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 tech, 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, read and write book reviews, 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. These are the principles I try and live by.

Thoughts

I sometimes write about ideas I've explored; a few are listed below. My wife and cousin are my captive peer reviewers so if something is vehemently wrong, it's probably their fault.

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:

  • Consumer and media technology
  • Happiness, satisfaction and ambition
  • 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 like making things -- mostly digital, some physical -- in my spare time. A few recent projects:

  • An AI Shopping Assistant: A prototype to illustrate the kinds of products emerging agentic commerce protocols might enable. It's a brand new world, with a lot of cool tech being built. [Try it out!]
  • Lemma: A Card Game for Overthinkers™: A card game about messy situations in your lives. Learn more here
  • 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]
  • An AI Assistant: Along with what looks lke everybody with a paid Claude account in 2026, I made an *drumroll* AI assistant. Basically - a simple Telegram bot that triages my mail, summarizes my newsletters and flags mails I need to reply to. Entirely designed for my idiosyncracies, so don't think it's worth sharing. I find it really helpful and it requires minimal maintenance.
  • 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]
  • [Deprecated] Perspicacity AI: A RAG to answer questions about me based on this website. Built this to learn how RAGs work and test design choices for the pipeline (e.g., semantic vs lexical search quality, chunking approaches, embedding model options, ANN design etc). I try and ignore the fact that I am the only MAU for this product. [Try it out!]

Contact

Email me here.

Last updated: Mar 2026