i joined interact ai in march 2025 as an intern. the company had just raised a $2m pre-seed, and there were just two of us. the ceo had an idea he kept coming back to: talking to a website should feel like talking to the person who built it. my internship was to turn that idea into something you could actually click on, and i was the only one on it. that became the level -1 version of interactnow, built solo. by june i was full time.

when i went full time we were four people, and we started on interactgen. the brief: build it, get it live, two months. somewhere in those two months i raised my first real pull request and it collected 112 comments. in my defense, it was 35 files. the team went through every single one, merged it, and then printed me a certificate so nobody would ever forget. i have not written a lazy pr since.

interactgen went live in two months, as promised. soon it had paying customers and i broke production. we fixed it, and they gave me a gift for it. an actual wrapped gift, for taking down prod. that and the pr certificate tell you more about that team than i ever could: mistakes got fixed and laughed at, never hidden.

in between all the shipping, we went to goa. nobody organized it, somebody just said goa and everybody packed.

then the intern project came back around. interactnow was going to be the company's main product, and it needed to be rebuilt properly. utsav, our cto, and i went into a one week sprint: hacker mode, no meetings, just the two of us. it shipped, and it became the main product. i have never moved faster, before or since.

near the end of my year, i traveled to colleges to hire our next interns. a year earlier i was the intern trying to earn a seat. now i was the one asking the questions. nothing showed me how much i had grown like sitting on that side of the table.

and cricket ran through everything. we played it in the office after hours, and when rcb finally won the ipl after 18 years, there were jerseys on the line.

there is a lot of fun the story skips: christmas, bowling nights, poker nights, team meetups, some of my favorite people anywhere. we parted ways in march 2026.