Surya Polisetty

I’m the co-founder and CTO of Mindlabs. We build the hardware, firmware, cloud and AI systems that let companies see and act on what is happening across their physical operations, in real time. Since we started, that has become more than 100,000 IoT devices in the field and a business past $2M in revenue.

I’m responsible for the technology end to end — circuit boards, embedded firmware, the distributed backend, and the AI layer on top of it, which is where most of my attention goes now — and for a good deal of what surrounds it: the engineering team, enterprise deployments, where and how we manufacture, what we charge. Very little of that came with the title. There isn’t a layer on that list I haven’t been deep inside, and not one I hold alone today.

The habit underneath all of that is starting beneath a problem rather than inside it — understanding why a thing is built the way it is before deciding what to do about it. It predates the job: three years of independent research in mathematical logic and physics, before I came back to industry. Building was never the point on its own; it is what tends to follow once you understand something well enough to see a better version of it.

What I have optimised for since is capability rather than comfort or title — being able to take on problems the earlier version of me could not have. If I can learn a thing, build it, or lead it, I have rarely found a good reason not to.