Dear the version of you that needed the answer to land,
For as long as I can remember, I have tied my identity to my career. Not the actual work — the thing I could say I did. When I failed to make pre-med work my freshman year and had to transfer and change my major, I knew I had to make something of myself in a different way. It was embarrassing then and it's embarrassing to admit now, as an Indian girl who was supposed to have that handled.
So I moved into finance, then banking, then crypto — chose it partly because as a woman, that world felt less traveled and easier to stand out, but stayed because it was genuinely alive in a way I hadn't found anywhere else. The founders bringing real projects and real use cases to life, the pace, the money, the whole culture around it — it was everything banking had promised and wasn't. I loved all of it.
For two years, I ran Modern Mangal in every hour outside that job. That was the peak — running partnerships at a multi-billion dollar startup and building my own brand on the side. That sentence did what I needed it to do in every room I walked into, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't know exactly what it was doing or that I didn't lean into it.
Going full-time on Modern Mangal wasn't a bet on myself in the way people mean when they say that. The numbers made it obvious — I couldn't keep splitting my attention and being neither fully here nor there, and the quality of both was starting to show it. I also had a timeline I was working against: if I wanted to start a family within the next few years, I needed to be in full-time entrepreneur mode first, scale the business, and stabilize before making that transition — not try to absorb everything at once and crash out. So I left.
And the answer became: I run a jewelry company.
The first time I said it to someone who didn't already know me, I felt the ick before they reacted. Their face recalibrated in that fraction of a second, and I knew exactly what was happening because I had the same image in my head they did — not Spinelli, not Catbird, not the women who build something from nothing into a household name. The Indian uncle jewelers, sitting in the Diamond District eating tiffins at their desk every day. That was the category I'd just been placed in, and I was not prepared for how much it would bother me.
What actually happened when I got further into the industry was the opposite of what I'd expected. Those very people I'd written off were the ones who showed up — some out of pity, some because they genuinely believed in what I was building before I fully did myself. They turned out to be some of the sharpest and most well-connected people in the business, the kind every brand I'd admired had probably crossed paths with at some point, because the industry is genuinely small once you're in it. I had walked in with a category and found actual people.
What I couldn't see from inside the ick: in crypto, I had been building someone else's bottom line the entire time. Every title, every room that sentence opened — borrowed from an industry that would have replaced me the second I stopped being useful to it. The answer landed because the industry handed me the ability to make it land. I was performing as though that were mine.
Modern Mangal I built. In a space I had no background in, a market everyone said was too saturated, with no one handing me credibility or contacts or a sentence that opened rooms on its own. The ick was never about the jewelry. It was about needing the answer to do something — and not yet trusting that what I'd actually built was strong enough to carry that weight without the borrowed scaffolding underneath it.
It is. That took longer to believe than it should have.
The answer I was protecting was borrowed. What I built is mine.
The full version — the ego of running both, the moment I realized I'd misjudged an entire industry, and what it actually cost to let go of the borrowed answer — is on Substack.