Official Book Launch
Today my first book is officially out in the world. It is called 9th Grade Dropout on a Mission, and writing that sentence still feels strange to me. For a long time it existed only as a folder on my laptop — notes, half-finished chapters, screenshots I could not bring myself to delete.
I want to be honest about what this is. It is not a book in the sense of a product. It is years of memories, failures, cold nights, difficult decisions, small wins that felt enormous at the time, and moments that quietly changed the direction of my life. Some of it I am proud of. Some of it I am not. All of it is in there.
People usually meet a story after it is over. They see the result, the company, the numbers, the version of a person that has already survived the hard part. This book is the other side of that. It is everything before. The part nobody puts on a profile.
Why I Wrote This Book
I never wanted to write a book to become an author. That was never the goal, and honestly it still isn't. I wrote it because I was afraid the real story would disappear.
Memory is unreliable. I noticed it happening already — events from two years ago were starting to soften, and the difficult months were becoming a single blurry sentence in my head. Failures get forgotten faster than anything else, because there is no reason to revisit them. And if I ever do build something meaningful, I know exactly what will happen: people will remember the outcome and skip everything that made it possible.
So I wrote it down while I could still remember it correctly. Dates, conversations, the exact feeling of certain days. This book preserves the story as it actually happened, not as it will sound later.
What Readers Will Find
The book moves roughly in the order my life did. Childhood, and what it was like growing up in Bahraich. School — the parts that shaped me and the parts that slowly stopped making sense. The decision to leave in the 9th grade, and everything that decision cost inside my own house.
Then the years that followed: teaching myself skills online with a weak connection and a lot of stubbornness, my first experiments with binary trading, and the strange, disorienting feeling of making money for the first time. There is a chapter about buying my mother a phone that I found harder to write than anything else in the book.
After that it gets less comfortable. Leaving home. Living in real uncertainty. Starting over more than once. Building Arise AI with almost nothing, learning how systems and automation actually work, and slowly forming a way of thinking about business that I still use every day.
I won't describe every chapter here. Some things are better read than summarised.
This Isn't A Success Story
I did not wait until the story was safe to tell.
This book was not written after becoming rich. It was not written after "making it." I am still in the middle of it. There are chapters that haven't happened yet, and I genuinely do not know how they will go.
That is exactly why I published it now. A story told after the ending is always edited by the ending. Every risk looks like conviction, every mistake becomes a neat lesson. Written from the middle, none of that protection exists. What you get instead is the truth of not knowing — which, for anyone currently in their own uncertain middle, is the more useful thing to read.
Who Should Read This
I think students will find something in it, especially the ones who feel like the system was not built for how their mind works. Young entrepreneurs and founders will recognise the operational chaos of the early days — the part where you are building and doubting at the same time.
But the readers I thought about most while writing were the ones nobody writes for: people rebuilding their life after something broke, people who feel behind their friends, people starting from actual zero with no network and no safety net. If that is where you are right now, this book is closer to a letter than a lecture.
A Personal Note
To everyone who supported this journey — my family, the friends who stayed when it was not obvious that any of this would work, and the people online who sent a message on days I needed one without knowing it — thank you. I remember more of it than I ever say out loud.
And to you, reading this: thank you for believing in a story before knowing how it ends. That is a rare kind of trust. Reading this book isn't supporting an author. It is stepping into the story while it is still being written, which means you now know the beginning better than most people ever will.
I intend to keep documenting it. Whatever happens next — good year, bad year, whatever it turns out to be — it will be recorded honestly, the same way this was.
About The Author
Aryan Srivastav is an entrepreneur and the founder of Arise AI, where he builds AI products, automation systems, and digital businesses. His work focuses on AI automation, SaaS, and business infrastructure — the systems that quietly run a company and compound over time.
He left formal schooling in the 9th grade and has documented the entrepreneurial journey publicly ever since, writing about self-education, systems thinking, and execution over noise. 9th Grade Dropout on a Mission is his first book.
Continue The Journey
If the book gave you the beginning, the rest of this site is where the story continues in real time.
- The trenches — the public roadmap, updated as it happens.
- Book insights and timeline — background, lessons, and official resources.
- Blogs and essays — long-form writing on building and thinking.
- Projects and AI products — what is being built at Arise AI.
- Media links — every platform where I publish.
