I was kicked out of my first college. It was the best thing that happened to me.

In 2009, at 18, I was out of my first college.

For a middle-class kid from Tamil Nadu, there are few things more frightening than that sentence. In homes like mine, academics were not just important. They were the plan. My mother was a teacher, my father was a police officer, and every rupee they saved went towards one thing: my education.

So when that door closed, I didn't just feel like I had failed. I felt like I had let down everyone who had sacrificed for me.

The questions nobody prepares you for

The hardest part was not the decision itself. It was everything around it.

• Endless nights of self-doubt
• Relatives asking, "What went wrong?"
• The quiet shame of walking past friends who were still on the "right" path

I had two choices. Give up, or start over. I chose to start over.

Sitting through the first year again

I enrolled in a new college and sat through the first year again. Same subjects, new classmates, and a lot more determination. I put my head down and decided that this time, nobody would have to ask what went wrong.

By the time I graduated, I was named Best Outgoing Student of the Year. Not because I was smarter than anyone else, but because I had already seen what failure felt like, and I wasn't afraid of hard work anymore.

The pitch where investors laughed

Years later, after a Master's at the Technical University of Munich and time as a data scientist at Telefónica, Volkswagen and Siemens, my co-founder and I walked into our first investor pitch for bitsCrunch.

We had passion, an amateur pitch deck and a lot of blind optimism. When I confidently asked for ₹1 crore, the investors didn't just say no. They tore our plan apart.

It was embarrassing. It was also the best masterclass I've ever attended. We went back, refined the model, found mentors and turned every critique into a stepping stone. Over the following years, bitsCrunch went on to raise more than $12M from investors including Coinbase Ventures and Animoca Brands.

What I'd tell my 18-year-old self

Resilience isn't something you're born with. It shows up when life demands it.

Your failures don't decide your future. What you do on the day after them does.

If you're sitting with a closed door right now, a rejection, a failed exam, a company that didn't work out, know this: it isn't the end of your story. Very often, it's the plot twist that makes the comeback possible.