I'm a technologist, builder, and writer. I co-founded Cask Data, where we spent years building one of the most ambitious open-source data platforms in the industry. Before that, I worked at Yahoo and Google, where I learned that the best ideas rarely wait for permission, and the best products are built by people willing to iterate on things that don't yet work.
I write because thinking out loud is the only way I know how to think. I don't write to communicate ideas I already have — I write to discover what I actually believe. That means some essays are polished arguments and some are half-formed questions I haven't resolved yet. I'm comfortable with both.
Niranta is my personal corner of the internet. The tagline — 42, our life's answer — is a nod to Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. It's a reminder that we're all searching for meaning, and sometimes the right answer to a question is realizing you're asking the wrong question.
I write across a range of subjects: AI and what it means for how we work and think; quotes and idioms that have quietly shaped how I lead and live; philosophy at the practical level — not Plato in the abstract, but Seneca on a Sunday morning; health and what endurance teaches you; experiments I'm running; and personal essays about the things that matter most.
In January 2025, my brother passed away after a year-long illness. I stopped writing. For months, the cursor blinked on empty pages. Grief has a way of making even the most articulate person go silent — not because there's nothing to say, but because everything you might say feels smaller than the thing you're carrying.
I came back to writing not because I healed, but because I remembered that writing is how I heal. I still sense him around me every day. These essays are partly for me, partly for anyone who has ever tried to make sense of something that resists sense-making.
When I'm not writing or building, I'm hiking. Nepal left its mark on me — there's something about moving through difficult terrain, step by step, that resets the way I think about everything else. I'm also building a farmhouse, slowly. The pace of that project has taught me more about patience than any book on the subject.
If something here resonated, I'd love to hear from you. The best conversations happen when strangers connect over ideas they didn't know they shared.
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