For engineers, architects, and technical leaders thinking about what they are building beyond their day job.
I had the post ready. A short announcement, sitting in my drafts, that I was going to wind down the podcast within the next few weeks. I had made the decision. I just had not sent it yet.
That was mid-2020, about eight months into You+AI.
How I Got There
I had been writing on Medium for a year or so before that. Decent readership, reasonable engagement. But I kept circling back to the same unease: I was building on someone else’s platform. If Medium changed its algorithm, its paywall, or simply went away, the work I had put in would be much harder to find.
So I built a website. Not a portfolio with a hero image and a contact form. Just a place where I could collect everything under one roof: writing, podcasts when I eventually started them, and links to every social handle I was active on. One URL: youplusai.com. I got a logo designed by a professional @i_v_i_d. I created @youplusai on Twitter and later a YouTube channel under the same name. The name was deliberate: this was about the intersection of AI and human expertise. Not AI in the abstract. The intersection.
The podcast launched the same year. The premise was specific: AI and healthcare, told through conversations with practitioners who were actually building things. Not hype. Not predictions. Real work, real tradeoffs, real people.
The Episodes That Went Nowhere
Two early episodes hit me harder than I expected.
The first was with Dr. Syed Tabatabai, a physician who had just published a viral Twitter thread called “A Monster Awaits”, a frontline account of what doctors were seeing with Covid and what ordinary people could do to protect each other. I thought this was the episode that would break through. The guest was compelling, the subject was urgent, the timing felt right. The downloads were modest. The silence after was loud.
The next was with Dr. Raviprasad, a conversation about mental health and AI at a moment when the pandemic had made the subject impossible to ignore. I was convinced this one would take off. It did not. I still do not fully know why.
After that episode, I stopped and asked myself the question I had been avoiding: was this worth continuing?
That is when I wrote the announcement. I was done. Not dramatically. Just quietly, honestly done.
The Cold DM That Changed Everything
The only reason I did not send it was a prior commitment. I had already agreed to record with my next guest and we had a date on the calendar. I could not ghost him.
I had found Dr. Ron Daniels the way you find someone when you are not expecting to. I was watching a CNN segment where he was speaking about Long Covid, a condition that was barely being discussed publicly at the time. He also ran a support forum for patients who had it. I thought: this is exactly the right person for this conversation. I knew it was a long shot. I sent him a DM on Twitter anyway.
He replied within the week. We recorded shortly after.
That episode performed better than anything I had done before. So did the next one, Dr. Sandhya Ramanathan, a physician from New Zealand whose home remedy advice for Covid had spread virally across WhatsApp in multiple countries. After those two episodes, the downloads picked up. The personal DMs started coming in.
The lesson from those two episodes was not really about content or topics. It was about long shots. You send the DM knowing it probably will not land. Sometimes it does. And when it does, it changes the math on everything that comes after.
I finished Season 1, fifteen episodes, by mid-September 2020. Then I started Season 2 with a wider scope: not just clinicians, but scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, researchers. Anyone building at the intersection of AI and human outcomes. Looking back, that expansion was the first hint that You+AI was not really about healthcare. It was about people who build things with AI, whatever their domain. I just did not know it yet.
The Recognition
In December 2020, about a year in, the You+AI podcast was listed among the Top 10 Digital Health podcasts in the world.
I had not started the podcast with that goal. I had nearly stopped it eight months in. By September 2021, after Season 2, it had been ranked Top 8 worldwide. I got tagged on LinkedIn and on Twitter. Congratulations came in from listeners and well-wishers across countries I had never expected to reach.
I had never set out to make one of the best podcasts in its category. It had got there through perseverance, consistency, and brand presence. And I had the quit announcement written and ready the whole time. Honestly, I felt like I was on top of the world.
What the Website Actually Is
Through all of it, one thing anchored everything: the website.
A personal website is not a portfolio. A portfolio is selective and retrospective. A website is a work log. It shows what you were thinking about in 2020, what you were building in 2021, where you were headed in 2022. The full arc, right there.
In 2020 I was exploring how AI would change clinical care. In 2026 I am asking how AI can make cloud infrastructure legible to the engineers who run it. The question changed. The curiosity behind it did not. Anyone who visits youplusai.com today can see that continuity. Not because I said so in a bio, but because six years of timestamped work is sitting there as evidence.
That is not something you can retrofit. You cannot go back and fill in six years of consistent effort. The only way to have it is to start before you need it, and to keep going through the periods when it does not feel like it is working.
I know that is easy to say in hindsight. I also know I had the quit announcement ready to send. What kept me going was a commitment already made, a cold DM that got answered, and two episodes that reminded me why I had started. The long shots work, if your foundation is real.
In the next post: the brand does something I never designed it to do. By the time I realise it, I am already mid-way through a job interview.