Describe your most meaningful experience and why it matters to you

“Uhh… why are you inside a trashcan?” I nearly banged my head looking up at the stranger confronting me. “Err… It’s for our hackathon project” I said sheepishly.

It was my first hackathon and my team was trying to make a smart trashcan that could automatically sort between different items. I was just a freshman at the time, and a finance major at that, but I tried to make up for my lack of coding prowess however I could. I dumpster dived in trashcans to get items to train our computer vision models. I crafted our pitch and learned bits and pieces of React Native to hack together a basic analytics app.

I’d love to tell you that this was the start of an incredible business. The truth is that after the hackathon my team and I worked tirelessly on the project for months, interviewed dozens of potential customers, launched a pilot around campus, and then… failed to get any traction and ran out of money before we could hit any semblance of product market fit.

But it’s this humble story that caused me to switch majors to CS and made me fall in love with building products. And yes, I may not be building trashcans anymore. But whether its been crafting stock trading strategies to increase financial inclusivity, or working on products to improve mental health, the lessons I’ve learned from this experience: dealing with failure, being customer obsessed, and figuring out how I can uniquely drive value, have been foundational.

— Rishub Nahar