I'm Shiven. I'm an engineer and founder, and most of what I build is the unshowy plumbing that makes an AI product actually work.
Software usually goes wrong long before anyone opens an editor. A founder gets quoted $60,000 for a thing that should cost $5,000 and has no way to tell. A team spends a year building something nobody asked for. A number goes in a deck and nobody checks it, including the person who wrote it. I've been on most sides of that.
Freelance work early on, then tech lead, then AVP of Technology at Imarticus Learning, where I ran tech for a company teaching 45,000 people across 30-odd countries. Somewhere in there I co-founded a company that was A polite word for: it worked, but not in the shape any of us drew on the whiteboard.. These days I mostly build my own things.
Right now the main one is Generally Critical, with a couple of side projects I keep circling back to and a trail of finished work behind me. The thread through all of it isn't a technology. It's that each one sits on a pile of Nobody has ever put the word ODBC on a pitch deck. That is precisely why it holds.: a scoring rubric that has to come out identical for every player, live traffic that has to be read in plain English, a twenty-year-old accounting format that fought me for a year.
A game that scores business judgment: one scenario, three connected decisions, a number you can argue with. I co-founded it and run the tech. Around 1,500 people have played since May. Three quarters played once and never came back, which is the real problem and not one I'm going to dress up.
Seven AI agents doing the work of a marketing team. Research, strategy, content, ads, analytics. You review, you approve, it ships.
It reads your code and your live traffic and shows you where people give up on your product, in plain English, with the fix attached.
A learning platform that three companies run their courses on. Four portals, AI tutoring, certificates, video tracking.
An Electron connector that reads Tally over ODBC, syncs to the cloud, and answers questions over WhatsApp. A year spent inside a twenty-year-old file format.
A carbon credit platform for AshTerra Sciences, scoring projects on additionality and permanence against satellite imagery.
An AI music and hospitality platform. I owned the infrastructure: AWS CDK, real-time audio, messaging, caching.
Mutual fund analysis. It takes apart a Consolidated Account Statement PDF and tells you what you actually own.
All writing. There is also a book in the works, Wired for Growth, 67 pages on growth frameworks and which ones are worth your time.
I'm in Bengaluru, and I do my best work at hours I would not recommend to anyone. Most of what ships here was written between midnight and two, then read back in daylight when I can be honest about it.
I'm bootstrapped by choice, which is really a bet: a low burn buys the freedom to be wrong more often than most founders can afford, and I use all of it. I read more than I finish, I'm slowly Elementary and staying that way, if I am honest about the hours I put in., and I care about how things are made in a way that is occasionally a liability.