I spent last summer at home, feeling somewhat dissatisfied with the work I was doing. I was working on making web apps — and I liked what I made, I even thought it could’ve been important — it just felt like I was trapped inside this box of web development: It’s the only thing I’d ever known, and I didn’t know if I was capable of doing other things even mildly well. Because this is all I thought I could do, all my new ideas somehow turned out to only be ideas for web apps — and that sucked!
I was gonna turn 20 the next year, and it felt like I should work to get out of this rut and try something new. Doing different things would be the only way I’d get different ideas.
Around then, I was on a call with Krish, and was told that he recently met the best engineer he’d ever seen — and that this guy was working on making robot butlers. I looked up the startup, called Prosper, and spent an hour playing a game they made that explored the robotic future they wanted to build. It was pretty fucking cool — how many other companies build games to explain their vision? I was intrigued, and Krish offered to introduce me to Shariq, the founder at Prosper. With only 3 engineers, they’d built a super low cost teleoperated humanoid robot that could… do things. It was wild — there’s so much stuff that had to be done to make this happen. This is the kind of work I wanted to be able to do. So, I asked Shariq if I could visit Prosper, and he said yes!
I spent 2 weeks in November in London, visiting Prosper — and came out of it inspired af. This team was incredibly smart and worked very hard. After the 2 weeks, Shariq offered me an internship to come back and work at Prosper! I was incredibly excited — I came back to Berkeley and got through finals, decided to work at prosper in the summer, and also to take a gap semester.
Why the gap? I could have just continued school in the spring, but this felt like the perfect time to try working on another thing I’d never done before.
Soham had been pushing me to do more challenging work for over two years now. He found me on Hacker News when I was in 12th grade, and we’ve stayed in touch since. He left behind a life as a computer science PhD student at Cornell to lobby the Indian Government for more widespread rapid COVID-19 diagnostics, and after that, he built PopVax, a mRNA vaccine company in Hyderabad. He had no training in biology, and now is running the 50 person team working on the frontier of vaccine development.
I thought it could be fun to work in biology — I’d finally understand what Seyone talked about all day, and I knew someone who was on the cutting edge. Soham agreed to let me intern at PopVax, and I flew over to Hyderabad, where I’d stay for the next 2 months.
Popvax is a mRNA vaccine company based in Hyderabad, funded by Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and they’re currently working on building a vaccine that is capable of neutralization across the betacoronavirus genus of pathogens.