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VibeCon India Submission Answer

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I designed the LooCafe Mini, which now has 200 live deployed units. I also worked on the governance side and helped build the technology stack for our public sanitation systems, with multiple interfaces now used across more than 400 units in our broader network.

I started working with LooCafe after first learning to build through Roblox when I was 11. That’s where I picked up a lot of my design instincts and early building skills. I made my first hundred dollars by trading Fortnite accounts and building Roblox games. Around 14, I had a YouTube channel with 100,000 subscribers. At 15, I started an education startup that won an Emergent Ventures grant and built a 400-member community.

I also had side gigs. In one travel business, I sold 800 tickets within three months, working alongside my mother when it was still a side project. I worked with Invest India during the G20 period and helped run events. I was invited by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs to contribute to work around water, sanitation, and hygiene policy. All of this happened before I even got to college.

Once I got to college, I doubled down further on public sanitation through LooCafe. I was sent to China, nominated by the Gates Foundation as one of the most promising young engineers in WASH, to help bring the Reinvented Toilet to India. It’s a fascinating project: essentially a shipping container with public toilets where all waste is recycled through the system and returned at drinking-water standard, with no external water and no external energy input. I learned chemical engineering and machine systems from scratch to help work on and set up this project, which is now continuing at DU Works, often described as the MIT Media Lab of India.

Academically, I was nominated to go to Oxford to study computational neuroscience, which connects to one of my deepest interests: enhancing human capabilities. I was also fully funded to go to Cambridge through Works in Progress by Stripe Press, as one of the most promising young people in policy and development. Throughout my life, I’ve had repeated external signals that I’m a young person worth betting on, and that has given me a lot of strength. A lot of who I’ve become is because of the support of others, but it also comes from a very deep curiosity and a constant need to build systems, infrastructure, and new models at scale.

That pattern has shown up across everything I’ve done. With LooCafe, we took something people treat as a lost cause, public sanitation, where you can pour in money and still end up with dirty, broken toilets, and we changed the model. We made it work. We made it profitable. We focused on what was actually required. With computational neuroscience, I was driven by the idea that if transhumanism or human enhancement is possible, I need to understand the science deeply. With Nexteen, it came from an internal need for community and a desire to help young people learn emerging technology while also rethinking education as a system.

Now, with Personhood, I’ve been obsessed with the problem for the last eight or nine months. I even took a gap year from college for something that had zero users at the time, simply because I was so fascinated by the question. How do you build better communities? How do you really engage with where AI is going? How do you make AI agents feel more like digital people? Language is such a high-signal medium, and yet AI characters still don’t feel fully alive. I want to fix that.

I think obsession is one of my defining traits, and one of the main reasons I’m a top builder. I get so deeply locked into problems that everything else starts to disappear. One of the core traits of builders is having a very high sense of agency, the instinct to step outside broken systems and build better ones. With Personhood, I want to expand the social fabric itself. I think I’m one of the best people to do that because the obsession, interest, and need I have for this problem outweigh almost every other desire.

And to me, what matters is being a top builder for the problem you’re actually in. In public toilets, I know I’m second to none. I can understand every part of the system and build the best version of it. More broadly, I think my range, across governance, infrastructure, science, community, design, product, and technical execution, combined with a proven ability to scale, ship, and understand virality and human behavior, is what makes me one of the top builders in India.

I usually do not walk into a room feeling underwhelmed by my capabilities, because I’m so obsessed with the thing I’m building. And I genuinely believe my thing is cooler than most other people’s thing. That obsession makes me effective, and that belief gives me conviction.