I am, by most measures, bad at the things that are supposed to matter — networking, self-promotion, operating. I am a thinker in a world that rewards operators. And yet here I am, building anyway.
The Long Way Around
I started in computer science because that's what you did if you were good at math and bad at knowing what you wanted. Then political science, because I got curious about why people make the choices they do — not individually, but in groups, in systems, under pressure. Then quantitative finance, because I wanted to understand markets, which are really just collective behavior with a price tag.
Now behavioral science, because after all that wandering, I realized the question I'd been circling was always the same:
Why do people do what they do, and can we design around it?
It looks scattered on paper. It didn't feel scattered. It felt like I kept leaving rooms because I couldn't find the question I was actually trying to answer.
The Thinker Problem
Here's something I've had to make peace with: I am not an operator. I don't sustain execution at the level operators do. I see patterns, connections, the shape of things before they exist. But turning that into something real — the grind, the follow-through, the thousand small decisions — that's not where I live.
For years this felt like a deficiency. Everyone around me was shipping, scaling, grinding. I was thinking.
Un-Dios is my answer to that. Not by becoming an operator, but by finding a different way. I'm building an entire Android platform without writing a line of code myself — working through Claude, through AI agents, through whatever tools let me translate vision into artifact without pretending to be someone I'm not.
Is it cheating? Maybe. Is it working? So far.
On Respect
I used to think I wanted respect. That was the word I kept using. Respect over money. Respect over titles. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that "respect" was a stand-in for something else.
These five things, bundled together, looked like "respect" from the outside. But they're not the same thing.
More than any of that, though, what I want is to not be reduced. Not flattened into someone else's category. Not mutated into a label that makes me easier to process.
Once I realized that, about 90% of my behavior made sense.
What I'm Actually Doing
I lead a research team at Glance. We work on lockscreens, smart TVs, ambient displays — the surfaces where attention is thin and design has to earn every second. I've helped ship products to millions of users across India, Japan, the US. I have patents on AI creative analysis, trust scoring systems, cognitive load management. I'm working on a doctorate about social comparison and network mobility.
But the thing I'm most interested in right now is Un-Dios.
It's an open convergence platform for Android. Think Ubuntu-style desktop experience meets Android's app ecosystem. Your phone becomes a real computer — terminal interface, window management, workspace switching — without needing a custom ROM or root access. Just an APK.
I'm building it because Samsung DeX exists and is locked to Samsung. Because Motorola Ready For exists and is locked to Motorola. Because I want the customization depth of Linux and the app ecosystem of Android and I don't want to ask anyone's permission to have both.
It's also, if I'm honest, me proving to myself that a thinker can build.
The Uncomfortable Parts
I am extraordinarily bad at networking. I know its value — after a certain point, everything is network. Where you live, what you eat, your next job, your kids' school. All of it. Decades of relationship-building, compounding quietly in the background.
I know this. I still don't do it. Something about it feels like wearing a costume that doesn't fit. I'd rather play devil's advocate in a real conversation than work a room. I'd rather write to strangers on the internet than collect LinkedIn connections.
Maybe that's a mistake. Probably it is. But I've accepted that I'm not going to out-network anyone, so I need to figure out my own thing.
This site is part of that. Writing is part of that. Building in public, awkwardly, is part of that.
What I Want
My own category.
Not "Director of Research" — though I am one. Not "Behavioral Scientist" — though that's closer. Not "the non-developer building an Android platform with AI" — though that's true too.
Something that holds all of it without flattening any of it. A space that's mine. A way of working that fits how I actually think, not how I'm supposed to operate.
I don't have it yet. But I'm building toward it.