Vivek Khimani

I found my way to computer science through mathematics.

What I liked about math was that complicated things could often be built from a small set of primitives. You could understand those pieces deeply, understand the rules connecting them, and build from there. The trick wasn't eliminating complexity, but finding the right primitives from which it could be built.

When I build software or a product, I find myself thinking about the same things: what is the system really made of, what actually matters, what should be kept separate, and how should the pieces relate to one another? Get the foundations right, and much of the complexity that follows becomes easier to reason about.

I started my career working on privacy-preserving machine learning, then joined Semgrep, a company I had first encountered in college while using it to grade data structures assignments. At Semgrep, I got to build products from scratch and eventually watch people use them in the real world. I learned that building something useful is rarely just about the software. You have to understand the problem, the person experiencing it, and what is actually worth solving. The code is only one part of it.

I grew up watching my dad run a small agricultural business. Its economics were fairly intuitive: more people, more land, more resources, more output. Software felt different. You could build something once and have it quietly do useful work for thousands of people. I've always been interested in what happens when that kind of leverage meets industries that don't look much like software.

I like sport for a similar reason. I grew up playing competitive squash, and these days I play tennis and run. There is something satisfying about taking a complicated movement and reducing it to a few things you can actually work on. You isolate a movement, repeat it, notice when something feels slightly off, and try again. Eventually, if you do it enough, you stop thinking about the individual pieces.

Outside of work and sport, I like traveling on my own, reading, and playing guitar. I like being somewhere unfamiliar and figuring things out as I go. And I like having a few things in my life that don't need to lead anywhere.