working on right now stops being worth solving, if the market changes, if a bigger team does it better, if I look at it one Tuesday morning and realise the math doesn't compound anymore, I will retire it and move on to the next one. That option is the whole point. The reserves exist so that the option stays open.

I'm aware that sounds privileged. It is. The frozen-pizza weeks bought a privilege I didn't have at twenty-three, and I'm honest about that. But the privilege isn't lifestyle. The privilege is being able to say no to capital, no to scope I don't believe in, and no to growth that would make the work worse. Most founders I know would take that trade if they could see it on offer.

That's the part of the story I think is actually useful for other people to hear. Not the bitcoin lottery. The boring version. Save in something you believe in for long enough, take real risk while you're young enough to absorb it, and convert it eventually into the only asset that compounds for a builder: the freedom to walk away from work that isn't yours to do.

And about Settle, specifically

We work with manufacturers and mid-market operators who have real workflows that don't get solved by a ChatGPT seat. We deploy Claude AI into the parts of their business where the work actually happens. We go on-site. We deliver in weeks. I run every engagement personally.

That model only works at small scale. It would be a worse business with thirty people in it. It would be an even worse business with a board demanding growth into a market we don't believe in. So we won't do that.

We're deliberately small. We're deliberately selective. And we're bootstrapped because being bootstrapped is the only structure where we can mean what we say.

That doesn't mean we're allergic to scale. The honest goal is to find a productized angle inside this work. A recurring problem, a repeating shape, a theme that several customers pull at the same way. Something that wants to be productized because the work itself keeps pointing to it. We watch for it on every engagement. We haven't found it yet.

If it shows up, we'll build it on the same terms as everything else. Bootstrapped. Transparent about what's working and what isn't. Scaled because the work is pulling us into the next shape, not because a cap table needs the upside.

And if we never find it, that's fine too. Helping a handful of real businesses solve real problems isn't a consolation prize. It's a different shape of success than the one the venture script teaches you to want.

The frozen pizzas, the on-chain account, the fund that didn't fundraise, the micro-caps. None of it is a flex. It's the receipt for the freedom to build the version of Settle I actually want to build, for as long as it's still worth building.

If that stops being true, I'll tell you. Same way I told you everything else.