Work by Saitec

Let’s connect

Hey you,

Thanks for stopping by.
I'm Sai. A scrat chasing the acorn.

So far, I've got about 10 years of staying in the game, building early-stage startups and making things that are worth making.

Things that are worth making, shape the future in positive ways. But getting these things out of the lab and into people’s lives isn’t easy.

I build and invest in deep-tech startups. The wild bets. The things that move the needle. The blurry line between what is improbable, and what is impossible.

I'm mildly opinionated about most things.
Moderately opinionated about Spatial Computing.
Deeply opinionated about dosas.

This is my playground.
A place for my ideas.

Stop by. Say hi,

Built & Backed

I’ve been a tinkerer all through.
I have founded, funded, and figured out life in early-stage startups.

"Saitec" would like to change base reality

Don’t Allow

What I'm on

Spatial Computing

Generative AI

Open Source Protocols

Antiportfolio

For a few things that work, many don’t. This is my list of attempts at building products, that went to the graveyard. Failure is a part of the process, and I hope this section helps shed light on the same.

Vagabond

Vagabond was aimed to be a Web3 research lab focusing on tokenized assets and collectibles. We couldn't have timed this worse, through the implosion of the NFT market.

Beep Collective

A motley crew of builders focused on creating communities around microcultures on the internet. Did the above sound vague? Yeah, you get why this didn't work.

Grail

Self-sovereign identity, tooling that helped DAOs govern better. Grail was an insightful experiment into how zk powered voting could work for experiments in human coordination. High potential? yes. Early? yes.

Culture Tools

Culture tools was built as an easy pad to help create and distribute meaningful GTM initiatives for startups. Whilst successful as an experiment, scaling this was tremendously hard.

Nada

An Al platform that analyzed a track and then isolated each stem to allow you to download the same. The Al worked great. The business model? Not so much.
Nada was an incredibly fun experiment to carry out, with lots of potential in the NFT music space moving forward.

Pixel

A home automation company built to manufacture inexpensive switching systems. The core communications device was a routing hardware called Rally, which had built-in Zigbee, Z-Wave, WiFi, RF & BLE communications. The vision was to create a central service for all home automation communications.
The startup failed because we had prioritized product building and not spent enough time generating demand for premium home automation products in an emerging market.

Augmented Shirts

An experiment between AR & physical products, where T-shirts would have the functionality to augment messages, animations, expressions, and more when you point your phone at them.
Clearly, my sense of fashion is misaligned with my optimism for technology. I still believe this is a compelling idea in the age of NFTs and phygitals, but perhaps it needed more marketing muscle than attempted with this one.

RCB Cards

The RCB Cards were supposed to be a collection of 9999 unique NFT phygital cards with Augmented Reality effects, token gated access to players, content, and more utilities. This project was Dead-on-Arrival due to complications in cricket rights management.

Kooriee

It was aimed to be a hyperlocal logistics delivery service that made it accessible for long-tail brands, merchants, and sellers to tap into delivery networks in a city. The unit economics in executing inter-city generic logistics proved to be simply too intensive, to continue this effort.

Specto

Virtual Reality hardware company that was making accessible VR cases for mobile phones to slot into. VR as an industry moved away from Cardboard and mobile viewers to standalone hardware, effectively killing this category of products.

User Stories Comics

A series of comics that were aimed at making a light-hearted poke at the world of tech, Mixed Reality, and startups.
Like most experiments, this one just didn't enjoy the prioritization that building a full-blown webcomic needs to succeed.

Micro Dark Wares

The WeWork for dark stores in Bangalore.
Through the pandemic's first onslaught, there was an attempt at building micro- warehouses throughout Bangalore, which could function as white-labeled dark stores for delivery companies to tap into. With the increase in popularity for deliveries as quick as 10 minutes, shared resources in a city seemed compelling as a venture.

Metaverse for Live-Learning

Was advising one of India's largest startups on their plans to build 3D content, interactive videos, and Metaverse environments to better engage with their learners through a live- tutor environment. Several solutions were built and tested with students with some leading to a significant increase in learning and class engagement.

How I work?

Going Owl

I work almost exclusively through the nighttime, as a being of the dark. Should you be up, you can find me with chai, Tamil music and flow state @ 150 wpm on my mechanical keyboard.

I sweat the details. A product is only as good as what the customer sees it as. I work with my teams & portfolio to take a product from viable, to loveable.

Zero-to-One. That's the stage I enjoy the most when creating something. Unproven. Fuzzy. Early.

Make tech fun,

by building fun tech

Mentorships

Opinions are luckily inexpensive. Following through, isn't.