Rahul Sonwalkar

About me:

• I live in San Francisco and work on a company called Julius AI
• I grew up on the internet and owe a lot to it
• I watched The Social Network in sixth grade and it got me into computers
• I taught myself to code by reading this book
• I have built several of my ideas that didn't end up working, here's some of them:
  • Short email addresses as a service. I couldn't get rahul@gmail.com when I was 12, so I wanted to fix that with a premium email service that lets you buy short, clean addresses.
  • A bill splitting app with deep Venmo integration. A classic tarpit idea for college students.
  • A messaging app that let you talk to other people in your class without revealing your identity. Also a classic tarpit idea.
  • Group buying service for family plans. A service that matched you with strangers who wanted the same subscription so you could split a family plan discount.
  • A unified podcast comment section. I was briefly really into podcasts during COVID and felt like the fragmented podcast consumption market meant podcasts never got the comment culture that YouTube and Instagram have.
  • A better Firebase with a built-in NoSQL database. I tried this in college in 2018, but the Supabase team ended up doing a much better job than I did a few years later. My target user base was college hackathon attendees, not a very retentive audience since most projects wouldn't get worked on after the hackathon weekend. Turns out startups are a much better target user base for something like this.

Writing

• I probably don''t know that person on linkedin (March 10, 2026)
• one day I will get around to properly writing my thoughts down. today is not that day (January 25, 2025)