I love it when I get to build things for people. Things that make their lives >1% easier.

That's the short version. 

Longer version, roughly backwards in time:

I recently got back to New Delhi after spending a year in SF and 3 in San Diego. Most of my time went into startups: working at a new AI trading firm, and also, building startups of my own. I've shipped products. Handled growth. Scrapped ideas and started over. $$$ of compute later, the loop still goes on, now with more taste. I think you can study product sense from the outside, or you can just ship things and observe what happens. I like doing both.

I've done ML research and I've done B2B enterprise work. But what really pulls me is consumer stuff. I make a thing to ease a pain, I put it out there, and people either reach for it or they don't. This is the cleanest feedback loop. Of course with its own messiness, but this is the game I want to play. Maybe even for the next decade.

Before startups, I was at Chainlink Labs, building a ranking system for their data providers, using graph AI and Bayesian stats. Before that, during my CS master's at UC San Diego, I worked at the ACES Lab w/ Intel to accelerate AI inference at scale. Both were problems I had a ton of fun solving. But they were infra/plumbing problems. Important ones for sure, the kind on which robust systems depend, but I could never see a person on the other end, directly deriving real value for themself.

The work I'm most proud of is work where I can see someone enjoying the outcomes of my ideas and effort.

Early in my career, I spent ~2 years at a government AI lab in India. Building computer vision systems. Driver drowsiness detection for commercial vehicles. And face recognition, which was shipped in millions of phones. This is work that people use every day. They get tangible value. They have no idea who made it, their lives get better, and life goes on. This is the feeling I chase.

Side note: The reason I ended up doing AI in the first place is more personal than I usually let on. It was summer 2016, I almost fell asleep driving. The crash was near fatal, like death's essence teased me. It rewired my sense of what I'd want to work on.

Anyway, after the government lab, I joined a private research group at IIIT-Delhi and published at ~10 top AI conferences: EMNLP, AAAI, NAACL, etc. We also won a paper award! Over 1.5yrs, we built quant trading systems, speech analysis systems (pre-LLM era), played with graph neural nets & RL. I got to collaborate with people from Tower Research, Bloomberg, Samsung, NVIDIA, LG, NUS, MIT, and more. Too much name-dropping but I can't help it. I learned more from those geniuses than all of my degrees.

Nowadays I run, lift weights. I make electronic music. I claude code.

In my me time, I think too much about why people do what they do. It might just be the non-technical version of the same problem I keep trying to solve.

I'm trying to find my people, have fun along the way, and build tasteful, useful things for humanity. If you read all of this, congrats, your attention span isn't really cooked. 

Reach out if you want to chat. I'm always down.