2015 indeed started on a great note for me. I managed to get a 1-1 meeting with the Harnhua – Co-Founder at Plunify, a startup specialising in FPGAs and cloud computing based solutions for this space. Well, technically, they aren’t a startup anymore, just a small company. But from my talk with him, I understand that they are pretty much the startup that they set out to be. And probably have all those startup problems 🙂
I have been following Plunify for quite a while now. I’ve even tried to join their team without much progress though! Anyway, that apart, I believe they do brilliant work and perhaps work that really matters for the future. When I first came across this team, they were trying to put FPGA design in the cloud. I immediately drafted an email letting them know my opinion and how I believe they were doing great stuff. Harnhua was kind enough to get back and we had a couple of email exchanges then.
When I relocated to Singapore I sort of forgot about this company at all. I recently came across my old email exchange and I thought I should connect and see what they were upto. And of course, they are upto even more brilliant stuff. So I shot another email requesting to meet up with Harnhua. He was kind enough to schedule a meet and after a few hiccups, we managed to catch up at a Starbucks.
It was a wonderful chat and we discussed a variety of topics: FPGAs, Indian History, Sanskrit, GPUs, Acceleration, machine learning and on and on. For a full 2.5 hrs. We were both surprised that we could talk technology for so long, outside of work.
I hope to have more such interesting interactions with more founders in the future. I came to know from him that Singapore has quite an interesting tech startup scene. Maybe I should connect with more of them, if only to say a Hi!