Former CTO @ Story.com

It was time for me to explore other ideas and figure out what I want to do next. I left with a lot of beautiful memories, on a personal level, on a team level. I had good connections with everyone, and I'm grateful for every moment of it. Story.com will always be a chapter I look back on with nothing but love.

We thought raising capital was the biggest challenge, but we were so wrong. Soon enough, we realized it's not the money, it's the talent that makes or breaks a company - and finding those first few hires is nothing less exhilarating than building a rocket. After reviewing over 1000s of profiles for each role, we finally ended up going out of the norm FTEs, and hired 2 candidates for the same role on contract. The idea was - we'd pick one, and convert to FTE: we ended up hiring both of them - they added too much value to pass on.

During the 12 weeks at HF0, we built with a culture of FISI [F**k it, Ship it]. This meant a lot of what we pushed out was ready for a launch, but not for supporting the scale. The next few months were about cleaning up all the mess. Along with that came fundraising: so much to do, not enough brains to execute. We needed capital, and coming out of HF0, we had the traction. That ended up being a $2.25M raise at a $15M valuation.

We ended up in what I can only describe as a tech monastery: 12 teams locked in a mansion for 12 weeks, and the only thing we had to do was work. Steve's wife called it 'the tech orgy house.' There's no better way to explain it than to feel it. They promised it was going to be the most productive 12 weeks of our lives, and they were right. 11 weeks we focused purely on building the product, growing the platform, getting traction. The 12th week, 'The Demo Container', was nothing like the first 11. It was intense, it was crazy, it was lively. All the teams were dead focused on their demo pitches. We were no longer founders staying in a mansion, but actors on a production stage. And then the day arrived, 19th March, where all the efforts of the last 12 weeks were to be showcased. There was no winner to be announced, because we all had won already. And this was just the beginning.

I packed up everything and moved to San Francisco. That's literally me: just back up and go.

Three months into the product, we'd completed two accelerators and were doing 8,000 stories a day. But nothing was bigger than what happened next. Steve and I were on a business trip across SF and Seattle. I remember going on a hike with Steve and our new friend Jatin. Both in their 40s, they scaled Mount Si with ease, while I, in my mid-20s, struggled to keep up. It set a new benchmark for my future hikes, that's for sure. Near the end of our trip, we were at Harajuku Sushi in SF. I was sitting there savoring the menu, when Steve told me he didn't see me as just the Head of Engineering. He saw me as a future Co-Founder of StoryBird.ai. That moment was the start of a whole new chapter.

Our ChatGPT plugin went live, and oh boy, did it make waves. The surge in traffic was a pat on the back and a slap on the face at the same time. It was chaos, but the good kind, the kind that screams 'success.'

My journey with StoryBird.ai was quite unique. Steve, my then employer, was in search of a tech engineer. As a part of the hiring process, he hired multiple engineers to do the same task over a week's time. The project wasn't any tricky coding assessment, but rather a real-world scaling problem. Dealing with real-time APIs, load-balancing and robustness. In Steve's words: 'Deep was one of the 2 engineers that actually completed the task, and the only one who did it not only quickly but also with high quality.'