About

I’m Shobhit. These days I live in Bangalore with my wife — the last decade spent here, building software.

I grew up in Kanpur, in the 1990s — an ordinary, noisy industrial town, in a joint family that filled the house. My mother taught at a college; my father ran a business. From the outside you might picture something grand, but Kanpur then was a plainer, more primitive place, and most of what I carry I owe to two things that arrived early: books and curiosity.

My mother’s reading habit became mine — I worked through shelves of Indian writers before I really knew why. Then cable television brought the Discovery Channel, and I’d follow a single thread for weeks: geography into history into how the two had quietly shaped each other. I wanted to know how everything fit. Somewhere in there I found football, and I’ve supported Manchester United ever since.

Then, while I was still in school, I met a computer — and that bent my path for good.

I was never a class topper, but maths, physics and computers always came easily, and I enjoyed them thoroughly. I had a habit my wife still finds funny: I’d read only the theory and skip every solved example. Once the fundamentals clicked, I could build the rest myself. That has been my whole way of working — get the first principles right, and you can scale them as far as you like. I fell for computer science the way I’d fallen for everything else, by going to the source: the early papers, the people who built networks and distributed systems and data platforms. Those are still the things I love most.

I never really wanted a job. At college I started two things I cared about — a football culture and a programming club — and gave them as much time as my studies. But what I actually wanted was to build. So I skipped placements and joined a tiny startup, because building products and companies was the only thing that held me. My first company failed. The second became part of Gojek.

Gojek is where scale stopped being theoretical — hundreds of millions of transactions, thousands of services, a company growing faster than anyone could plan for. I learned what it actually costs to scale something, in systems and in people, and I learned it the way I learn everything: from the ground up.

That same instinct is what pulled me toward what I’m building now. I’ve come to believe technology is the real lever of change, and that the next shift — the one that finally makes software work for the person using it — is the agent. At Shovel we’re building toward a simple idea: that every person should have genuine agency over their digital life. Stevens, a personal agent for the family, is where that idea becomes something you can hold; it runs on the Creole Network, which keeps your data in your own hands. The belief underneath all of it is the one I started with in Kanpur — understand the fundamentals, and you can build anything on top.

Selected work

A short film, from my Gojek years