I have a short attention span.
I say this without self-pity. I've come to understand it as a design constraint — one that's shaped how I learn, how I teach, and eventually, why I built Yoda.
The question I was sitting with in 2018 was simple: why is so much educational content designed for people who can sit quietly for an hour? The research on learning doesn't support that format. Spaced repetition, active recall, micro-sessions — the science points in a completely different direction. And yet the dominant product form for learning is still the lecture.
I wanted to build something for people like me.
What Yoda was
Yoda was a micro-learning app. Short lessons — three to five minutes — delivered in a format optimized for mobile, for distraction, for people who learn in the margins of their day. On the commute. In the queue. In the five minutes between meetings.
The content covered practical skills: productivity, communication, mental models, financial basics. Things that educated Indian professionals wanted to learn but didn't have structured pathways for.
The design philosophy was: every lesson should be completable before you get distracted. Every session should feel like you accomplished something. The feedback loop had to be tighter than anything else in the market.
Building from nothing
I've worked at Amazon. I've been a product manager at a growth-stage startup. Nothing prepares you for being a founder. Not really.
The difference is that at Amazon or Sprinklr, there are systems. There are processes, budgets, teams, playbooks. The infrastructure for making things happen already exists — your job is to navigate it intelligently.
As a founder, you are the infrastructure. You're hiring, and selling, and designing, and writing code at 1am, and answering customer emails at 7am, and trying to figure out why retention dropped three weeks ago. The question isn't "what should I prioritize?" — it's "which of the fifteen things that are on fire do I put out first, knowing I can't put them all out?"
What I learned from Yoda is that founders need a very particular kind of relationship with uncertainty. Not comfort — comfort is a lie. The uncertainty is real, and it's unrelenting. But you need to be able to function within the uncertainty. To keep making decisions without enough information, knowing that the alternative — paralysis — is worse than a wrong decision.
The numbers that mattered and the ones that didn't
Yoda grew to 250,000 users. We served 40 million lessons. Our app store rating was 4.7 out of 5. We were accepted into the Google Accelerator programme.
These are good numbers. I'm proud of them.
But the number I thought about most was a different one: the 7-day retention rate. Early on, it was around 18%. We needed to get it above 30% to have a business that could sustain itself.
Getting from 18% to 35% took almost a year. And it wasn't any single change — it was a sequence of small, careful bets. A new onboarding flow. A push notification strategy that worked with how people actually used their phones rather than against it. A curriculum redesign that front-loaded the most valuable lessons. Content personalization based on the user's self-reported goals.
Each change moved the needle by two or three percentage points. When you're doing this kind of work, it doesn't feel like progress. It feels like incremental defeat interrupted by small victories. But the discipline of it — the patient, evidence-based iteration — is one of the most important things I learned as a founder.
What I walked away with
I sold Yoda in 2020. The outcome was modest; this wasn't the kind of exit that lets you retire. But the education was extraordinary.
I know now, in my bones, what it costs to build something from nothing. I know the loneliness of it, and the strange joy of it, and the moment when something you made works for a real person who needed it — and that person tells you.
I also know that I'm better as a builder within a team than as a solo founder. Not because I lack conviction or stamina, but because the problems I find most interesting — at the intersection of scale, user behavior, and organizational complexity — require more than one person to solve.
Yoda answered the question I asked. Now I wanted to ask harder ones.