Ten years of Hasgeek

I was a Tech lead/Manager at VMware from 2008-2011. I was thinking of starting up, and i first got excited about Android in 2010. Hasgeek provided an excellent community to give techies voice and recognition (Hasgeek events were cool, and kept a high bar for quality). More importantly, I could meet with other enthusiastic tech/design/data folks in Bangalore. I have so many memories of meeting folks at Hasgeek events, especially chatting oustside the audi while sessions were going on, those were the best conversations! I also got inspired by some of the work and presentations, they taught me what we’re capable of doing if we are motivated. Even though i didn’t even work in some of the areas (e.g. jsFoo or 5th elephant), I would try to come to the events.

HasGeek ended up being a great way for me to go deeper on Android and meet experts, something that was really helpful in 2011-2013 when Android was nascent. I met startup founders in a casual environment (as opposed to meeting them for a job of for funding). I recruited people through HasGeek when i was doing my own startup and when i was managing a team at Flipkart. And most interesting of all, i discovered a small pre-funding startup called Little Eye Labs that was presenting about battery consumption, right when my team was building an eBook reader and we were struggling to measure battery! I connected right away and became their (possibly most vocal) alpha customer. I liked them so much that when Flipkart shut down Flyte, I joined Little Eye, happened to get in the door at Facebook, and that led to our acquisiotion in 2014. I’ve been at Facebook for 5 years (and learned a TON) and now lead an Android team at WhatsApp.

I love connecting dots backward, and HasGeek clearly played a huge part in my professional journey. Thank you!