About Harsh Agrawal

Hey, if you landed on this page, thanks a lot for checking out the story of a random stranger on the Internet.

I am Harsh, born and brought up and living in Faridabad, Haryana, India.

If you are interested, you can read a bit about my overall life journey, or you can just skip to the sections that are most relevant to you.

Super quick life story

• Started programming by building video games in 8th grade.
• Got into NYU with a $100K scholarship but couldn't attend as the rest of the finances didn't work out.
• Dropped out of a college in India when I was 18 to go work for Avalara (a $10B+ tech company) as their youngest SWE. Spent 2 years learning and building in Web Dev, Big Data, and DevOps.
• Worked 1 year at DappCamp closely with Preethi Kasireddy (ex a16z and Goldman Sachs) on a Web3 EdTech product.
• Last year spent 6 months full time on my startup DevKit which got 8K+ signups and $5K in revenue, and pitched to partners at a16z, Sequoia, TechStars, etc. on 1 to 1 calls.
• Currently leading engineering at BanterAI.business.

Growing up, school, and chasing a dream (2002 to 2019)

I had access to computers from a pretty young age since my mother used to do CAD designing, teach programming, advise on insurance and mutual funds, and a ton of other things.

I didn't learn programming from her directly, but the exposure to computers and different software was quite helpful.

I got into actual real programming in 8th grade when I discovered Unity. I was a maniac gamer in my childhood, used to devour flash games. When I discovered that I could make my own games, I just went crazy. The next five to six years were just about building interesting games and trying to potentially get famous and make a lot of money, none of which happened, but I learned a lot in that journey.

Another reason for building video games and being super passionate about something other than my coursework was that all of this would be a really nice addition for my bachelors application to colleges abroad. My brother had told me about NYU somewhere around 6 to 8th grade. He wanted to go there in the past, and that probably inspired me. I made it a goal to apply to colleges abroad. My brother and sister guided me whenever they got the chance. I also spent a lot of time researching on my own and taking help from other people.

In the end, I was able to secure a $100K scholarship from NYU, and a couple more from Top 100 US and UK universities. Still, the costs after scholarships were in tens of lakhs for UK unis and in crores for US unis. Financing that much money probably wouldn't have been the best decision, so I had to skip the bachelors abroad dream.

Start of the unconventional path (2019 to 2020)

My mother and brother showed me a couple of local colleges and I joined one of them. I was settling into college but still wanted to do something interesting. One fine day, I discovered Coding Ninjas' Career Camp on Instagram. Instantly the dots connected. The bootcamp could work as a bridge to let companies consider a 17 or 18 year old as a serious applicant. I could spend a few years in the industry working on real world problems and then start my own business, which I really wanted to do (inspired by my parents who have their own financial advisory businesses and my brother who always has a venture in the works).

After the online test, one or two phone calls with the Coding Ninjas team, convincing the founder to let me join the course, and convincing my parents to let me do this unconventional route, I was able to get completely onboarded to the course.

The next few months were all about finding every inch of free time and completing my college coursework and my Coding Ninjas course. About three or four months after the course had started, the first company (Avalara) came to hire students from our batch.

I cleared the HackerRank round, then had a virtual interview with the Director of Engineering (Rajesh Sir). I got the call during a college class. I just got out of the class real quick and found a spot that was quiet and jumped on the call. Rajesh Sir asked me about SQL, my projects, why I was taking this unconventional route, my plan for the future, etc. I think I tanked the purely technical questions like the ones on SQL, but I did well on explaining my projects with confidence and communicating my life plan effectively.

After this, I got invited for the onsite interview. I went to Pune, saw the Pune office (they were not at the office at that time since they had gone for college placements), so I went from Avalara's Pune office to the college where the hiring was happening. There, my onsite interview happened with Ashwanth Sir. He started by understanding me, really dissected me, told me there are smarter folks than me younger than me, and told me what I was getting into. It was a really valuable discussion. I got two questions, somehow was able to solve them, and got in.

First tech job (2020 to 2022)

All of the new hires got started off with a 4 month internship. We learned Scala, Akka Streams, Docker, Scalding, Spark, etc. and worked on a couple of interesting challenges. In the last few weeks of the internship, we did some actual contributions like adding SAML auth for one of the apps and updating dependencies for the open source projects that our teams had created in the past.

After 4 to 5 months, all of us got converted into FTEs. The next two years were all about learning a lot and building a lot:

• Learned React.js, K8s, Golang, Temporal, ElasticSearch, Terraform, Kafka, GoCD, etc.
• Built multiple full stack apps.
• Worked on data pipelines that processed terabytes of data.
• Upgraded infra pieces.

Working at startups and starting the real entrepreneur journey (2022 to present)

I left Avalara in 2022 to start DevKit. At my job, I used a ton of tools and I thought the most common features could be brought into one place to save people a lot of time.

Built the MVP for DevKit in a few weeks and did the first Product Hunt Launch in mid January 2022.

The product wasn't doing great. Around the same time my ex boss reached out and I started freelancing for his startup (DappCamp). Eventually after 3 months, I got converted into a full time contractor. Stayed there for about a year. Got the opportunity to work with him again and with his co founder Preethi Kasireddy (serial entrepreneur, ex GS and a16z, and USC grad), and an amazing senior engineer.

Stayed there for about a year and built enough conviction to go full time on DevKit.

Travelled a lot, did a lot of experiments, and ran DevKit for about 6 months full time. Lots of good things, lots of bad things. Made $3K to $4K in revenue. Pitched to partners from a16z, Sequoia, and others. Great overall experience.

In mid June 2023, I connected with another AI startup founder for a pitch practice. His pitch, energy, product growth, and vision seemed amazing and it got me convinced to work with him and learn from him.

Ever since, I have been working with him.

Now that I am a bit adjusted in the new role and have finally made sense of my past journey and my decisions, I have started working on DevKit again whenever I get some free time.