My parents brought my sister and me to the United States from Gujarat, India, when I was five years old. We did not arrive with much. A one-bedroom apartment in Jersey City. A new country. A new language. And the unshakable belief that hard work and education could build a life worth living.

I shared a pull-out couch with my sister. Pizza Hut, once every six months or so, was the occasion we genuinely looked forward to. In our house, eating out was not a habit. It was a moment. And yet saving was never described as a sacrifice. It was simply what you did. My parents came from a part of India where putting twenty or thirty percent of one’s income aside was an ordinary expectation, even on incomes that would seem impossibly modest by American standards today.

I have come to believe that what I learned in that apartment — that discipline is not a burden, that the future self is real, that what you defer today is what you build tomorrow — has shaped my work as an investor more than anything I learned at any school I attended.

The schools did matter. I graduated from Columbia University in 1991 with a degree in Computer Science, summa cum laude. Three years later I graduated from Harvard Law School, also with honors. I never became a lawyer. What those years gave me was something more useful: the ability to think rigorously, read carefully, and tell the difference between an argument that sounds right and one that actually is right.

In 1992, while still in college, I bought my first stock — Procter & Gamble. I had begun reading Buffett’s annual letters and the books he recommended: Philip Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. Something clicked. These were not theories. They were how the most successful investors of the twentieth century had actually thought. I started applying them in my own modest account and watching what happened.

From Columbia and Harvard, I went to Wall Street. Seven years at the highest levels of institutional finance — first at Merrill Lynch, then at Lehman Brothers — advising Fortune 1000 companies on IPOs, mergers, and corporate finance. I saw how the largest deals get done. I also saw, at close range, what Wall Street gets wrong: the short-term incentives, the misalignments between the firm and the client, the way advice gets shaped by commissions rather than by truth.

I took notes. Then I left.

I spent the next six years at a hedge fund, as a Vice President and Investment Associate covering small-cap equities. That is where I built the analytical rigor — the close reading of financial statements, the deep-research instinct — that still drives how I evaluate businesses today.

And then, in 2002, I went to Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting for the first time. Sitting in that arena, listening to Buffett and Munger answer questions for hours, was one of the most formative experiences of my career. Later that year, I founded Ridgewood Investments.

The goal was simple. Bring the kind of intelligent, disciplined, long-term wealth management that had previously been reserved for the wealthiest families to a wider group of serious investors. Fee-only. Fiduciary. Patient capital. Built to compound.

The first money I managed at Ridgewood was my parents’. They started with roughly $100,000. Over the years, the total capital invested reached approximately $500,000. Today, that portfolio is worth many multiples of that figure — not because of any brilliant tactical decision, but because of decades of quiet discipline and patient compounding. Most of the growth came late, after the foundation had been building for years.

That portfolio is, in many ways, the truest statement of what I do.