🚀 New beginnings

Back in 2011, as a first-year undergraduate, I built and maintained a not-so-professional personal website. It remained a moderately well-kept secret for years, until friends started discovering and sharing it for laughs. Now it’s become a running joke to reveal it to unsuspecting friends years into knowing them.

Being born in the '90s—and not named John Smith—made it easy to secure myfullname.com. My 14-year quest to buy j.ai, however, is a different story. The domain has remained in the same hands all these years, leased to various users including jasper.ai most recently. The owner asked for $50k back in 2012 and my budget definitely hasn't outgrown the inflation since then.

I recently had to update and migrate the old website just to keep it running. Expired SSL certificates, deprecated PHP code... total mess. But it was worth it just to salvage that sordid blog from the archives.

It also gave me renewed inspiration to maintain a subtle web presence—less so on social media, more so tucked away behind an obscure domain.

Why J2?

• This is version 2 of my website: J1 -> J2
• It reflects my initials: JJ -> J2
• It's a numeronym for my name: Jai -> J2

Pick your interpretation.

Why now?

Two years ago I stepped out of the cushy world of investing and decided to bootstrap a software/SaaS company as a solo-founder. It was a curious choice given that the biggest edge I gained as an investor was the ability to fundraise, but a deliberate choice nonetheless. The framework behind bootstraping vs. fundraising is perhaps a discussion for another post.

Caution has been thrown to the wind and I'm learning a tonne along the way. I hope to share my thoughts and experiences here.

Stay tuned. ✌️