In August 2007, Arjun Jain was staring at his resignation draft from Yahoo Bangalore, earning ₹1 lakh per month with stock options — “the golden handcuffs every middle-class kid dreams of.” Yet he felt suffocated.
“Another content push. Another database migration. Another week moving avatars from server A to server B. My engineering degree screaming in protest. My mouse hovers over ‘Send’,” Jain wrote in a heartfelt post shared on X.
On the other side of his email lay a €1,400/month internship at MICC – Media Integration and Communication Center in Florence, with no job security and no visa certainty. “I hit send,” he said.
His manager pulled him aside: “𝘈𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘱𝘪𝘥? You’re leaving Yahoo! for… Italy? Do you know how many people would kill for your job?”
Curiosity Over Comfort Leads to Global AI Impact
Six months in Florence brought financial struggle, visa hurdles, and uncertainty. Applications to Columbia and other programs were rejected, fees in the US or Europe were steep, and even “free” German programs required living expenses he couldn’t cover.
Here’s the thing about curiosity
“It’s not Instagram-pretty. It’s coding until 3 AM in a tiny Italian apartment, building computer vision models while others are at aperitivo. It’s visa anxiety. It’s everyone thinking you’ve lost your mind while you’re grinding harder than ever – just on something that matters.”
That leap of faith eventually led Jain to the Saarland Graduate School, Max Planck Institute, and NYU, where he worked alongside AI pioneers including Chris Bregler and Yann LeCun. “Not because I was smarter. Because I was curious,” he said.
Today, Fast Code AI represents his latest experiment in following curiosity over comfort. “Comfort whispers: ‘You have so much to lose.’ Curiosity whispers back: ‘You have so much to learn.’”
He ended the post saying, “To everyone suffocating in their comfortable cages, staring at their own resignation drafts, wondering if the leap is worth it: Your curiosity is trying to tell you something. Maybe it’s time to listen. What comfort are you choosing over curiosity right now?”