I do not think I have ever felt ready to start anything.
Not the first YouTube channel. Not the blogs. Not the agency. Not Indraprastha. Not QuestSchool. Not even joining HiveSchool. If I had waited until I knew what I was doing, I probably would not have started any of them.
What "ready" actually means
Looking back, I think we have misunderstood what ready means. People treat readiness like a destination. I will learn a bit more. I will wait until the idea is clearer. I will start after college. I will start once I find the right co-founder. But in my experience, readiness is not something you arrive at before starting. It is something other people assign to you after you have already done it.
I searched how to make money online when I was around ten or eleven. I was not trying to become an entrepreneur, I just wanted to make money. I watched random YouTube videos, started gaming channels, made comedy videos, built blogs, and learned SEO because someone on the internet made a tutorial. At no point did I think, I am ready. I just kept following whatever seemed interesting.
The Greybeard meeting
When I cold emailed more than fifty investors for an idea called Greybeard, I had absolutely no business doing that. One investor actually agreed to meet me. He asked what valuation I wanted. I confidently replied, sir, near about one crore. I cringe every time I think about that conversation. But I am glad it happened, because I learned more from that awkward meeting than I would have learned from another six months of watching startup videos on YouTube.
The same thing happened with almost everything else. Bella Deor. The WordPress agency. Valeska. QuestSchool. Indraprastha. Every single one looked messy in the beginning. Some worked. Some did not. Almost all of them taught me something I could not have learned by waiting.
The pattern I see in students now
Today I spend a lot of time around ambitious undergraduate students, and the pattern is surprisingly consistent. The people who keep asking how do I know when I am ready rarely start. The people who start with an idea that is probably wrong somehow move faster. Not because they are smarter. Because reality starts teaching them the moment they begin building, in a way books, podcasts, and courses simply cannot.
That does not mean starting blindly is a virtue. Thinking matters. Preparation matters. Doing your homework matters. But there comes a point where more preparation is not actually making you better. It is making you more comfortable. Those are not the same thing.
The real advantage of starting young
One of the biggest advantages of starting young is not that you have more time. It is that the cost of being wrong is incredibly low. When I started businesses in school, nobody expected them to succeed. That turned out to be a gift. I had permission to experiment, permission to fail, permission to look stupid. As you grow older you slowly convince yourself that every decision has to be correct, and ironically that is often when learning starts slowing down.
I have started things that went nowhere. I have walked away from businesses making money because they no longer aligned with what I wanted to build. I have spent months on ideas that never worked. None of that feels like wasted time, because every failed project quietly became the foundation for the next one. I do not think QuestSchool would have existed without Valeska. I do not think I would be building undergraduate education today without QuestSchool. None of it was linear while I was living through it. It only looks connected in hindsight.
If there is one thing I have learned over the last few years, it is this. You do not become ready by thinking about building. You become ready by building. Everything else is just theory until reality has a chance to disagree with you.