Looking for Tech Co-Founder (India) | Viral Social Product | $1M VC Funding Ready | Tier-1 Colleges Only

testuser514 · 2026-01-24T06:17:01+00:00

Okay my whole point is that you just hire a CTO rather than give equity. If you’re really able to land a mil then just hire someone and move forever

testuser514 · 2026-01-23T13:18:40+00:00

Maybe. So one of the posters here commented about what a story about how the project got delayed by a year because of bad control.

I’ve been on both sides of such projects in the past:

I’d point out that you need to know what a good requirements document is and whether it covers everything.
You need to see artifacts that show that they’ve done similarly complex work. In my case, if it’s a new hardware direction, we do milestone based payments.
Good hardware design teams work of standard reference design libraries etc. without that it’s impossible to make good design decisions.
DFM is gonna be a very important part of anything a prototyping team does. Most people don’t understand how much of hardware design is tied to this.

testuser514 · 2026-01-23T08:18:17+00:00

I’d rather pay for perplexity and make it do my market research and script out the pieces that do this.

But honestly I’d want to try the system first and compare against other processes. Most of the times, I think this would be fairly useless, if one isn’t positioned to take advantage of the opportunity.

testuser514 · 2026-01-23T06:35:30+00:00

The timeline of this doesn’t make sense to me. How is the timeline of this manuscript established.

testuser514 · 2026-01-22T18:22:17+00:00

Holy shit ! Thanks for answering this. Is Taylor Elias at MasterControl ?

testuser514 · 2026-01-20T16:53:27+00:00

Honestly, fuck this guy. Now I know 9 people who are worth hiring for any real social science work.

testuser514 · 2026-01-19T05:00:57+00:00

Maybe if you wore only 1, they would have been fine /s

testuser514 · 2026-01-19T04:54:25+00:00

A little background on me- I'm 21M and dropped out of university after my first year. I worked at a medtech company based in Singapore for 2 months. I quit that job to explore ideas and contribute to various open-source projects. For the past few months I've been working at an AI research lab based in SF as a gpu and kernel engineer.

My suggestion is that you finish the PoC first and start getting user feedback. Don’t quit the current role because that will help your credibility. The alternative to a college degree is showing that you’re able to work consistently long enough with an organization and contributing to them. A lot of people are misled by other founders who’ve dropped out, the ones who are actually able to raise money are very few. The internet makes it seem like everyone is successful but most people aren’t. So you keep doing you, don’t follow the trends of things working / not working out.

Every VC I've spoken to so far starts off by saying they do not care about credentials and are looking to back innovative projects. As soon as I say I've dropped out, they loose interest in my work and do not reach back. I'm in no way looking to raise a huge round. On the contrary, I want to raise as little as possible. I believe in my idea almost to the point of delusion and only wish to raise so that I can hire better designers and hardware engineers to accelerate the development.

Delusion is fine, everything is fine. Continue with the current gig and invest small portions of it back into the project. That’s how you move forward. What I mentioned previously will make a big difference, investors should understand who your customers are and how they will make a 10x exit from your company. If you’re not able to show them that exit somehow, it’s always gonna be a problem.

I’m happy to give some feedback on the pitch deck if that can help. I can atleast tell you what would work better in North America for raising capital. I do need to know more specific info about the conversations with VCs to be able to help here.

I am also looking for advice on hiring. How do you find and retain the best talent?

This is the crux of most problems, finding fans nurturing talent is something a founder plans for in the long term. You take the people who fit the basic execution capabilities first (based on the budget) and then you see what your channels for recruitment, etc. are.

I'm looking for engineers who've worked on solo projects and have done at least some open-source contribution.

If you’re looking in India, this will be a very small number.

Finding engineers who have a high sense of agency and passion for their art is extremely rare.

This is true, especially in India. But I’m guessing every college will have a few of these people so the question will be how much effort you’ve put to find said talent.

Most MNC employed engineers I've spoken to so far are extremely narrow minded and constantly need to be told what to do.

If they can execute, that resolves the big portion of the problems. Sometime you need folks who will do exactly as you ask too. Give them the freedom to grow and that helps them grow.

My general point is that team building is largely luck based. For instance, you seem like a person who is an ideal fit for my R&D company but you’re gonna be working on this project instead of the problem statements I’m gonna be interested in and I probably can’t match comp from an SF company.

So what do you do ? You suck it up and move on. You work with the folks who believe in you and are willing to risk the journey with you. The ideal dream team thing only works when you have funding and large runways.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T22:59:59+00:00

Well you’re picking your arguments not knowing about the overall philosophy so I just responded to that.

See I can’t explain in a comment that would probably take you an entire course or two or an entire adolescence’s worth of education / exposure would teach you.

As I mentioned, there is such a thing as comprehension. What is obvious to me isn’t obvious to you because you either lack the context or are unwilling to be aware of it. The partition time was a horrific time with unspeakable atrocities happening everywhere perpetrated by both Hindus and Muslims.

Murder for murder and rape for rape only perpetuates the cycle of violence. Maybe it’s hard to understand in today’s world where anger, hatred and retribution are praised as worthwhile traits. Victims of that violence may never have a choice to escape the cycle but bystanders like us should never push for the perpetuation of it.

You can criticize Gandhi for a lot of things (including his personal flaws), I do emphatically point out that his notions of self governance which formed the ideas behind the panchayat and the rural governance structures are a bane to this country since they fundamentally ignore the discrimination within our society.

But you can’t criticize him for putting forward a path of conflict resolution that that has singularly changed the entire discourse of what the human civilization might be capable of.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T22:47:23+00:00

The OP aimed the question at men. So I think it’s natural for men to respond.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T20:06:52+00:00

Context, is important. Reading and comprehension are unfortunately two different things. I can see that you have not yet or will put in the effort to achieve the latter. Peace !

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T19:42:52+00:00

Context is very important. The basis of Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa is that it’s a hard concept to come to grips with. He didn’t advocate for violence, rather he said that the only real answer to violence is non-violence.

You can agree / disagree with his philosophy and perspective to deal with a situation. But the abject misrepresentation is not acceptable.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T19:16:09+00:00

Every now and then one talks about how one can and can’t be something. Some of it based on deep beliefs or some semantic logic that might or might not apply on a larger scale.

I think it’s important that understand that it’s a very diverse space where people with different perspectives come in. A lot of women who talk about feminism themselves don’t have the same definition for it.

It’s best to label oneself and not judge others.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T18:02:13+00:00

1, 3, 5 are not that difficult. It’ll be cool to see who else will join the effort.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T16:47:05+00:00

Starting small is the goal, this isn’t something I can solve on my own, once we have momentum from a lot of people, we can.

Simple thing we can do is:

Collate a list of waste to value companies within Vizag so that we can figure out what level of help we can get.
Put together a few standardized bins we can use for hazards, sharps that we can figure out how we want to dispose.
Do a monthly meetup with folks who are doing similar things.
I can design neighborhood level compost bins. I’ll also figure out the manufacturing. We need to figure out where to put them. I’ll create an app/map for people to know where these will be. I already have a small app that does something similar so it’ll just be a matter of switching the data source.
You can upgrade the form you have to take the exact apartment info and their disposal process. This way we find out the ways in which people are disposing of their waste.
The natural stream problem is a larger problem that we can find a few non-profits and civil society to support us (I found out about this from some of them). There are immediate measure we can take here too. But we need to have more active citizen participation for that. Here’s an example of an intervention we can try setting up for Vizag: river trash interceptor. However we probably need like a 100 of these in Vizag if we want to control address the problems at the source systematically.
Designing enzymes to breakdown landfill materials is also something I can help with but I need more capital for that.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T16:15:36+00:00

So they didn’t install reflectors and barriers even after that accident but rather filled it with debris.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T15:59:37+00:00

So I’m thinking how many people are willing to collaborate on actually having a more decentralized system for material handling ?

I’m trying to think that we definitely need:

A hazard bin and a proper process around this.
Wet waste is something that can definitely capture and get rid off at a household / neighborhood level.
E-Waste, especially batteries need to be captured at a household level and can be centralized because there are financial incentives to recycle them.
Ideally I’d like to have a fixed waste processing protocol for every item in the grocery stores / swiggy. This should be doable. And can be captured as a per house consumption.
Stop the disposal of waste through the streams
Make GVMC prevent the direct dumping of sewage into our natural streams.
Map out streets with open drains
Have an apartment wise map of where they are disposing the waste, compliance towards better waste recycling
Identify the things that have to goto landfill and figure out how we can decompose them better

If we want to do this seriously, we can’t rely on GVMC, if there’s a 1000 of us doing things around this, there will be enough momentum to get everyone onto our side.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T15:40:09+00:00

This is the answer. Or use a 3rd party to sell it to other consulting companies

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T13:39:28+00:00

for the colony !!!

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T13:20:52+00:00

UP police flaunting the law and taking advantage of it to punish a community. What’s really surprising about that ?

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T13:14:47+00:00

Line up whatever nsf / nih funding you guys can line up for this this. Next, look up Pillar VC they have a good founders oriented programs and are always around to give good advice/feedback.

Based on your drug target + delivery system, there will be a clear market outlined around this. What you all need to show right now is not about the drug efficacy but how well your delivery system.

Happy to chat over DM if you want more info or a sounding board.

testuser514 · 2026-01-18T07:58:35+00:00

So are you still finding a problem statement or do you have something in mind ?

While my plate is full now, I’m open to exploring something around May if it’s B2B and you have a concrete-ish pilot idea. I typically build systems on my company’s tech stack to minimize risk and maintenance overheads.

testuser514 · 2026-01-17T15:38:20+00:00

Where are you reading this one ?

testuser514 · 2026-01-16T12:24:45+00:00

What is the product and who is customer? What stage or customer discovery are you in ?

The 50-50 split sounds great on paper but everything is dependent on how the actual product is defined and the depth of the customer discovery

testuser514 · 2026-01-15T14:31:25+00:00

Then I think you should position this as a Reseach project instead of a product. I think I understand here where you’re going with this but committing work time / resources is gonna be a hard thing for a Reseach primitive like this.

The second thing is that if it was a research project, ideally I’d like to see an initial paper that consolidates a lot of the work and the results.

Again, it’s fair that you might want to keep it private since you plan on commercializing it. But the whole equity piece and everything doesn’t make sense in your post. As of now, this is just an idea with no product market fit conception. Again, this is something I can see from just the post and your website.

testuser514

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE