From Strangers to Founders: Published
My second book this year tells the immigration story that shaped everything, from arriving in America as a stranger to building a career in tech
Two books in one year. I did not plan it that way, but here we are. "From Strangers to Founders" is published, and it is a very different book from my first one. Where "Mastering Cloud Engineering" is technical and instructional, this one is personal. It tells the story of immigration, of arriving in a country where you know nobody and building a life, a career, and eventually a sense of belonging from scratch.
This is the harder book. The one that kept me up at night wondering if I was sharing too much, if the story was worth telling, if anyone would care. But that discomfort is exactly why I needed to write it.
Why This Story
The tech industry is full of immigrants. Walk through any major technology company and you will hear accents from every corner of the world. Engineers from South Asia, researchers from East Asia, developers from Eastern Europe, entrepreneurs from Latin America. We are everywhere, and we are building the systems that power the modern economy.
But our stories are rarely told in full. The public narrative about immigrant engineers tends to focus on either the success story ("came to America, got a great job, living the dream") or the policy debate ("H-1B visas, green card backlogs, immigration reform"). The actual lived experience, the loneliness, the cultural disorientation, the years of uncertainty about your legal status, the guilt about leaving family behind, the slow process of building a new identity in a new country, that part usually stays private.
I wrote this book because I wanted to make that private experience visible. Not as a policy argument, but as a human story.
The Stranger Phase
The title captures a real arc. When you arrive in a new country as an immigrant, you are a stranger in the most literal sense. You do not understand the social norms. You do not get the cultural references. You mispronounce things. You eat lunch alone because you do not know how to insert yourself into existing social groups.
I remember the small things more vividly than the big ones. Not understanding that "how are you" is a greeting, not a genuine question, and giving a detailed answer that confused everyone. Not knowing what to order at a restaurant because the menu assumed cultural knowledge I did not have. Feeling invisible in group conversations because by the time I formulated what I wanted to say in my second language, the topic had moved on.
These experiences sound trivial, but they compound. Day after day, week after week, they create a persistent feeling of not belonging. You start to wonder if you made a mistake. If you should have stayed home, where you understood the rules, where you had friends and family, where you were somebody.
Building Anyway
The core of the book is about what happens when you decide to build a life despite that discomfort. You find the other strangers. You form bonds that are unusually strong because they are forged in shared vulnerability. You throw yourself into work because work is the one domain where your competence is visible regardless of your accent or cultural fluency.
For me, technology was the equalizer. Code does not care where you are from. A well-architected system is a well-architected system regardless of who designed it. The meritocratic aspects of engineering, where your work product speaks for itself, gave me a foothold when everything else felt unstable.
But I am honest in the book about the things that were not meritocratic. The networking disadvantages when you do not have a pre-existing professional network in the country. The bias, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, that comes with being visibly different. The moments where you realize that working twice as hard for the same recognition is not a motivational poster; it is a daily reality.
The Founder Mentality
The "founders" in the title is not just about starting companies, though some of the people in the book did that. It is about the founder mentality that immigration cultivates: the willingness to start from nothing, to take risks because you have already taken the biggest risk of your life, to build something where nothing existed before.
Every immigrant I know has this quality to some degree. You left everything familiar. You bet your future on a country that does not owe you anything. You built a career, a family, a community from raw materials. That is founding. Whether you started a company or built a career inside one, the psychological DNA is the same.
The book profiles several people who made this journey, each with a different trajectory but recognizable patterns. The early years of uncertainty. The breakthrough moment when competence meets opportunity. The complicated relationship with "home," which gradually becomes a concept with two meanings. The moment when you realize you have become someone your younger self would not recognize, and you are not sure if that is a victory or a loss.
Writing About Yourself
Technical writing is comfortable for me. You are explaining systems, processes, architectures. The subject is external, and the standard for success is clarity and accuracy.
Writing about your own life is terrifying. You have to decide which truths to include and which to leave out. You have to describe moments of weakness and failure without self-pity or false humility. You have to represent other people, family members, friends, colleagues, fairly and honestly, knowing they might read it.
I sent early drafts to my family. That was nerve-wracking. Some of what I wrote about the difficulty of immigration, about the loneliness and doubt, was news to them. I had never spoken about it openly. Putting it on paper and sending it to the people closest to me was one of the most vulnerable things I have done.
Their response was generous and emotional. My parents said they had no idea how hard the early years were for me. That conversation alone made the book worth writing.
Two Books, One Year
Publishing two books in a single year was not the plan, but in retrospect, the pairing makes sense. One book represents what I know. The other represents who I am. Together, they capture the full picture: the technical expertise built over years of practice, and the personal journey that made that practice possible.
I do not know if I will write another book. The process is rewarding but exhausting, and this year has been an intense one. But I know that these two books, sitting on a shelf together, represent something I am genuinely proud of. Not just the content, but the fact that a kid who arrived in this country as a stranger wrote two published books in a language that is not his first.
That means something. I am not going to pretend it does not.