Hey folks, I’m Apu 👋

I’m co-founder & CTO at koodos, where we build Shelf: a home for your digital self, used by millions of people on iOS and Android. Before that I founded Sidetrack, an Entrepreneur First-backed startup reining in out-of-control cloud compute costs, led teams at Improbable and studied engineering at Cambridge.

Engineer by day 🛠, clown/stand-up comedian by night 🎙, based in New York City 🗽

📚 What I’m building

Big tech holds the most complete picture of who you are, but you can’t see it, correct it or take it with you. At koodos we’re flipping that by building personal context infrastructure: the richest personal context model there is, controlled by the person it represents, so AI actually works for you.

🎤 Talks & podcasts

• Supabase Select 2026 – Agentic memory without the vector store with Luis Fernandez, alongside Steve Wozniak, Andrew Ng, Garry Tan, Parag Agrawal and Amjad Masad
• Owners Not Renters, Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian’s podcast – on personal data, AI and owning your context with Raffi and Jad Esber
• MozFest 2025, Barcelona – Context is All You Need: The Collective Land Grab Reshaping the Internet with Mozilla.ai CEO John Dickerson and Jad

✍️ Writing

• Beyond Digital Exhaust: Reclaiming Agency in the Context Economy – a paper with Mozilla on personal context and the future of AI
• The Next Phase of the Data Economy – an SSRN Top Ten paper with Jad, Scott Duke Kominers, Scott Belsky, Doc Searls and others
• Thriving as a Founding Engineer – a guest post for Gergely Orosz’s The Pragmatic Engineer
• The edge of glory – how we accidentally halved our API latency while trying to fix a bug
• Case studies on scaling Shelf with Supabase and OneSignal

Plus tech on Technically Thinking and life on Tranquil Thoughts.

🧪 Side projects

• ⏰ ProgressBar – a Windows taskbar app that shows your day and year progress. Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty Product of the Year 🥇
• 🎙 London Standup Comedy Map – free and paid comedy nights to perform at in London

👋 Say hi

I love to help where I can, especially mentoring folks who are underrepresented or early-career. I’ve mentored founders at SXSW and on First Round’s Fast Track, and judged startups at MassChallenge and MIT Reality Hack. Grab time with me, or find me (and my favourite programming memes) on X and LinkedIn.