Krrish Agarwalla

Shitposting my journey with you all, with time posting my learnings.

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

New to @X so sharing my journey.

TL;DR: From being bullied in school to 95% in boards, 94% in 12th, 99 percentile in JEE, almost giving up on education, building a startup, fighting through my father’s cancer treatment, moving to Germany with financial uncertainty, surviving job losses & racism, earning scholarships, joining @LMU_Muenchen + @cdtm_munich , and now becoming a Visiting Student Researcher at @Stanford working on ML/AI for Analog Circuit Design.

The video is about a committee interviewing me to celebrate me getting a position at @Stanford.

This journey was never linear - it was built through risk, resilience, curiosity, and an obsession with learning and building. More to come 😎

I have never spoken about my journey publicly but at some-point I have to right ?

It all starts with me scoring 95% in my class 10th boards, it was one of my ways of proving against my classmates who use to bully me that I matter and since then people started to take me seriously and I didn't get bullied anymore.

I had interest in computers so naturally (as all indian do) I started preparing for JEE (one of the most difficult exams in india) I was going strong ( use to rank in top 5 across Sai Vikas Academy in assam, no boasting ) but then as soon as my seniors started to get their JEE results I was really disappointed because of the whole reservation scene, I didn't feel like giving exams anymore because someone who hasn't worked harder than me is going to have an easier way to the colleges - it started to have doubts and this continued.

It continued so strongly that I wanted to leave my preparations which I did but my mother and teachers insisted that "Prepare for it and we will see what is next" I was okay.

In the examination I scored 99 Percentile which made me qualified enough to appear for JEE-Advanced but I didn't do it because of reasons like :

1. I didn't want to study in IIT, take up debt and take up a job and spend my next 3 years paying up that debt wanted to explore the world and go beyond India always.

I was not getting admission anywhere and was on the verge of giving up on my education and start a street cart to serve eggs but for good reasons it didn't happen 🤣

I was lucky enough to secure a spot at @FergussonPune and luckily there I selected statistics as my major and started to love the subject of probabilities and inference ( not limited to it ) but I wanted to do something different always, always.

So I started to build Kaza, an order management platform for street food vendors, struggled in it for around a year and then things started to pickup, we onboarded 30 vendors, secured at spot to present at @sharktankindia @ABCSharkTank and was recognized as one of the top 17 student led startups in india by @startupindia , felt like finally life was going to be good like this. This was all done taking minimal support from my family.

But then tragedy stuck in my family with my father's diagnosis of terminal cancer, I left everything and started to focus on getting him healed. For once he was healed and I was relieved very much and family was very happy that so much effort invested into his treatment finally got some relief.

After this I got a spot at @LMU_Muenchen to study statistics and data science, me being a computer science nerd always wanted to dig deeper into the mathematical and computational foundations of AI and this felt like the perfect course for the same but from where would I manage such huge finances at that time ? As just my family spend Millions of INR on my fathers treatment.

I contacted multiple banks and they denied my applications, I was feeling hopeless but then Dr. Forbes ( @NaushadF ) supported me and helped me be more courageous with my dreams.

It finally felt like I could support myself by taking a job up there in germany part time ( luckily my university didn't charge a single penny as fees ).

As soon as I land in germany after undertaking such a big expense, I decided that within one month I will get a job and start managing my expenses.

For gods grace I got a job at SE3Labs, on paper they said that cool you are going to do computer vision but actually they made me do labelling and stuff, so for a month or so I was a digital labour, labelling stuff so that they can sell and then when the project changed they fired me citing in competence ( which I believe if give time I could have become / grown into the job ).

I was fired and I was on the search again, it was becoming very difficult for me to focus on my studies so I left the job search started to apply for scholarships and student assistant positions ( as they are more flexible with university work ).

During this time my father was diagnosed again with cancer and he passed away and this was a very very difficult period for me.

Lucky for me I secured a scholarship from @LMU_Muenchen and job as an HiWi ( student assistant position ) at one of the labs there and from there my finances stabilized and I started to focus more on my studies.

Attending serious courses like :
1. MLOps
2. Computer Vision
3. Deep Learning
4. Deep Learning for NLP
5. Mathematical foundations of deep learning
6. Parallel computing
7. Optimization
8. Deep generative models
9. Reinforcement learning
10. Foundational models

Which built my foundations to be on the cutting edge of machine learning / AI, after learning all this I started to get job offers as working student ( 20h/week) but my eyes were on @cdtm_munich

CDTM is a course which empowers innovators to build crazy stuff, their alumni's have raised more than 9B$ and every week some CDTM startup raises a multi-million dollar round.

Even @sequoia capital says it has the highest density of unicorn founders in the world per class.

I worked harder built my profile got a job at a CDTM startup ( which I left as soon as getting into the program because the founder was like "you should be able to perform better than claude", I was like "You should make me do the work I am hired for and pay me more" ; but anywhich ways I learned a lot there ) and

Started my journey at @cdtm_munich as a part of Spring 2026 cohort.

I made really good friends there and my options have expanded so much as always in my mail box I was getting job opportunities in the USA and starting very young I was very much into San Francisco as I believed that there is a reason why a single valley is producing all the trillion dollar companies.

And this belief was reinforced when I saw the other founders / people at CDTM working hard towards getting there / founding there. Snapping up O1 visa like they were a normal visa or something.

I got so empowered that I started to believe that I could get into @Stanford do my master thesis (as this is something done by guys at CDTM a lot).

I was starting to go crazy about it, I started to reach out to alumni's studying there and emailing professors to potentially get a visiting student position there and on

24 May 2026 I got a position at @Stanford as a visiting student researcher at a lab to focus on "ML/AI for Analog circuit design" which is a very interesting topic for me because it sits in the intersection of electronics and ML and I always believed that true potential of ML can be realized which it is tailored for science ( That is started to look at deep generative models ).

You might ask me, Why I only applied to @Stanford you might ask ? Because it has amazing people ( from whom I can learn a lot ) and it sits right there in the heart of silicon valley and It is known as the biggest entrepreneurial university producing founders building companies like @Google @nvidia which I aim to build sometime.

But now what are the challenges ahead ? Gathering funding for my stay, SF is damm expensive ( around $4K/month including the fees and the stay ) but I have trust and belief in myself that I can find ways to fund it.

Where next ? I have some plans in my mind but first and foremost I am committing myself to do work that could potentially change the field of analog circuit design for which I am really excited.

So next up is working seriously ( creating some novel to progress the field ) and learning more ( by peers there and taking up serious courses ).

For rest of my life stay tuned, as I will keep on shit posting about my life here.

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

Post training is hard bro.

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@PatrikTheBatman @grok Even if grok is able to count no human will be able to verify stuff.

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@GoGoFly23 Can you post it how did you do it ?

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@IamSandeshSoni Understood sir! Best if luckk

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@polynoamial @OpenAI It is a system or the model?

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

Saying hello to some dolphins.

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@janonacct @Stanford @CORGI @OpenAI @AnthropicAI How cracked people can be in SF. Would love to buy you a coffee haha to discuss more data and RL envs

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

Would US be less spread out if they used the metric system? i.e. miles instead of KMs

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

Justt like a movieeeeee, lovely riding the @Google bike at google HQ

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@HarshalsinghCN I would be love to hear how RLVR works on model of this scale

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@Alessandro41512 @ycombinator Welcome to @X

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

Having a really good time in SF meeting cracked people.

Love it

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

Rooting for @SarvamAI

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@maharajamihir Actually I have been observing this as well, kinda the roles reversed

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

At @MiniMax_AI learning from the researchers..

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

@DavidOndrej1 India always got access to products cheaper

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

Attendes the YC Startup school was rejected last year, a lot has changed this year btw

[Krrish Agarwalla @krrish_does]

I am super tired tbh at the startup school. How do I get energy to selllllll