Rishi Kundargi

San Francisco, CA

Hi! My name's Rishi Kundargi. I've come to think of myself as a technical generalist in the tech world. See: “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. How did I get here?

I've asked my mother extensively what I wanted to be when I grow up. Apparently, it was a professional skier at first. Then I got more realistic - professional tennis. The first real job I wanted as a teenager was to research particle physics - specifically fusion. That passion came from the PPPL - the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. The National Science Bowl was hosted there for regionals, and I spent all my free time wandering and reading. It truly fascinated me.

Then I got into doing stuff like “integrate the magnetic flux over the northern hemisphere of spheroid” and realized I didn't like physics all that much anyways. This was my senior year of high school. So basically right as I was applying to college - I had no idea what I wanted to do. Typical teenager issues.

I knew I was good at math. I was good at science. I liked tangible things. Something in the engineering world made sense - I also liked stability. I ended up applying undecided engineering to a lot of my early applications. Halfway through, I switched. For all my main schools - I applied as a double major in Computer Science and Economics. The computer science was mostly because I had coded some games over the years and I had found it pretty simple and enjoyable. The economics was because I had taken all the econ courses in my high school, and I actually enjoyed it. It felt practical - and in the wake of the 2020 election, it felt really important to know about economic issues. Money makes the world go round, and not fundamentally understanding it felt like I was falling behind.

After a long tumultuous decision process, I ended up majoring in CS + Econ at the University of California, Berkeley. I won't get into it now - but this was the single best thing that's ever happened in my life.

Throughout college, I took courses in whatever piqued my interest. ML, Behavioral Economics, Game Theory, and even the history of the Middle East. Throughout all that - I also tried working in different industries. I was a consultant to CalPERS (the California State Retirement Fund). I was a fullstack software engineer at Amazon. I was a data platform product manager at Chime. All that is to say - I tried everything.

Post grad, I was stuck in the same boat. After trying everything, I really still had no idea what I loved. Life ended up working out for me anyways. I was driving to Yosemite to climb Half Dome when I got the offer to be a full time SWE at Coinbase. Honestly, at the time, I was elated. That was a real company - one that made significant changes to the world.

And it was great for what it was. Every company has its problems, and every company has the things it's great at. But at the core, I was missing something. I tend to think I have an ounce of charisma in me - and as a SWE, that was being wasted. Even worse, Coinbase was fully remote. There were no connections to anyone I worked with other than Slack. And as a young adult in a new city - that wasn't the life I wanted.

And that brings us to today. I'm currently the only developer advocate at Chalk. And you may be wondering - wtf is a developer advocate. To be honest, fuck if I know. Lee Robinson (a goat in devrel), has about the best piece on it I've ever seen here. But basically, I do everything engineering + marketing. My goal is to get people excited and knowledgable about Chalk. And it's a blast!