Why I'm Interested in Cryptography, Quantum Computing and AI

I've gotten a few DMs asking why my X and LinkedIn posts now mostly veer into cryptography, quantum computing, and AI. I know from the outside it might look like a sudden pivot, but to me, it feels like the next natural step in my explorations.

I've been privileged to get to follow my curiosities. Growing up as a small-town kid in India, I was fascinated by social, political, and economic history, thanks to my patient teachers at OP Jindal Modern School. However, there was one lesson by my history teacher that stuck: it's always the winners that get to write the final story. Looking back, it makes sense that the uncomfortable, everpresent tension between truth vs the hot narrative pulled me towards storytelling, media, and writing. Eventually, it would be via Ryerson's School of Journalism (now called The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan Uni), that I got to learn from some of the best Canadian media has had like Stuart Coxe, Shenaz Kermalli, Sonya Fateh, Kathleen Goldhar, and Lisa Gabriele.

Student politics in India and Canada taught me that entrepreneurship is probably the most effective lever we have available as a society to create lasting, measurable impact. To that end, I found myself obsessing over technology businesses and their interplay with impact. Getting to partner with Muhammad Lila to build Goodable was the opportunity of a lifetime.

When I discovered Ethereum and blockchains, it felt like a convergence of all my passions: history, economics, markets, social impact, technology and media - all stitched together. I knew instantly that Web 3.0 was where my future was going to be. Building companies and growing teams in the crypto industry at teams like Cyber (backed by Multicoin), Caldera (backed by Sequoia and Founders Fund) forced me to think deeply about incentive design, game theory and markets, but also about surveillance, anti-authoritarian technologies etc. Oh and learning from and experiencing new cultures alongside Ryan Li, who I believe is a generational founder, was special.

I'm a child of the internet; I watched it as it slowly enveloped our entire world. That vantage point, plus detours through media, history, entrepreneurship, and markets, shapes my prediction about the next few decades: the social, economic, political, and spiritual progress mankind has seen in the last 70-90 years (the post–New Deal era) will look small relative to what's coming in the next few years. I predict that we're entering an era of evolutionary acceleration, beginning with an intelligence explosion on track for the late 2020s, likely before 2028. If that lands, it will compress progress in both the world bits (markets, education, governance, software) and the world of atoms (space, physics, chemistry, genomics, biotech).

Quantum computing will likely be a force-multiplier in this acceleration, perhaps even a destabilizing 'boost' that will rewire our existing assumptions about our world across the board.

So no, my interest in these topics isn't sudden or a detour. AI, quantum computing, and cryptography sit squarely at the intersection of my long-standing curiosities and my present work. I feel lucky to explore them.

For now, I'm enjoying learning and writing about these things.