Vinay Sridhar
About Me
I grew up in Bangalore and now live in Brooklyn with my wife, dog and daughter. I like culture, community and technology, and love when they intersect. I currently lead product for a new business at Reddit. In the past, I worked in media technology, management consulting and government. I studied engineering and business in college. See my Linkedin for more on my professional and academic life.
In my free time, I consume all kinds of content, work on projects, take photographs, compete in trivia tournaments, collect art and cook South Indian food. I also advise two non-profits: Right To Live in Bangalore and ProblemSolvers Labs in New York
Thoughts
Go here to read reflections of books I've enjoyed. Go here for a collection of my photographs. I also codified the principles I try to live by.
I sometimes write about ideas I've explored; a few are listed below. My wife and cousin are my captive peer reviewers so if you vehemently disagree with something, please direct questions at them.
- Reflections on Urban India (Feb 2025)
- On Magisteria and Authority: Science, Folk Wisdom and Human Experience (Jan 2025)
- On LLMs, learning and education (Dec 2024)
- The
MediumTechnology is theMessageSkill (Nov 2024) - My Dog's Utility Function (Oct 2024)
- IVF and Scientific Adoption Curves (Dec 2023)
- Holy Cows and Water Buffaloes (Sep 2023)
- Family Conflict, Humanism and Formalism (Jul 2023)
- On Indians who follow the US Elections (Jul 2018; published in the Indian Express)
- Modern India's first business leaders (Jun 2018; published in Business Standard)
Interests
I have brief obsessions about a range of things, and develop quick and loosely-held opinions. This is an incomplete list of my Roman Empires:
- Happiness, satisfaction and ambition
- The business of consumer and media technology
- Cities, urban planning and architecture
- Morality and religion in daily life
- Politics of science and scientific progress
- Nature and our relationship with the wild
- Contemporary art, especially from Indian artists
- Gen Z and Gen Alpha
subcultures - How wealthy Indians live (I'm serious)
Projects
I've started making things -- some physical, some digital -- in my spare time as a new hobby. A few recent projects:
- Lemma: A Card Game for Overthinkers™: A card game about messy situations in your lives. Learn more here
- Perspicacity AI: A RAG to answer questions about me based on this website. Mainly did this to learn how RAGs work, and serve the 1 DAU who would actually use this [Try it out!]
- AI Podcast Editor: Shorten podcast episodes by summarizing host questions and recreating it in a new voice while keeping the guest content unchanged. Sample before/after snippets from an episode of The Seen and The Unseen. [View code on GitHub]
- AI Audio Prescriptions: An app for doctors in India to automatically create an audio explainer for Hindi-speaking patients. It converts an English medical prescription into an audio file in Hindi that describes each medicine and dosage instructions. [View code and sample input/outputs on GitHub]
- [In Progress] An app that lets children create their own bedtime stories in different styles e.g., tell me a story about a dog called Skip in the style of Beatrix Potter
Contact
Email me here.
Last updated: Apr 2024