On August 15, 1995 the internet reached India, and I started selling names for a country that was not online yet.

On the fifteenth of August 1995, Independence Day, VSNL switched on public internet access in India. A handful of cities, dial-up measured in a few dozen lines, speeds you would laugh at now. Most people treated it as a curiosity for engineers.

Six days earlier Netscape had gone public in America and made the web look like serious money. Nine days later Windows 95 shipped and put a browser on every new machine. I was in the middle of all of it, selling domain names in a country that had barely gotten online. I gave the venture a name, netlinkblue, and set myself up as its technical architect, which is a grand title for a young man who mostly just believed the internet was going to matter more than anyone around him did.

It sounds absurd written down. Sell the addresses before the roads exist. But that is exactly the trade. A name is a bet that someday someone will need to be found at it, and in August 1995 almost nobody in India could be found anywhere yet.

That gap, between what was already live and what was obviously coming, is where I have spent my whole career.

FILL: the story of your first sale that month, in your own words. This is the one only you can write.