In the past, I've made a video describing my three year self learning experience after dropping out of the college. This article is a continuation to it. I actually planned for a make a video on describing the details for my future plans but thought this blog would be more appropriate for it.
First of all, why am I writing this? Whom I'm trying to impress - actually no-one. The thing is I want this article to set as a vision statement for what I've been brewing in mind since 2019 and lay is straight upfront to everyone whom I want to associate with my work so it become easy for them to understand why I'm doing what I'm doing. Also, during my interaction with my friends and family, I received numerous weird reaction on me telling them I'm a dropout (but I understand its a new thing for them). So hopefully, this will serve both purpose.
Starting with story, I've already talked what my childhood was like in the video. So, I'm not going to repeat it and come straight to point in which I want to expand within coming 10 years.
Create an independent media - research company in space science.
Make P2P file transferring easier for general public and create tools for media houses requiring high bandwidth.
A Data analytics company that could provide meaningful insight to individuals, farmers, etc.
Long behold since the beginning of mankind we always wondered what's in the sky and why do we even exist on this blue pale dot?
Since childhood, I've been fascinated with Nat-Geo and Discovery's space documentaries. Especially the *Cosmos *and Into the wormhole. So, growing up I knew I have to do something in it. But before 2016, there was no jio revolution. So, access to information was pretty low and all the option that I knew at that point of time was joining NASA and ISRO which to be honest are pretty tough to crack. Also, I had that feeling when I was of age 14 years that I don't want to be in backstage. As the time passed, the idea of doing something in the space science got cornered somewhere in mind and I started learning programming which I liked quite a bit and as of today i.e 2022 I know JS, Serverless stack and currently learning Go and Rust.
Starting from 2018-19, I've been actively watching many science creator channel like Veritasium, PBS space time and all other creator. Amongst all, the journey of Linus Sebastian aka Linus Tech Tips amused me the most. I mean he went from graduating his college to now employing 50+ people and earning millions of dollars "just" by the power of his YouTube channel. Something clicked in my mind and that feeling came back in 2020-2021 of wanting to explore in astronomy. This is indeed the most perfect way of how I wanted the things to carry out. Before 2015, I thought you can't make money out of it but here I was proven wrong. So at the beginning of this year(2022), I thought about how to go now onward and here's some of the overview.
One of thing that I observed is that there are indeed explanatory video on every aspect of space science but they don't go very deep and also there's not a lot of structured courses/material that could make you sufficiently good enough that you could right your own thesis or research paper without going to university. This is actually the reality of the software IT world which is build on open source and high quality coding tutorial is available for free and cheap cost.
There's tons of things that are worth discussing with regards to astronomy but in the first two years we'll just experiment on the various topics to see what works and which is more complicated. For any business to survive, having a strong distribution is essential. So, in the beginning we want to making series on the things that general audience might have thought in some way. And as we gain more and more audience, we'll create an online platform that help anyone to understand relativity, Black holes, computation in satellite imagery, etc. Basically we want people to be a self taught astrophysicist without the need of expensive college degrees. I'm pretty sure this hasn't been done before in a scale and this is something we want to bring our own uniqueness to it. This is also important in terms of keeping the company financially up-float.
I've always questioned that why the tech companies move so fast but the many scientist work tirelessly till their hair turns grey but still not able to get the recognition they deserve and why things move so slowly in astronomy. For tech companies the ROI are much instantaneous whereas in case of Mathematics and Astrophysics which runs primarily on donations, things takes at least 50-100 years to come in daily life. Look at the quantum computers, the first quantum phenomena were found in early 1900's but its now that we are able to use it. So clearly, Astrophysics isn't wastage of our money. But we need to speed things up like moore's law. In coming years, we aspire to bring great minds together and compensate them well enough to achieve high efficiency like neuralink and do our independent research.
And I'm confident enough that all of these could be achieved in next 2-3 years while keeping this venture completely bootstrapped as I don't want to opt for venture capital.
Coming to second venture, I'll only begin it once we have the systems and process to run above mentioned stuff neatly so I can focus on it. When I started learning coding I watch the film Social Network which is glorified movie of how FB started. While learning basics of webdev I thought facemash is a great stuff to make just for coding practice and possibly make money out of it. First of all it took a lot of time for me to be familiar with AWS. You might ask what AWS has to do here? Well my goal was to build scalable application from start and learning AWS took almost a year. By that time, I was just not into the idea of making facemash. The thing is Facemash is basically like tinder which I'm not into. So I dropped that idea.
But in mid 2021, I happen to saw a demo of webRTC which is a P2P way of communication. Given though, I was aware of privacy concerns regarding FB, Whatsapp, etc. I thought maybe we need something like that especially for sharing files. Texting is fast but sharing large file isn't. Take for example the gigabit broadband has reached in all major cities in India but there aren't as many services that could take advantage of it. If you want to share a large file to your friend, probably, you'd use google drive, dropbox, etc and then share the links with your friend or coworkers in which you need to wait for files to be unzipped and pay for storage cost. Let say even if you do this, the bandwidth (upload speed) is capped around 300-400 Mbps by these providers which doesn't fully utilise gigabit speed. I mean why can't send file as easily as I text someone no matter how big that file is.
I've been inspired by BitTorrent and WebRTC protocol to make this happen. But I realise both aren't ideal to what I want to build. WebRTC uses array buffers which makes it slow. BitTorrent is fast but has no access control i.e anyone with torrent file or magnet link can download the file. So currently I'm discovering what tools/process are available that I use to build a P2P connection that could truly saturate 1, 10 or even 100 Gbps connectivity. I want to target mostly media/content creators who want security and fast access to the file for collaboration. Also there's other aspect to it like faster cloud migration, multi cloud storage, mounting cloud storage as drives, etc. So there's a lot of networking and building of custom protocols involved here which I'm studying and hopefully to develop such application with Go/Rust.
Lastly it's about data analytics. This is the which I'll doing at last as it required millions of Dollars in R&D. This was the time in 2019, when I was lying on my bed in afternoon and casually a thought came in my mind that why don't we have automated todo list app in which we don't need to fill it, it does automatically understand what we need and based upon it, it should alert us accordingly. Just think about for a moment. Most of our time pretty much goes into online world. Every scroll, touch, likes are being recorded to serve you relevant ads. Instagram know more about you more than your parents i.e whom do you like, how many times do you visit your crush's profile, etc. You get the point what I'm trying to say.
So, why not to use all those data about yourself and use it to create positive habits and goals that you want to achieve and based on your data we'll help you to slowly and effectively steer your habits for better life and be productive in your work. Lets say If we know where do you live, what do you eat, how many family members you have, we can auto generate list of item to take on grocery stores so you don't need to worry about it. If you want to go to holiday, we can fetch you the info which allows you to enjoy your holiday in best way. These are just few of the many examples. It can be also used in stock market and especially for farmers to enable them with right information that's needed to them.
But whats worries me the most is how people will react to the privacy issue. For that, I think is better to open source it for ensuring trust and keep this on a freemium model for financial sustainability. This is still in ideation phase. We'll need to study the complexity of this problem to be sure what's coming ahead.
And all of these are something I want to achieve before I reach 30 and be financially free by 25 i.e having 3-4 Cr. INR in bank account for financial retirement. And amongst all, the first one is my utmost priority.
This is pretty much what my vision is. If you have any question, please let me know. Thanks...
