He’s the co-founder of a company – Polygon – that was valued at $20 billion in its last round of funding. But his early life was an entirely different story.
Sandeep Nailwal was born in Ramnagar, Uttrakhand. He was born at home through a midwife. His mother tells him one of the legs of the rickety cot she was giving birth to him on, broke during childbirth. He was a breech baby who didn’t cry upon being born and everyone feared they had lost the baby. The midwife had to slap him multiple times to get his first reaction.
When he was five, the family moved to Shakarpur in East Delhi. They lived in a makeshift arrangement on a rooftop. Nailwal recalls everyone from their extended family visiting Delhi in search of a job would stay in that one room accommodation.
A neighbour who used to run a school called Amar Bharti with 15-20 students asked his parents why Sandeep didn’t go to school. That’s when his parents even thought of putting him in a school. He studied till class 1 and then moved to another small school called Gyan Deep. Having started his studies late, Sandeep would be the oldest in every class by 2 years.
His father had a drinking and gambling addiction, like most men in the locality. Sandeep, when he was in Std 6, would teach students of Std 2 & 3 to be able to supplement the family income. The Rs 300 a month he made helped the family, and it helped him buy his books.
His mother was a pillar of strength to the family. He had two siblings, a sister three years younger and a brother nine years younger. The family could afford only 500 ml of milk everyday and he would sacrifice his daily intake to ensure his brother got adequate milk. He was like a father to his younger brother.
He would also bail his father out of his debts. He had once applied for a student loan and had added the cost of a personal computer to the loan. When the loan was disbursed, rather than buy the computer, he settled one of his father’s loans.
Sandeep was keen on engineering. He fared poorly in IIT-JEE, and finally did BTech from Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, affiliated to Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University. He followed it up with an MBA from NITIE, Mumbai.
Relatives called him delusional
He was ambitious. His relatives and friends called him delusional. “I always told myself that I’d do better than the school or engineering exam topper. They were made out to be our heroes. Today, I look at Elon Musk and get inspired,” he says. In 2009, in the third year of college, Sandeep developed a software that converted PDF data into a query database. That project caught the attention of the college director. It led to Sandeep’s first paid project worth Rs 20,000.
His MBA got him a job as consultant in Deloitte. The job enabled him to quickly repay both his and his father’s loans. From Deloitte, he moved as chief technology and supply chain officer at Welspun Group’s e-commerce division. Later, encouraged by his wife Harshita, he followed his passion of entrepreneurship and started his first business – an online service provider called Scope Weaver.
While working on several freelance projects, he learnt about blockchain, crypto and other emerging technologies. That’s also when he ran into Jaynti Kanani, who was a data scientist at Housing.com, and who had realised that the Ethereum blockchain had scaling issues. Jaynti convinced Sandeep to join him in solving this issue. Over time, several others joined them.
The rest, as they say, is history. Polygon today offers developers a toolkit to easily build decentralised applications (dApps) while ensuring fast, low-cost transactions. It significantly improves the throughput and efficiency of Ethereum-compatible blockchains. Polygon processes over 3 million daily transactions on average. Its investors include the likes of Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank, and Tiger Global.
Sandeep spends his time between India and Dubai, which has a friendlier approach to crypto and the Web3 ecosystem.
Source Homevior.in
