Girish Rao

Startup engineer and product guy. Living the NYC startup experience since 2007 (that’s pre-iPhone!).

Tailored my double degree here to quench my curiosities (temporarily anyways), worked on some bleeding edge computational biology here for 15 months as part of the Human Genome Project, then moved to NYC for more school here in 2005.

After watching my friends decide to pursue more education or join banks, I decided to hold out. After the tireless hours and sleepless nights in the CS labs, there had to be a future better than that. I couldn’t envision myself wearing a tie while banging away at the keyboard while some prick yelled over my shoulder.

After a couple months of unemployment I joined a 3-man team here as the first engineering hire (Tony Jebara, director of machine learning at Columbia, and Sandy Pentland, former head of the MIT Media Lab and current head of human dynamics research at MIT, are co-founders). We built a great team and had fast times, building a location analytics platform and a couple mobile apps, including this. We ended up closing a Series B with Intel Capital, and continued to build.

Fast-forward a few years, the world of the technology startup had opened up to me, and I’ve caught the bug. I’m now at an early-stage NYC startup yet again enjoying building things and technology and products from the ground up, this time around the hot social media space. Work is play. I work on a couple things in my spare time too. I’m still looking to catch the big fish, but in the meantime I’m loving the journey and learning everyday.

Avid master of traveling (Hong Kong, India, Singapore, backpacking across Europe, scuba diving with sharks off the islands of Turks & Caicos), and grew up skiing on the slopes of Vancouver. I support charity:water and Startup Visa. You can reach me here and follow me here.

The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer past or present.