V.
01 / About

Vaishnav.

ECE student at Manipal. Interested in semiconductors, robotics, AI, and the people who build ambitious things.

Currently exploring how hardware, software and business intersect to create leverage.

This site isn't a portfolio. It's a map of curiosity. I'm still figuring out my niche. This site is where I keep track of the search.

Begin the path
02 / Journey

How the thinking evolved

A chain of cause and effect. Each milestone has three beats: what happened, what I learned, and what changed afterward. The rail fills as you read. Expand any card to read the story.

  1. Early design period

    2022

    The first serious craft

    Long before the startups and electronics, the first real obsession was visual and interaction design — copying, redrawing, deconstructing interfaces to understand why they worked.

    • Design
    • Craft
    • Self-taught
    What happened
    Spent months obsessively studying interfaces, type, color and motion. Rebuilt apps from scratch, read design writing, made a lot of small things just to feel the medium.
    What I learned
    Taste is built by doing the work, not by consuming opinions. Looking carefully is a skill, and it transfers everywhere.
    What changed afterward
    Gave me the aesthetic instincts that every later decision — product, startup, even hardware — quietly rests on.
    Ripples

  2. EonForge

    Aug 2023 — Nov 2023

    UI/UX Design Intern

    First professional design work — ERP software for schools. Real users, real constraints, real opinions.

    • Design
    • UX
    • Interfaces
    What happened
    Collaborated on the design of an ERP product used by schools. Learned the working vocabulary of interface design and product decisions in a team setting.
    What I learned
    Interfaces are opinions. Every small decision quietly tells the user what is and isn't possible.
    What changed afterward
    Gave me the foundation in design that made later product and startup work possible.
    Ripples

  3. Whomr

    Dec 2023 — Present

    Founder

    Identified a roommate-discovery problem and built a startup around it. MVPs, surveys, user conversations, pitch, angel funding.

    • Startup
    • Validation
    • Customer Discovery
    What happened
    Spotted the roommate-discovery problem, ran validation experiments and surveys, built MVPs, talked to users, pitched, and secured angel funding.
    What I learned
    Building is the easy part. Understanding the user — what they actually want, how they actually decide — is the entire job.
    What changed afterward
    Made customer discovery the default instinct, and pulled me toward founders, operators and the people who do the hard, slow work of starting things.
    Ripples

  4. Wemus

    Oct 2024 — Apr 2025

    Founder's Office & Operations Intern

    Worked close to 0 → 1 — product research, onboarding, UX decisions, GTM conversations, the operational glue.

    • Product
    • Users
    • Execution
    What happened
    Observed an early-stage startup up close. Contributed to product research, onboarding analysis, UX decisions, and operational work; sat in on positioning and GTM discussions.
    What I learned
    Products shape behavior. Onboarding friction is a story about what a user is being asked to believe.
    What changed afterward
    Turned a vague interest in design into a concrete interest in product thinking and user journeys.
    Ripples

  5. AFC

    2025 — Present

    Aspiring Filmmakers Collective

    Started a filmmaking community from scratch and grew it organically to 150+ members. Sessions, challenges, conversations.

    • Community
    • Retention
    • Behavior
    What happened
    Built AFC from zero — designed the on-ramp, ran sessions, challenges and reviews, and spent a lot of time talking to members individually.
    What I learned
    Communities behave like products. They grow on rituals, ownership and a low-friction first contribution, not on enthusiasm.
    What changed afterward
    Pulled me toward systems thinking — incentives, participation, feedback loops — and the idea that human behavior can be designed for.
    Ripples

  6. The reading turn

    2025

    Books that bent the direction

    A stretch where the inputs changed faster than the outputs. Chip War, Poor Charlie's Almanack and a handful of others quietly redirected what I cared about.

    • Books
    • Direction
    • Inputs
    What happened
    Read deliberately and slowly through a sequence of books on hardware, capital, behavior and decision-making. Took notes, argued with them, revisited the ones that didn't sit right.
    What I learned
    Your inputs become your taste. If you only read what everyone around you reads, you'll only see what everyone around you sees.
    What changed afterward
    Moved my attention from the application layer toward the layers under it — manufacturing, infrastructure, leverage.
    Ripples

  7. MIT pathway

    2025

    Committing to the hardware track

    A deliberate decision to orient education and research around hardware, semiconductors and the infrastructure beneath AI — not as a side interest, but as the main one.

    • Pathway
    • Hardware
    • Commitment
    What happened
    Restructured what I was studying, who I was talking to, and what I was building around the hardware track. Started taking the work — courses, labs, reading — seriously as a long-horizon bet.
    What I learned
    Direction is a decision, not a discovery. You commit and then the world starts giving you better material.
    What changed afterward
    Turned a curiosity into a path. Set up the electronics turn that followed.
    Ripples

  8. Electronics turn

    2025 — Now

    Where the curiosity is pointing

    Increasingly moved toward Electronics & Computer Engineering — semiconductors, robotics, AI infrastructure, systems that create leverage.

    • Semiconductors
    • Robotics
    • AI Infra
    What happened
    Shifted focus away from purely software work and toward hardware, semiconductors, robotics and the infrastructure underneath modern AI.
    What I learned
    The most interesting leverage tends to sit one layer below where most people are looking.
    What changed afterward
    Set the current direction — and the lens this site is built around.
    Ripples
03 / Current Interests

A thinking map, not a list

These aren't isolated interests — they influence each other. Hover any node to see what it connects to. Everything eventually loops back to NOW.

  • · Hardware ↔ Semiconductors
  • · Semiconductors ↔ AI Infrastructure
  • · AI Infrastructure ↔ Startups
  • · Startups ↔ Design
  • · Everything → NOW

Toggle View connections (bottom right) to see how nodes here link out to journey milestones, observations and books.

05 / Reading

Influences, not recommendations

Each book card carries four editable fields: why it mattered, key idea, related interests, and related observations. Content is intentionally blank — to be written by hand.

Chip War

Chris Miller
Influence
Why it mattered

Turned a vague interest in hardware into a specific interest in semiconductors — the slow, expensive, geopolitical layer underneath everything.

Key idea

Compute is a physical asset. Whoever controls the manufacturing controls the ceiling of what the rest of the stack can do.

Related interests
Related observations
Related milestone

Poor Charlie's Almanack

Charles T. Munger
Influence
Why it mattered

Reframed how I think about leverage — not as effort, but as a chosen position. Quietly reorganized how I evaluate every decision around Whomr.

Key idea

Worldly wisdom is a latticework of mental models. The person with more models sees the same situation more clearly.

Related interests
Related observations
Related milestone

The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman
Influence
Why it mattered

The first book that made design feel like a discipline instead of a taste. Everything I noticed at EonForge and Wemus had a name in here.

Key idea

Good design makes the right action obvious and the wrong action awkward. Bad design blames the user.

Related interests
Related observations
—
Related milestone
The path continues — through people
06 / Contact

Let's talk.

Hardware. Startups. Research. Interesting problems.

subscribe to my substack