👋, I am Akshay Deo, a Computer Engineer from Pune (India). I currently work with Slack as a Staff Engineer.

Background
I wrote my first computer program when I was in 10th grade for my dad’s construction company. Since then I have been 👨‍💻 software. I have worked on a wide range of tech stacks including VBScript, ActionScript 2.0 (even Flex), LAMP, C#, Django (flask in 1 or 2 projects), Play framework (plain Netty in a couple of projects) to Android, iOS, Go, NodeJS + Typescript, ReactJS, Hack (in Slack).

Startup life
In 2012, at the age of 23, I founded a company called RainingClouds along with 3 other co-founders. We built a product, AppSurfer, which in brief, runs Android on the cloud and can stream on any platform. We got a lot of 🗞 on https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/11/appsurfer-takes-android-apps-to-the-browser-lets-you-embed-them-anywhere/, again on https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/try-before-you-buy-app-demo-platform-appsurfer-lets-you-test-apps-on-facebook-debuts-an-android-app-of-its-own/, https://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/27/try-before-you-buy-appsurfer-lets-d/#.tnw_lJ48mLih, and https://venturebeat.com/2013/01/21/appsurfer-adds-tablet-apps-to-web-based-try-before-you-buy-android-app-demos/ to name a few.

AppSurfer Product Demo:
https://youtu.be/JqryuQDXge8

We successfully raised 1 crore INR (~200K 💰) as seed funding from One97 Mobility fund run by Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

For the next couple of years, we tried multiple use cases around this tech but sooner or later the economics of running the business and revenue did not match to convert this into a profitable business 😞. Eventually, most of the products we had built were built by Google. We have detailed out these product comparisons here: https://blog.appsurfer.com/post/145253504285/appsurfer-bids-adieu.

Twist, a better stick than Amazon FireStick:
After AppSurfer, we briefly worked on a hardware product called Twist. The vision of the product was, every HDMI stick that was launching had a separate remote for operating the device. But everyone has possibly the most powerful machine in their pockets, their phones. Why can’t we use that as a remote for the TV sticks?

We took this idea a little further, by converting phones into a game controller as well.

https://youtu.be/yuCPw8l_kts

But we were running on a very thin runway, and couldn’t launch it into the market.