ആദി

About

Builder / Entrepreneur / Uncompromising realist. From Kochi.

I'm Adithya. I was born in Kochi, near Panampilly Nagar, and I've spent almost my whole life here. I left for Bangalore for a while to work at Ather, and I came back. The Chinese nets at Fort Kochi, the ferry to Vypeen, a glass of chai at a roadside kada: it's still the best place I know to think.

A ThinkPad and a cookie box

The first computer at home was an old ThinkPad my dad brought back from work. Clunky, chunky, and no internet unless you plugged in the BSNL USB dongle, which on a good day gave you 50 kbps. I was in first grade. A cousin gave me GTA San Andreas on a CD, and that was the start of it. Around then I also started opening up computers to see what was inside.

Later we got a tiny desktop with the barest specs, and in fifth grade I found Arduino and Instructables. By 12 or 13 I was building line-following robots. I couldn't afford the parts, and I didn't get pocket money. But at Vishu, the elders in the family hand you a little money called kaineettam, so I saved up every kaineettam and used it to buy the wheels and the rest. An aunt sponsored the Arduino. The shell was a plastic cookie container. That's how I learnt to code.

Ubuntu, Arch, and a 2.5 kg laptop

I installed Ubuntu on my own at 13 and moved completely to Arch by 16. I stayed on Arch until I bought my first Mac in my first year of college, with money saved from internships and freelance work.

The reason was practical. My old laptop weighed 2.5 kg, I walked 1.5 km to the bus stop with it every day, and our classroom had exactly one plug point, near the door.

ZeW-IT and the tinkering lab

ZeW-IT started as an idea for a school science exhibition: a bin that sorts its own waste. Around then NITI Aayog was setting up Atal Tinkering Labs in schools for hands-on STEM education. I was the hardware kid, so my school gave me the job of setting ours up from scratch.

That lab became our workshop. A friend and I bunked pretty much all of 11th and 12th grade and spent countless hours in there building ZeW-IT end to end. It won Maker of the Year. We filed patent applications too, but the lawyer fees and the time it took were too much once college started, so I shelved it.

That was lesson one. A project can die for reasons that have nothing to do with the idea.

College, and organising everything

Ever since GTA San Andreas, I've had a thing for computers, so computer science was the obvious choice. I nearly took medicine, and nearly astrophysics, because I was really into both. I ended up at Model Engineering College (MEC) in Kochi.

In the first few days I met the friend who's now my co-founder. We built the college's IEDC (its innovation and entrepreneurship cell) together, end to end, and revived Technopreneur, a fest that had been dead for ten years. In its final weeks we almost went broke. We cut costs everywhere and pulled through, and we still talk about how close we came to cancelling it. We also hosted the first Kochi FOSS.

I started the DSC (Google's Developer Student Club) at MEC on my own. The only technical club then was FOSS MEC, which focused purely on open source. I wanted something that brought big tech and real-world opportunities on campus, so people could get resources and build. The idea came from talking to the DSC team at NIT Surathkal while I was there for a hackathon.

DevQuest

By second year, thanks to internships and freelance work, I could architect and build systems end to end. Most of my peers couldn't, and it wasn't really their fault. Our syllabus was from the early 2000s. People were graduating and still not getting jobs because they didn't have the skills the industry wanted.

DevQuest was my attempt to close that gap. We bootstrapped it, and we shut it down when other priorities came in and we couldn't raise money. Here's what it taught me:

  • Ship fast, get market feedback, and ask users to pay from the start.
  • Building isn't everything. Distribution matters far more.
  • Product-market fit is insanely hard to find. Users liking your product and a business that lasts are not the same thing.
  • Selling to students is the worst idea. We should have started on the B2B side, as a hiring platform for verified talent.

Ather Energy

At Ather in Bangalore, the thing I'm proudest of is the Bluetooth pipeline between the scooter and your phone. Think of pairing an earphone, except it was insanely hard to pull off and meant working across firmware, the app and the embedded side. I was also R&D lead for smart helmets, ADAS, pothole detection and a HUD.

There were tonnes of overnight nights. I rode up 13 floors almost 30 times a day to test, rode through peak Bangalore traffic with MacBooks on board to collect telemetry, and tested 50+ phones after every release. I worked with product, mechanical, electronics and a few other teams, and wore whatever hat the day needed. "Works on my machine" hits different when your machine is a scooter in Bangalore traffic.

I also learnt how to do a wheelie.

Hanomi

Next I joined Hanomi, a San Francisco startup building agentic CAD, as the first hire. I worked remotely, and it was very hectic. We went from idea to production in under six months.

Wagewyse, then DataWyse

Before DataWyse, my co-founder and I built Wagewyse. It ran for almost a year, and we got outcompeted. The lessons were expensive:

  • Ship fast, build fast, sell fast. The longer you take, the more someone else beats you to the market.
  • Distribution is king.
  • Release an MVP, get clients, and get them to pay. Only refine after people pay for it. Perfection is a recipe for disaster.
  • The market matters. There's always someone bigger building the same thing, and they can buy out your market.

I had a good job when I quit. Starting something of my own was always what I wanted, so I did, and we bootstrapped DataWyse on my savings for the first few months. It started with a problem at a bakery chain, and we saw a good opportunity behind it. Today DataWyse is an AI analyst for finance teams at small and mid-sized companies, and we still write the code ourselves.

What I believe

I'm an optimistic nihilist and an uncompromising realist. Life and the universe have no pre-written or cosmic meaning. I don't find that depressing. Nobody handed me a grand plan, so the choices are mine, and that's freeing. The realism is the other half: I try to see things exactly as they are, without sugarcoating or softening them, my own work included.

My rabbit hole is mysticism. I read Indian philosophy (the Gita, the Upanishads, the Vedas) alongside Marcus Aurelius, Osho, Nietzsche and Bukowski. On the science side there's Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and the quantum world, which is so different from ours that everything breaks after a point. I'm drawn to where spirituality meets science: the human body, anatomy, and how all of it connects to the mind.

I suspect we live in a simulation, and I hope a glitch makes me a better singer someday.

Things I love

Watches. I love mechanical ones. You're wearing engineering and craftsmanship on your wrist, all that effort put into something as important as keeping time, and it still blows my mind. I like classic pieces with a good, classy design and a story attached. I wear a vintage 1980s Seiko and a Timex Marlin.

The Alto. My first car, and I love knowing its ins and outs. Manual only; I hate automatics. People ask about a dream car. The Alto is enough.

Chai. Mostly black, sometimes with lime or milk, never with sugar. Usually three or four a day, though five to ten is easy. No favourite spot.

Everything else. My music is all over the place. I'm a big fan of Top Gun and Star Wars. I don't have a dog yet, but I'd love one later, which is why there's a German Shepherd on the beach on my home page.

When I travel, I take photos. So far that's Kochi, Mauritius, Singapore, Delhi and Mumbai.

This site, and why I write

I've had websites since school, mostly on free domains from the GitHub Student Pack. This .com went up in 2024.

I write mostly for people like me: people who think the same way or are stuck on the same problem, and any curious soul who relates. I also write for myself, to see how I've changed over time. It's a public journal, more or less.

Talks and speaking

Contact

The quickest way to reach me is a message on LinkedIn or X. Tell me what you're building or what you'd like to talk about. If you'd rather talk, book a call. If you're in Kochi, we can do it over chai.

Elsewhere

ഒരു ചായ കുടിച്ചിട്ട് സംസാരിക്കാം.

Let's talk over a chai.