1 new message from Aishwarya
Confident reflections, nervously shared
Episode 2 of “Participation; Aishwarya’s startup journey”. Read Episode 1 if desired.
Predictable answers have always bored me. It’s why I like Kendrick Lamar. His style, stories, concepts — all unpredictable. It’s why I like writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. It’s why echo chambers bore me to tears — predictable, predictable, predictable — and yet I seek them out. Lord help me.
Liminal space — the space between where you've been and where you're going — is much more like it. Unpredictable, intriguing, and exactly where I am.
Where it began
Let’s begin with the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. My early introduction to the ‘scene’ was in 2015 when I co-founded a startup while in college. Through this experience I met other founders, investors, industry experts and researchers who advise teams, alumni from other Bay Area universities, and tech media professionals, such as reporters from TechCrunch. I learned that there is a ‘startup ecosystem’ where ideas flow relatively freely. People are generous with their time and counsel, and generally want each other to do well.
It’s all so very promising. It’s all so very predictable.
There is a predictable path that I see startups follow. Identify a specific problem. This problem should be solvable with technology. The more specific the problem the better. Identify a customer that would pay to have the problem solved. Raise money to build and scale your software solution.
My mentality
If I’m going to take a risk and invest immense time and effort to build a derivative company I might as well work for one — it’s good pay and less risk. But I want to be a different type of technologist. To do this, my co-founder and I need a unique idea. One that is fresh, blends disciplines, and is rooted in our life experiences.
It all comes down to our purpose. Why are we doing this?
What do I want
Where stale conversations and withering imaginations meet, that is where boredom resides. My co-founder and I have been discussing our ideas with other tech founders, investors, and a few friends — but I want us to go wider. Since our ideas are about human relationships and knowledge sharing, I would like for us to talk to librarians, sociologists, educators, and others who study how people interact with knowledge and information.
At the risk of sounding trite but with the hope of being crystal clear, I want to build more than a company; I want to create a cultural shift. A shift towards pro-social technology i.e. technology that facilitates increased understanding and trust between people in intimate social circles. Technology that is nonintrusive (e.g. books), respects your privacy (e.g. Wikipedia), flexible (e.g. Notion), and connective (e.g. roads).
Not quite internet subculture, not quite mainstream tech product
My interest in Trust and Safety and responsible technology brought me to this point. I worked in Trust and Safety (T&S) for two years at the Wikimedia Foundation, designing T&S tools and developing frameworks for ‘safety by design’. My conclusion from that time is — what happens upstream (i.e. government regulation and policy changes) is what matters most*.
I’ve also researched data feminism, decolonial design, and design justice, but the question remains, what does an alternative look like? I worked at ‘an alternative’ for ~ 3.5 years (i.e. Wikipedia), and there are numerous creative alternatives I’ve seen on the internet (100R, tiny internets, future non stop, are.na). I now want to know if my co-founder and I can design and build a platform that sits at the intersection of these paradigms. Not quite internet subculture, not quite mainstream tech product. A hybrid, just like us.
Whether our ideas fail or flourish, this path will have been ours to tread.
*Changes in regulation and policy happen due to efforts of a responsible technology ecosystem. Here is a list of responsible tech organizations I can vouch for: All Tech is Human, Tech Global Institute, Integrity Institute, and U.S. A.I. Safety Institute