What is this strange name?
And who am I?
Always a weird thing to toot my own horn, but here’s a quick timeline on me and my professional life.
First off, this is me: Hrishi Dixit.
I’ve been in the tech-startup world since early 1999, and in tech in general a tad longer, since 1996. Most, if not all, of that time was spent building software - starting with some pre-Internet-era embedded software in the mid-90s, riding the dot-com riot in San Francisco for about 6 years starting 1999, and then for almost 2 decades in Manhattan, which is where I have been living and working since 2006.
Over the last 15 years or so, I have been in founding CTO roles at a couple of fintech startups in NYC, most recently at Yieldstreet, a private-market investment startup. Just prior to this, I did a similar rodeo at another NYC-based fintech - LearnVest - from 2009 to 2015. LearnVest was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in 2015 for about 350M, one of the biggest fintech exits at the time.
In the few NYC years before LearnVest, me and a few of my old SF buddies ran a small boutique software development firm called Gordian Labs (which we hope to someday resurrect as a seed fund). We loved building stuff together, particularly 0 to 1 bootstraps, and often did it for just equity. Those projects didn't pay the bills, but were a blast to work on, and occasionally worked out well, like LearnVest, or Twilio! (In fact, one of the Gordian principals went on to become a Twilio co-founder.)
TL;DR: I have always loved building stuff :) Early-stage startups, building and scaling both systems and teams from scratch, is what I really love to do. I’ve been doing it for close to 20 years now in operational roles as CTO, technical architect, engineering manager, and software engineer.
Now, about two decades into the NYC startup ecosystem, I’ve gathered enough battle scars and, um, exit wounds, to write about these. Hence this little publication. Someone somewhere may find it helpful, or at least, entertaining.
As for the name — here’s my ramble about it:
