about.

👋 I'm Kanishk.

I build products. Right now that's mostly PointsCasa.

Before this I was a PM. Before that, a recruiter. I was kinda bad at it.

How I got here

Grew up in Delhi. Went to Bangalore for college, did a BBA, and spent most of it doing theatre and business fests instead of going to class.

Came out convinced I wanted to be a recruiter.

That lasted six months.

I'd joined TopHire because the founders were young and I liked their landing page. Half a year in I knew recruiting wasn't it. Gave it another year anyway. Maybe I only hated it because I was bad at it? Turned out that was about half true.

Then I found product management at TopHire. Wanted it immediately.

Told my manager I was quitting. She asked why. Instead of quitting, I got a trial as a PM.

It stuck.

Learned SQL over a weekend because my boss made fun of me for not knowing it. Was the only PM there for most of two years, so I did the interfaces, the analytics, the docs and some of the code.

Leaving

Early 2023 I started wondering if I could build something myself instead of helping someone else build theirs.

Put in my papers in February. Gave myself till the end of the year to save up and finish what I'd started. Left on December 31st.

Could I code? No.

Learned badly. Shipped anyway.

Now

PointsCasa is the main thing. Award flights and hotel stays across 15+ programs, with your bank, airline and hotel points in one wallet.

It's what I expect to be working on for the next five to ten years.

Also live:

• HowsThisGoing, standups in Slack
• VPNonly, one Mac app on a VPN instead of the whole machine

Two things that stuck

Couldn't speak English confidently as a kid. Did theatre through college until I could. A friend introduced me as a "great orator" recently. Still makes me laugh.

A professor once told me I talk well but lack depth. Been trying to disprove that ever since.

You can read what I've written, or find me on Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub.