Certain question invariably come up during the first phase of getting to know someone. It can be annoying to have to repeat the answers to those questions every time you meet a new person. With this post, I want to give you the answers to the most frequently asked questions about me, so we can skip the small-talk and go into more depth when we actually meet.

What’s my work exactly?

I conceive, architect & build software. During the day I build fleet and customer management applications at Mercedes-Benz Vans Mobility (a corporate startup of the German car company Daimler). In the evenings and on the weekend, I focus on my own passion project NoGame (an app that supports singles in their pursuit of romantic partners without online dating).

Where am I from and what is my culture/religion?

I was born to an Indian mother and a German father. Growing up I spent a lot of time in India but nevertheless the only place in the world that really feels like home is Berlin. I do not have a strong national identity and celebrate the role of being a cultural outcast. I follow an eclectic tradition of Yoga and meditation developed by Shrii Shrii Anandamurti which has a lot of overlap with Hinduism and Buddhism.

How did I end up with all those career switches?

Until my mid-20s I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. I thought it made sense to focus on an important problem and the most important problem I saw was global poverty. So I studied economics, worked for some pretty famous professors at J-PAL in India and enrolled in a PhD program at Yale University. During that time I found out that I was actually much more passionate about entrepreneurship, art and documentary film than about economics. So I dropped out of the PhD program and started exploring all these other avenues. I made a few films, worked at an advertisement agency and started coding at hackathons. With the help of online education, I taught myself the ropes of web development and started realizing ideas for apps on the internet. Creating a piece of technology from a mere vision was clearly the most challenging, fun, meaningful and rewarding thing I had done until then. So at the age of 27 I finally decided to be a software engineer and entrepreneur. Thanks to Van Gogh for the encouragement – he was the same age when he decided to become a painter and maybe I would not have done it without knowing that.

Am I a pickup artist?

I prefer offline over online dating and I believe that offline dating requires certain skills and mindsets that can be acquired. I also believe that words are mere shells that often cannot do justice to a phenomenon. A more detailed discussion can be found here.

What are my favorite books and movies?

Apart from the experiences we make ourselves, we are heavily shaped by the ideas we consume through media. I want the world to have an idea of what has shaped my thinking and my personality. So I created two lists of all the books and all the movies that I can remember having read or watched respectively. I also added comments and ratings for the most impressive titles so that you can derive recommendations from it.

Why am I obsessed with real-world interaction between strangers?

I believe that the progress of mankind depends on its ability to coordinate cooperation between people who do not know each other well. I want to increase the wealth in our world, by creating systems that allow strangers to trust each other and exchange values.

I am particularly interested in immaterial values like personal growth, learning and love. I believe that these are becoming increasingly valuable as we enter an age of material and informational abundance.

We have already gotten quite good at interacting with strangers in virtual online worlds. But in the real world there are still huge opportunities for creating enriching interactions: The public spaces of the modern city often feel awkward and solitary and we still do not trust strangers enough to interact with them in those contexts. I have been obsessed with this problem ever since I was a teenager and therefore decided to dedicate my life to it.

Why do I have a personal website but no social media?

Social media distracts me from creating. When I was still on Instagram and Facebook I spent very little time creating content and a lot of time consuming it. It made me think about other people and their opinions way too much and it became a way to kill time when I was not motivated enough to do my life’s actual work.

I do like to express myself but I do not want to do it in an environment that is controlled by a company that has an incentive to make the experience addictive and lecherous. A personal website is a more appropriate online home for my ideas and experiences. You are always welcome to come in and check out what is going on in my life but there is no middle man trying to pull you in because he has put advertisement all over my walls.

I also believe the best way to understand the world is to interact with it directly. Books, movies and social media are fun and can be educative but ultimately they only allow you to see the world through someone else’s eyes or through heavy filters. To develop your own beliefs and gain conviction in them you need to experience things first hand and meet people in the real world.

Why do I write?

I recently discovered the work of David Perell and also read the biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Matthew McConaughey. It all made me realize that most people who change the world write a lot. I think it makes sense for three reasons:

Writing improves my thinking. In fact, for me, real deep thinking can only happen when I write, because I cannot keep a long thread of logical thought just in my head without getting stuck or lost in circles. When I consolidate my existing thoughts through writing, I can also think further and have more advanced ideas when I am not writing.

Another benefit of writing is that it allows other people to access my ideas and my ideas to spread. This is important for me as an entrepreneur. I am building new products for new problems so I need people to hear about and understand my solutions for them to get adopted. Even if I do not see the changes that I envision in my own lifetime, someone else can build on my ideas and refine or implement them in the future.

And lastly, writing is a fun way to chronicle my life. It will make it easier for me to remember the excitement and spirit of my youth and tell the stories to my grandchildren. It will also be of immense help for whoever might decide to write a biography about me some day 😉