People I’m Long On

Judging a company is easy by comparison. There is a price, a cap table, a growth rate, and a crowd of people who have already done the work of forming a view. Judging a person before any of that exists is the harder problem, and it is the one I find more interesting.

These are four people I have known well enough, and long enough, to have watched the thing happen rather than hear about it afterwards. None of them is a headline. Each of them, in my reading, is mispriced.

Chinmay Moghe

Author, playwright, and a one-man publishing house. Pune.

He wrote and published an epic at seventeen — Shivpratap, a full mahakavya, out of a Marathi-medium school. By nineteen he had written Tathagat, a 340-page first-person biography of the Buddha and the first of its kind in Marathi, and had a commercial Sangeet play, Chandrapriya, in production. Most Marathi authors debut in middle age with one thin book.

Then he did the thing authors almost never do. He noticed that a writer keeps a small royalty while the publisher keeps the rest and controls printing, pricing and distribution — and rather than resent that split for a career, he founded Samar Publication and became his own publisher at around twenty. He now competes with houses that have run for decades, alone, with no team and no office, and outsells plenty of them.

I have known Chinmay since he was fourteen, about ten years, well before any of this looked like it would work. He is one of my closest friends, so I have seen the writer and the playwright and the publisher, not a summary of them.

What I would point at is how he connects things that do not obviously belong together. He saw the festival gifting spike and said, out loud, that people were buying books to give rather than to read — then rebuilt his distribution around gifting before anyone else would have called it more than seasonality. I watched that insight form in real time. He moves between literature, theatre and unit economics inside the same sentence.

He was schooled in Marathi. He now publishes in English, a language he was never taught in.

Bhabani Shankar Mohapatra

Designer, engineer, founder. Built an EV charging company from a dorm room and sold it at 24.

From a tier-3 town with no design exposure, he chose design over the mechanical engineering branch he had been allotted, became Design Head of the E-Cell at IIT Guwahati, and placed at a top design company — while his peers followed the branch they were given.

Then he started Evy Energy from his dorm room in the middle of the pandemic, building EV charging software while campus was shut and his cohort did internship and placement prep. gradCapital backed it before he graduated, and he walked away from a confirmed placement to go all in while his classmates were signing offer letters. Evy scaled past 3,000 charging ports and was acquired by Zemetric in the US two years out of college. Most funded companies from that wave died in the winter; I can count comparable exits from his batch on one finger.

Bhabani and I worked together for at least two years — first at the E-Cell, where he was my Design Head, and then on my bachelor thesis, where I picked him as my partner specifically to learn how he thinks. With no biomedical background between us, we designed prosthetic implants using metal 3D printing. I watched him pull ideas from product design into implant geometry, and from aesthetics into manufacturing constraints, quickly and without ceremony. He applies his mind across fields that are not supposed to touch.

And all through that he was running Evy from the dorm, completely absorbed, building between thesis sessions day after day. That absorption is the part you cannot see from the outside.

Pranav Hari

VC analyst turned open source project lead.

He was at the top of the national inter-school quiz circuit, then IIT Madras, then BCG with a top rating, then a tier-1 VC analyst seat at Lightspeed. Each of those moves is common on its own. What is not common is what he did from inside the seat: in his final stretch at Lightspeed he started shipping open source on nights and weekends, through one of the most demanding jobs in Indian venture. Around 2,200 GitHub contributions in a trailing year.

Then he left to build Muesli full time — an MIT-licensed, open source alternative to Granola and WisprFlow for macOS. It has 780+ stars, 78 forks, 1,100+ commits, 43 releases, and distribution on Homebrew. Granola and WisprFlow are venture-funded teams. Muesli is one person leading an open community, and it is free.

I met Pranav at BCG, where we were peers, and marked him within a couple of conversations — because he knew something real about everything we touched, not trivia. He is a genuine polymath: he knows ML and AI properly, he codes and ships, and he understands people. Very few have even two of those, and the Lightspeed contributions and Muesli prove all three are real.

He connects random dots by default. His thread calling frontier models the chicxulub moment for Indian IT services ties an asteroid extinction to AI economics to Indian services in a single argument; talking to him about anything feels like that. He still quizzes, and still wins, twenty years after the school circuit. Talented people collect around him, and the density of the people around him is itself a read on how his peers rate him.

GitHub · pranavhari.com · @pHequals7

Viknesh

IIT Madras, Goldman, Kellogg, BCG, and then a systematic trading desk.

Two top global internships before graduating, in unrelated domains — a Goldman Sachs quant strategist internship, then a research internship at Kellogg. Most of his batch chased one kind of seat; he cleared two very different ones.

Joining BCG from IIT is common. Leaving it for systematic high-frequency trading is not. Those desks hire out of maths and CS, and consultants essentially never cross over. He crossed over to Graviton Research Capital, one of India’s serious HFT shops, working on medium-frequency strategies across F&O and equity markets, and stayed.

My read on why this matters: smart people change orbits easily, because most of what looks like domain expertise is pattern recognition, and pattern recognition transfers. Viknesh has demonstrated that transfer four times, each time into a harder room, and each time by becoming credible in a field he had no formal training in and staying there. That is a cognitive story, not a credential story — and it is the kind that compounds quietly for a long time before anyone reprices it.

Written up from notes I made for myself. Everything here is my own reading of people I know, and the achievements described are theirs and public; the judgements are mine.