Aaditya Sood

Completely alien to Indian kids’ experience today, I had to fight my parents to get into engineering.

In the early to mid 90s, a software engineering career path in India didn’t exist. My parents preferred a government career path for me, but I was always a geeky kid, and it was love at first sight with the first computer I encountered.

When I was in fifth grade, my school, located in a small town in the Himalayas, got one computer. I was allowed just one hour of computer time a week and I couldn’t get enough. For six years I did only an hour a week and still, a lightbulb went off. I’d do all my programming in my head and on paper, and would subsequently use that one hour to do the best I could to code.

The concept of buying a PC back then was akin to buying a nuclear submarine – the idea was in the realm of preposterous. In fact, I almost failed school because of this obsession, because it’s all I cared about, and it was all consuming.

I started with programming in BASIC and along the way I got into writing 3D game engines on DOS. This entailed teaching myself a few more languages – C, x86 assembly, C++ (Ah, the heady days of TurboC & VGA graphics!). 

I chose Electronics as my college major, but ended up mostly hacking for various wacky ideas: neural networks on embedded boards, 8085 emulators, a CAM driver, few mini-languages – experimented a fair bit with LISP & Emacs. Founded my college’s Linux User Group, and fervently believed in the Free Software movement.

I went on to work for Oracle, then joined a startup as their first engineer, built a lot of good tech, joined Yahoo, joined another startup where I met my co-founder, and finally started calm.io – which Sequoia India invested in – and ended up being acquired by Nutanix in 2016. Those war stories for another time!