Akshat Totla
I'm Akshat. I build things, and I want to show you why.
This page starts at the largest structure anyone has ever mapped and ends inside a single cell. My life is somewhere in the middle. Scroll, and we'll fall the whole way.
10²¹ m · a galaxy
Pick one of those lights and fall into it.
A galaxy. A hundred billion suns, and ours is nowhere special. Somewhere out in one of its arms there is an ordinary star, and a kid on the third rock who wouldn't stop asking what held all of this together.
10¹³ m · a solar system
The ordinary star.
Eight planets going round it. I grew up on the third one taking things apart, and I never picked a side between the sky and the skull. The same question worked on both. What is this made of, and what happens if I change it?
10⁷ m · the Earth
The places that made me.
A full scholarship to NYU Abu Dhabi, where I studied business and taught myself to code on the side. A summer at Google, building a model that found seventy million dollars nobody had looked for. Amazon's warehouses. Ziina, a YC fintech, where I rebuilt the numbers from scratch. Then investment banking at Barclays, and a co-founded app called Thunder in between.
Every one of them taught me the same thing. Systems get stuck in the same few places, and someone has to be curious enough to look.
10⁻² m · a fingertip
Then there's me.
Get close enough to any person and you find a spiral. Mine goes like this. By day I work on billion-dollar deals at a bank. By night I put AI agents inside that bank to see if they'd work, and they did. I take things apart because I want to know how they work, and I can't leave them in pieces.
Wondering was never going to be enough. So I build.
10⁻² m · now building
Both are live today. Both are mine.
Both of them run on a fleet of agents I built. They work while I'm at the bank, and they keep going after I've gone to sleep.
Nobody asked me to build any of this. I wanted to know if it would work. Most of it does, and the parts that don't are where I learn the most.
10⁻⁵ m · a neuron
Keep going. Past the skin, into the skull, into one cell.
This is where all of it lives. Points of light, and the lines drawn between them. Every place that shaped me and everything I've made is wired in here. Pull on one.
Hover a light.
10⁻⁹ m · the same drawing
Fall into one of those lights and you'd swear you were back at the start.
Twenty-nine orders of magnitude, and the universe used the same drawing twice. I have never quite got over that. It's the reason I build.
I'm an optimist, and not the naive kind. The future doesn't arrive on its own. Someone gets curious enough to build the next piece of it, and then it's here. I plan to keep being one of those people.
The zoom never really ends. Neither do the questions.
So here is the one that matters most.
If you're building something, I want to hear about it.
Akshat