I walked into work on a Tuesday morning.
By afternoon, my entire office was gone.

It was supposed to be a good day.

Leaders from the US were flying into our Bangalore office. The entire team was excited — the kind of energy you feel when something important is about to happen. People were dressed a little better than usual. There was a buzz.

I got caught in traffic that morning. By the time I walked through the door, the townhall had already ended.

I remember seeing my colleagues coming out. Their faces were wrong. Not disappointed — something heavier than that. They were talking in clusters, voices low, eyes unfocused. I couldn't make sense of what I was walking into.

Then my friend found me.

"The entire office has been laid off."

The entire office. Not a department. Not a team. Everyone.

A few people from the security team were offered a transfer to Hyderabad. The rest of us — gone. Just like that. On what was supposed to be a good day.

The panic nobody prepares you for

The next few hours were a blur. People were calling family, calling recruiters, opening LinkedIn on their phones in the hallway. The panic was immediate and very real.

We weren't ready. Nobody is ever ready — but we genuinely weren't. That morning we had jobs. That afternoon we were updating resumes we hadn't touched in years.

I came back to the US. And I discovered that the market here was even more brutal.

What made it harder was that I wasn't just looking for any job. I was trying to transition — from Cloud Security Analyst into AI GRC and AI Governance. A move that made complete sense to me. A move I couldn't explain clearly enough to get past the first screen.

Every night I was searching for the same things:

Nothing told me what I actually needed to know. Not what the gap was. Not how to close it. Not who else was making this exact move.

What I was actually looking for

I didn't need a course. I didn't need a mentor with a $500/hour coaching package. I didn't need another LinkedIn post about "transferable skills."

I needed three things that didn't exist in one place:

• Someone to tell me exactly which skills were standing between me and the roles I was targeting
• A realistic roadmap — not a generic one, but one built for MY background and MY target
• Other people making the exact same transition — not to follow, just to talk to honestly

The loneliest part of career transition isn't the rejection emails. It's not knowing if you're even on the right track. It's applying into silence and having no way to know if the silence means "not yet" or "never."

I needed a room full of people going through the same thing. Not mentors. Not influencers. Just real people, mid-transition, willing to talk honestly.

That room didn't exist.

The DMs that changed everything

Eventually I landed a role at Purogaly as an AI Governance Specialist. The transition I had been trying to make for months — I made it.

But I kept getting DMs. From people in the same situation I had been in. Cloud security professionals wanting to move into AI governance. Data analysts wanting to move into cybersecurity. Experienced professionals who had been laid off and were confused about what to do next.

Every message had the same shape:

I had answers for some of them. But I couldn't answer everyone manually. And more importantly — I wasn't the right person to answer. The right answer wasn't my experience. It was data. It was community. It was a platform that could do for everyone what I had had to figure out alone.

That's when I started building Leapr.

What Leapr actually does

Leapr is built for exactly the situation I was in. You tell it where you are and where you want to go. It shows you the gap — specifically, not generically. It gives you a roadmap built for your exact transition. And it connects you with other people making the same move right now.

Not mentors charging by the hour. Not generic advice from people who made a different transition five years ago. Real people, in the same situation, willing to be honest about it.

If you're a Cloud Security Analyst trying to move into AI Governance — Leapr tells you the exact skills that role requires, which ones you likely already have, and which ones are actually blocking you. Not a guess. A gap analysis.

If you're a Data Analyst trying to move into Cybersecurity — same thing. Specific. Measurable. Actionable.

That's what I needed in April 2024, standing in a hallway in Bangalore, watching my colleagues walk out of a building we'd all shown up to that morning expecting something good.

That room didn't exist then. It does now.