Essay · June 2025 · 3 min
The room matters more than the résumé.
On 18 June 2025 I was one of six people selected from 2,500+ applicants to spend a day inside Ankur Warikoo's startup. The selection taught me less than the room did.
Top 0.24%. Six seats, 2,500+ applications, one day inside WebVeda , Ankur Warikoo's startup. It's the most selective thing I've been picked for, and the number is not the part I think about.
What I think about is how differently a functioning team treats problems. Nobody in that room asked whether an idea would work. They asked how they'd find out by Friday, what it would cost to learn, and who owned the answer. Velocity wasn't a value on a wall. It was just the default setting.
What proximity actually teaches
You can read a hundred threads about startup execution and absorb less than you do in one day of watching people decide things. Books compress the what; rooms transmit the how , pace, standards, the sentences people use when something is behind schedule.
Ambition calibrates to the most impressive room you've recently been in. Choose rooms accordingly.
Since that day, my filter for opportunities changed shape. I stopped asking “does this look good on a résumé?” and started asking “will this put me next to people whose defaults I want to steal?” Competitions, internships, communities , same test. The résumé line is the byproduct. The recalibration is the prize.