Why I Said Goodbye to a $300,000 a Year Law Career

“What do you want in life, and what are you willing to give up for it?”

I feel compelled to write this memoir both as a means to reaffirm myself that I made the right decision and to document my journey and thought process for my unborn kids.
The essence of life boils down to a series of trade-offs. Assessing risk, a tale as old as time itself. A saga woven into the very fabric of our being, has pulled our ancestors out from the cover of the ancient forests to the vast, open savannahs in their pursuit for more.
That same gene must be the one that led my grandparents to board a ship with their six-month-old son, embarking from Greece to the United States in 1963 in search of more.
This innate drive to venture beyond the comfort of the familiar in pursuit of something more is omnipresent. Luckily for us, the price of ambition is no longer the ultimate sacrifice. In 2024, while daunting, failure doesn’t carry the finality it once did.
It is within this backdrop that my story unfolds. A narrative not of life and death, but of Preparation, Sacrifice, and Persistence. Leaving behind a career as a corporate lawyer — a path lined with prestige and security, with its annual salary of $300,000 and counting — for the unpredictable journey of a tech startup founder, is my trip across the Atlantic.

Preparation.
Like most journeys , you do your best to prepare for what’s to come. When you decide to take risk, you must do everything to control whatever elements you can so as to not add more risk to the equation. You wouldn't skydive without a parachute, right? Then why would you want to jump into the cutthroat world of startups (which, I believe require the same rigor and dedication as becoming a professional athlete) without first undergoing the proper training?
My legal career was going to serve as just that, training to be the best chief executive & founder that I could possibly be. *Hey Siri, queue the Rocky Theme Song*. So my journey began.
In law school, I specialized in Bankruptcy and Restructuring and obtained my J.D./ LL.M. Bankruptcy was attractive because of the diversity of the practice and how many different business practices you can learn about (ask me about pig farms or grain silo’s and I can tell you all about them).
To reference Confucius, to see far, I had to stand on the shoulder’s of giants. So after law school, I went on to clerk for a federal judge and then worked as an associate at a prestigious law firm. I was purposeful in putting myself in the position to learn from some of the brightest legal minds the industry had to offer. A dozen years of experience were force-fed to me over the course of five (5) years.
Running parallel to my pursuit of a legal career was my desire to build and create. If I were to venture into the tech space one day, I would need far more than a legal background to know how to build and develop. So in 2018, during my second year of law school, I founded a design and development studio called Little Planet along with my two co-founders — Sajal and Shantanu.
Over the years we worked on various branding, design, and development projects for other founders, grew our team to 11 members, and together, we navigated through successes and failures, each failure teaching us invaluable lessons that we would carry with us.
Sacrifice.
Balancing both a legal career and a startup demanded substantial sacrifices. Given my co-founders were based in India, early mornings at 4:30am became a daily ritual before heading off to my lawyer day job. The luxury of late fun nights and temporary pleasures were not an option. I moved out of NYC to North Carolina to eliminate commute times — redirecting those hours towards work with my team in India — and to increase my disposable income, allowing me to self fund our projects. Family and friends were unfortunately left behind in the process.


My first meeting with my then co-founder, Shantanu. I knew it was the start of something special so I took a screenshot.
Persistence.
Over time, my desire to create and innovate only grew stronger. I knew building a successful company would require every ounce of my energy. Yet the long days as a corporate lawyer were getting the best of me. I had little time and energy to dedicate to scaling and growing startup operations. Because we lacked the speed and focus to be effective, our projects were dying on the vine and sales pipelines were drying up.
Father time is undefeated. Nearing the age of 30, the reality that time waits for no one was clear. I was hyper aware that as life progresses, new responsibilities will emerge, introducing additional risks to my entrepreneurial equation. The time was now and the circumstances begged the question, “If not now, when?”
Conclusion.
By May of 2023, what began as a side project evolved into my main focus. It took us six years of perseverance and learning from trial and error to launch and validate our idea in just under two hours. This idea quickly turned into an MVP that secured funding and achieved over 1,000 signups within its first week.
So why did I say goodbye to a $300,000 a year salary? Because when opportunity knocked, I was ready. The years of Preparation, Sacrifice, and Persistence led me to a point where the math worked in my favor. I put myself in a position where the risk wasn't that significant. The floor for me is the practice of law. The ceiling is building an amazing company, along side amazing people and finding out what i’m really made of along the way.
As far as my current trip across the Atlantic goes, we haven’t arrived yet. I don’t yet know if the streets are paved in gold. I don’t even know if we will make it across. But one thing I do know is that if we sink, I will swim because I sacrificed too much to drown.