My Story

I was born in 1992 in a lower-middle-class family in Gujarat. My parents had a love marriage, which in our community then was not ordinary.

My father was in the Indian Air Force for fifteen years, which meant he was away for most of my childhood. My mother worked as a junior clerk in the Government of Gujarat. She's the one who raised me. When my father retired from the Air Force, he couldn't find a job in Gujarat for eight straight years. My mother ran the household through those years alone. He eventually joined Corporation Bank — now Union Bank — as a clerk. We lived in small government housing, usually two rooms and a bathroom. That was the whole house.

I went to St. Xavier's High School in Gandhinagar. Until Class 10, I was a very shy and obedient kid. I was never a topper and I never failed at anything. I was just there.

The first time I felt like myself was on Navratri, when the boys in my neighborhood would build small temples to mark the festival. I started doing it with three or four friends. In the beginning we stole bricks from construction sites near our area — small temples, small theft. After a couple of years more boys wanted to join in, so we started cycling to construction sites and politely asking if they'd donate a few bricks. To my surprise, many of them did. We started asking adult neighbors for donations — two rupees, ten rupees at a time. We'd raise 150 to 250 rupees. We built temples as tall as we were. And at the end, we'd give back a "Lahni" — usually a stainless-steel bowl — as a thank-you to our donors.

It was the first time I led anyone. The first time I was accountable for money. The first time people in my neighborhood stopped calling me my parents' kid and started calling my parents "Akash's parents." I didn't know any of those words at the time, but I knew the feeling. I was hooked.

I loved basketball. I had school from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., and you could find me on the basketball court by 3 p.m. every single day. I practiced alone from 3 to 5:30, and then, when the others came, I played with them until 7:30. I played state-level under-14 as a top-5 player from Gandhinagar district. Father Joseph, the vice principal at St. Xavier's, is the person I give full credit to for that passion. He saw me.

And then, within a short span, two friends died.

Mohank was my closest basketball partner — a junior of mine, the only other person I knew who practiced as much as I did and cared about getting better the way I cared. One day he went missing. Days later his body was found in Goa. I was a boy, and I didn't know what to do with it.

Ashish was a family friend — our parents were friends, we were the same age, we were both in Class 10. One day I was told he'd had a heart attack and died. Officially. But I always suspected suicide.

I was sixteen. Two people my age had died. And the questions I started asking myself were the ones nobody had prepared me to ask. What is the meaning of life? Why am I put on this earth? How is someone supposed to live?

I didn't have answers. What I had was a quiet rebellion that started inside me and never quite stopped. I got into rock music — heavy metal, goth, punk, death rock, all of it. I started reading about religion: not just Hinduism but Islam, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism. From theology I fell into philosophy, and philosophy was the first thing that actually helped — not because it answered anything, but because it taught me that asking was allowed.

That's when I stopped being shy and obedient. That's when I started becoming myself.

After school I got into St. Xavier's College in Ahmedabad for Biotechnology. I kept playing basketball — I was the first-ever first-year student to play on the college team. I once woke up at 4 a.m. with a viral fever and called a doctor to get an injection so I could play a 7 a.m. match. We still lost. I was fine with it. I'd given it everything I had.

And then there was the night of Holi.

I had a Pulsar 150. I'd gone to Infocity to meet two friends. My mother called and told me to come home immediately — she had a bad feeling, she said. I thought she was being superstitious. I told her I'd be home soon.

"On the ride back, some stranger on a Pulsar 180 pulled up next to me at a signal. We raced. I was winning. And then I wasn't."

I went into surgery the next morning and was put on complete bed rest for three months. Those three months are the first time in my life I sat still long enough to ask: where am I going?

My parents are government employees. The instruction I'd been given since childhood was clear — a safe, secure government job is the only way forward. I had accepted it as gospel. But lying on that bed, I realized that if I wanted to crack competitive government-job exams, I needed to be studying arts subjects, not biotech.

So I did the unthinkable: I told my parents I wasn't going back to St. Xavier's. I applied to BA at Government Arts College in Gandhinagar. In Gujarati medium — after a lifetime of studying in English.

My parents, my relatives, everyone around me tried to talk me out of it. The pressure was real. Eventually, they saw I wasn't going to move, and they had to let me.

Going from English-medium science to Gujarati-medium arts was harder than I make it sound. But I got a hang of it. I topped my college for all three years, and I was elected General Secretary of the student body all three years.

At one of the parent-teacher meetings, Mrs. Namita, my head of department in English, said something to my parents that I'll never forget.

"You are successful," she told them. "But when I look at Akash, I think one day people will say — just as Harivanshrai Bachchan is remembered as the father of Amitabh — you will be remembered as the parents of Akash Chaudhary."

I still think about that sentence on the days I don't want to get out of bed.

I started preparing for government-job exams. The first exam I sat was IBPS. I scored 161 out of 250. The general-category cutoff was 123. I had cleared the overall cutoff by a mile. But there was a sectional cutoff. And in one of the five sections, I had scored one mark below the minimum.

I was looking at the result on the desktop at home with my father next to me. When I realized I'd failed by a single mark, the first thing he said to me was: "Good. Now you'll actually work hard. Now you won't think it's easy."

I spent the next few years doing nothing but preparing for competitive exams. I cracked one — an assistant's job at the District Court in Himmatnagar. I joined. I worked there for three months, got myself a credit card, and resigned.

The reaction around me was unbelievable. Who in the world quits a safe, secure government job? Friends, relatives, their parents — everyone had an opinion. I was twenty-one. I could not see myself spending decades at that desk.

After my previous radical choices — dropping out of biotech, switching to Gujarati medium — people had stopped listening to my reasons anyway, so I didn't try to explain.

For a long time afterward, people kept asking me if I regretted it. As if I might have made a mistake. They didn't understand that I had made a conscious choice, and that the hard part of any conscious choice is standing by it later. I stood by it then. I stand by it now.

I kept preparing. Kept competing. I was razor-focused on one thing and nothing else. I cracked many exams. I got offer letters from various government departments. But my real goal was UPSC or GPSC — becoming an IPS officer or a Deputy Superintendent of Police.

And in that system, I was in a game whose rules I hadn't written, whose luck I couldn't manage, and whose complacency and corruption — especially in GPSC — were taking a toll on my head.

The hardest part was my father. Every time I called him to say I'd cleared another competitive exam, out of tens of lakhs of applicants, his response was the same: "Is it IPS or DySP? If not, don't bother."

I forgot what it felt like to be in control of my own life.

One morning, I was having tea with a few friends like we always did. One of them said something — I don't even remember what — and the word "GPSC" came out of his mouth. It had nothing to do with me. But I grabbed a chair and almost swung it at his head. I stopped myself at the last second.

We were both terrified — him at what had almost happened, me at what I had almost done. I mumbled a sorry, picked up my bag, and went home.

On the way, I called a friend. He booked me a flight to Goa. Three hours later I was in Goa with no return ticket. I called my mother to tell her I was safe and not to worry. Then I stayed there alone for ten days.

One agenda: who the hell am I.

I don't want to tell you what I figured out in Goa. It wasn't a list of lessons. It was the first time in years I'd stopped performing, stopped competing, stopped trying to become something someone else had defined.

I came back on the eleventh day a different person.

My old laptop had stopped working. My parents had saved ₹1 lakh for my birthday to buy me a new one. When I turned twenty-something, they gave me the money. I got my old laptop repaired for ₹10,000. I kept the remaining ₹90,000 and used it to start Career Gujarat Academy — a coaching institute for the same competitive exams I had spent years preparing for.

My parents didn't know. When they found out, they were disappointed. In their minds, business was not what respectable people did. Government was.

The fight that followed wasn't with them — it was inside me. I had spent my whole life trying to make them proud. Now I was about to spend the next several years doing something they didn't approve of.

I told myself: to be a man of my own, I need to cut myself off of their approval of me.

Those are the exact words I used. I still remember them. They are not comfortable words. They are the words you say when you've understood that being loved for who you are is not the same thing as being approved of for what you do.

I threw myself into learning how to build a business. I read more than 300 books in the next three years on business, marketing, entrepreneurship, investing, self-development — more than I'd read for any degree, and this one was for me. I went to tea stalls where I knew local businessmen hung out and started conversations with strangers about how they ran their operations. I watched hours of Patrick Bet-David on Valuetainment — one of the one-sided mentors I've had over the years, people who taught me without ever knowing my name.

It took me three years to turn ₹90,000 into ₹43 lakh. By the end, I knew how to run a business. More importantly, I had become someone who could learn — and keep learning — how to run a business. That, more than the money, was the actual graduation.

I became a 25% partner in Sarva Minerals, a mining business. It was my first experience in a multi-stakeholder environment, and my first education in how hard it is to push new ideas into a conventional, orthodox industry. Mining is the kind of business that has been done the same way for generations. You don't walk in at twenty-five and rewrite it. But you do learn how businesses actually operate when you have to work with partners, vendors, and systems you didn't choose.

Sarva made me a better operator. It also gave me capital.

With what I'd learned from mining — especially about how credit cycles worked and how much time and money they ate — I started Advait Logistics. The insight was simple: in raw-materials supply, the default credit cycle is long, and a long credit cycle is a silent tax on everyone downstream. If you supplied only to reputable buyers with strong payment records, and you accepted slightly lower margins in exchange for shorter cycles, you could reduce risk dramatically and increase the velocity of your capital. More turns. More volume. Less working capital.

The math worked in theory. I wanted to know if it worked in practice. Advait went from ₹0 to about ₹80,000 in revenue in the first month, and grew at roughly 100% compound for the next four months.

Then Covid hit. Lockdowns. Everything stopped.

I made a call that other people in the industry didn't make. Instead of cutting costs, we doubled down on paying our employees. I had learned at Career Gujarat Academy that when the going gets tough, how you treat the people in the boat with you is what gets remembered when the storm ends. It cost us in the short term. Long term, it was right. Advait Logistics came out of Covid stronger than it went in.

And in the middle of the lockdown, Fancall was born.

I was self-learning from YouTube like everyone else. And I realized that the most valuable knowledge on the internet — the specific answer to my specific question — was on the other side of a wall I couldn't cross. I could watch a creator for hundreds of hours and still not be able to ask them a single question. There was no structured way to reach them. DMs didn't work. Comments didn't work. There was no product built for this.

So I started building one. I incorporated Fancall Private Limited in July 2020. We spent a year building the product, and in July 2021 we launched on the Play Store and App Store. We've been going since.

I run Fancall full-time. We have 20–30 people, over 250,000 users, more than 1,000 verified creators, more than 100 brands using the platform for influencer marketing, and we grew revenue about 5.6x in our most recent year. We are still bootstrapped.

I'm a silent partner in Advait Logistics and Sarva Minerals. I stepped back from both to focus on Fancall. Both are still operating.

Along the way I did my LLB at Monarch University and graduated as Gold Medalist in 2024. I completed the Young Entrepreneur Program at IIM Ahmedabad. I keep reading — I still read books the way I did when I was twenty-three, because the day I stop learning is the day I stop being useful to anyone, including myself.

I live in Ahmedabad.

There is a line Mrs. Namita told my parents in 2012 that I still think about. She said one day people would remember them as Akash's parents — the way people remember Harivanshrai Bachchan as the father of Amitabh. I am not there. I may never be there. But that is the direction I am walking.

If that sounds immodest, I apologize. It is the most honest thing I can tell you about what I'm doing and why.