Helping people

I found the missing link through startups. The truth, I discovered, is that knowledge in of itself is of little value unless it can be shared with others. I had been busy acquiring a wealth of information on various topics but did not have a way of sharing it. Locking myself in my room for hours on end was in fact separating me more from what I really needed which was to connect and share with people. I started looking for ways in which I could leverage my skills to maximize the value I could provide to society. I realized that businesses could give a clear way to measure the value of my creations. In the words of Jason Fried, “After sex, relationships, and family the most intimate transaction between two people is giving money”.

I built my first company when I was 20. It was motivated by my personal hatred of the way campus book stores would rip off students and the lack of easy alternatives. As someone familiar with the web world, I had already been purchasing cheaper paperback editions books through various online sources but realized that most students did not have an easy way of doing this. I setup a network of distributors in India to get low cost paperback edition textbooks. I then wrote a series of web crawlers to build a product list that I could offer to students. I put this together as a website and had immediately traction.

I have since built a number of websites and businesses. I was previously CTO of a Berkeley based delivery service called CampusMunch.

In June 2010, I completed my MS in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. My graduate research focused on writing machine learning algorithms for an autonomous robot that could help farmers better manage their crops. Before that, I was an undergraduate research assistant at the Iowa StateVirtual Reality Application Center. continue…