Rishi is one of our mentor on MentorCruise. Visit his profile now and get mentored by him: https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/RishiBhalodia/.
Hey Rishi! Before we get started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I am a curious learner and a perfection-seeking artist, who turned into a coder. I wish to bring Deep learning technologies to agritech in India. I’m a co founder of init27 labs and will soon be releasing an Computer Vision Project based practitioner’s guide.
Oh also, I’m a third year undergraduate.
Over the years, you have worked on several different exciting projects and have collected a lot of experience. How did you get started? How did you get your first job?
During our Freshman year, unlike our classmates, Sanyam and I wanted to be productive during our vacations. We ended up applying to every single company and lab that was offering internships in the space.
We were extremely lucky to get selected at one of the highest reputed Companies in our country — ONGC.
Together with one of our other mentors, Sanyam, you founded Init27. How did you get the idea?
We’re from cities that you won’t see on your TV, but we’ve been lucky enough to make it to a uni that claims to be on of the best in India. Still, we felt that there is a huge gap between learning and applying. We pride ourselves by calling ourselves to be Engineers, but we haven’t ‘Engineered’ anything.
So rather than sitting and complaining about the system, we decided to do something about it. We’re just a tiny Medium publication for now but Sanyam and I are keen on expanding into the YouTube space. I can promise that we’ll make sure we share cutting edge learning resources for free, forever.
What do you think is important in a co-founder?
I think it’s not the idea, it’s the people. Both of us complement our skills really well. Sanyam is a geek-he is good at his Nerdy stuff and a great Coder.
I’m a Designer and perfectionist. We both supplement our abilities and are great communicators.
I think you should be a good team, and you should understand your team’s shortcomings and your own too and figure out how to make them your strengths.
What is the best advice you can give to a young coder/entrepreneur who wants to found his own company?
Go crazy, listen to your heart. Don’t let other people tell you what to do.
Fail Big, Fail often, Fail Forward.
You have your complete 20s to fail and your 30s to fix it. You get one life, you better make it worth it.
Why did you decide to become a mentor?
I share Sanyam’s philosophy in giving back. We’re from small beginnings. We’re from towns where even though internet connections max out at 50Kbps, a GTX 1070 would cost you a 1000$.
TL;DR: We aren’t from a place with cutting edge technology.
Personally, I’m grateful to being exposed to such techniques at Fast.ai and I didn’t want to be selfish with these techniques.
I want to share and help anyone improve in this space. I want to give back the knowledge to the community, just like Experts better than myself have been teaching me.
Now that you are a mentor — who would you like to mentor? What is your desired mentee like?
I’m a Deep Learning Nerd. So anyone who loves this space — who would like to convert caffeine into code.
I want to be open to all, anyone who is excited about this space is welcomed.
We’d also be happy to push your content on Our init27 publication.
Thanks for having me on board.