LIMELIGHT
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Arvind Venkataraman
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The limelight

Arvind Venkataraman

Classically learned, cosmically wired, technically proven.

Arvind builds things: AI and digital transformations for Fortune 500s at McKinsey, a tutoring marketplace started in his college dorm with $250, and SPAC and trading analytics for a $2B fund.

Lately, a growing fleet of browser instruments, games, and worlds — audiovisual playgrounds, data pipelines, and a vision for the future. Precise because he has to be, underground because he wants to be.

My vision

Good ideas should travel.

Open the interactive flywheel →

What if we shared not just what we know, but how we think and work? I’m exploring how people can connect their knowledge across disciplines and create something neither could make alone.

Knowledge has limits. Experience compounds. The Brain Flywheel is the simple idea: share, build, learn, and give something back. Metapraxis makes the methods, open questions, and terms of collaboration clear enough to build on together.

Explore the vision ↗ Try the Brain Flywheel →
The record

Field notes

The professional line, in brief. Facts below, story above.

McKinsey & Company — Associate, Seattle: digital, analytics & AI transformations for Fortune 500s; contributor to Rewired and MGI AI policy research.
Cornell Tech MBA — digital fabrication, blockchain, the Law of Robots, M&A law & VC; Fund Manager at Big Red Ventures.
Q Investments — four years of enterprise risk at the $2B multi-strategy family office: a $150M SPAC portfolio and a $1B treasury hedge book.
Dallas County Audubon Society — Treasurer, 2021–2022: financial officer of the org managing Cedar Ridge Preserve — prairie habitat kept wild, conservation kept funded.
Television — Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, 2016: eight answers, $5,000, and peace eventually made with Bruce Springsteen. Watch the clip
Apollo Tutors — co-founded as an SMU freshman with $250 and a stack of flyers; 12 universities and 50,000 free tutoring hours. The founding story
SMU — BBA Finance, financial valuations track — the alternative-assets feeder.
Debate — 2012 Texas state champion, Foreign Extemporaneous Speaking — read into the Congressional Record.
Elsewhere — LinkedIn · an essay in defense of the liberal arts.

Built solo with AI-assisted vibe coding — engineered like instruments, kept like a garden.

Work

Work & decisions

Tools for exploring trade-offs. Change an assumption, inspect what moves, and keep the reasoning visible.

Engine
MICRORAPTOR
markets & trade research
My personal markets desk: compare exposures, explore spreads and hedges, and work through debt-cycle scenarios. A research workbench, not a trading service.
  • Trade ideation
  • Market ideation
  • Ray Dalio Archetypes
  • OSINT
  • Trade book
  • Valuation tools
See it Microraptor: markets and trade research workbench
Open Microraptor →
Professional
DECISION LAB
inspectable decision studies
Eleven interactive studies where changing an assumption changes the decision. Explore a reserve basket, a banking liquidity ladder, or a PMO capacity squeeze, with the reasoning alongside the result. Synthetic cases and dated research stay separate. No live trading or claimed track record.
See it Decision Lab: Basket & liquidity study — stress a reserve basket and leave with a decision you can explain

Decision: After risk-off, fund $1.5m within 30 days without counting late-settling credit as usable cash.

Rejected: Selling floating-rate credit for “more proceeds” when settlement misses the deadline.

Limits: First-order sensitivities; not LCR; synthetic; not advice. Arvind owns direction/framing; AI-assisted implementation; synthetic ≠ track record.

Open Decision Lab → Source →
Selected studies
Investment · basket & liquidity Banking · liquidity PMO · decisions
Creative

The workshop

Things to play, hear, explore, and build on. Original code, art, music, and story, with the tools behind them.

Creative · Games

Games

Self-contained browser games. No installs, no accounts — open a page and play.

Game
RESPLICE
the recombinant runner
A runner built on splicing — stages authored, recombined, and rerun. The fleet's stage-authoring gold standard lives here.
See it Resplice: the recombinant runner
Play →
Game
TALON TACTICS
the origin lineage
Tactics with talons — cockpit instruments and sprite factories. The lab-and-playbook discipline the rest of the fleet descends from started here.
See it Talon Tactics: the origin lineage
Play →
Game
PHRASEBLOOM
a puzzle that plays back
A beat-synchronized match-four puzzle. Shape the board, line up a phrase, and let the playhead turn your move into music. Each level has its own synth score.
See it Phrasebloom: beat-synchronized music puzzle
Play →
Game
SOAR
flight on rails
Altitude, banking, and speed play the AVIARY synth engines directly, through a quantizer that makes a wrong note structurally impossible. Fly it and it sings.
See it Soar: flight on rails
Play →
Game
GYRE
free flight in 3D
SOAR's sibling, off the rails — full three-dimensional flight in the same sound-world.
See it Gyre: free flight in 3D
Play →
WIP
VANTARA CHRONICLES
the LLM-driven RPG
An RPG where your decisions change the outcome of the world — no two adventures are the same. In progress, playable as it grows.
See it Vantara Chronicles: the LLM-driven RPG
Preview →
Creative · Music

Music & sound

Make a sound, find a connection, build a set. Browser instruments and a music library that feeds the next idea.

Flagship
CHIRP
The Sound System — a two-deck DJ instrument in your browser
Two decks, eleven effects each, a 3-band EQ with kill switches, beat-matching, scratch platters, record-to-WAV. No installs, no account — open a page and play.
See it Chirp: a deck's effects, filters and EQ in the browser
Open the decks →
Modules — the flock inside
TRILL · arpeggiator FLAMEBACK · mridangam BITTERN · bass synth CLUTCH · step sequencer WARBLE · modelled syrinx SHRIKE · beat slicer
Music
ROOKERY
the listening colony
The flock's listening room, with a set of custom visualizers — analog machines, avionics, sorcery & esotericism.
See it Rookery: the listening colony
Enter →
Music discovery
LIBRARY ATLAS
find the connections in a collection
Explore music across genre, mood, scene, style, and musical role. Turn a listening library into ideas for sets and production, with review and export paths toward CHIRP. Taxonomy estimates are not audio measurements.
See it The Library Atlas viewer on its demo data: liked songs by genre
Explore Library Atlas →
Gesture instrument
GESTURE SYNTH
play with your hands, or a pointer
A hands-on browser instrument built from CHIRP tools. Shape bass, arpeggios, sliced breaks, and rhythms with camera-based hand tracking, or play the same instruments with a pointer pad. No camera needed for pad mode.
  • Hand tracking
  • Pointer pad
  • Browser synths
Play Gesture Synth →
Creative · Exploration

Labs & explorations

Learn by changing something. Small worlds for testing a strategy, following an idea, or making a model less abstract.

Strategy & theory
SADDLEPOINT
play the choice, inspect the theory
An interactive game-theory folio with a strategy arcade alongside it. Explore cooperation, competition, and equilibrium, then change the rules and see what follows.
Explore Saddlepoint →
Physics workbench
PARADOX LAB
make an abstract idea tangible
Explore gravity, quantum states, observation, and more through ten interactive experiments. Voyager offers a cinematic entry point; the Hypothesis Desk helps frame what to test. Models and speculation stay distinct.
Explore Paradox Lab →
History explorer
TELL
place, time, and the evidence between
Explore the Bronze Age Near East through a timeline and layered map. Places, routes, and events carry their evidence and uncertainty, rather than pretending the ancient world is completely mapped.
Explore Tell →
Design workshop
FASHIONLAB
start with a reference, make it yours
A research-led clothing and accessories workshop. Explore historical references, play with shape and colour, and keep the sources with your design. Local-first concept studies, not fit simulations or finished sewing patterns.
Explore FashionLab →
Creative · Visual

Worlds & visual work

Worlds, scenes, and a rider in a golden-hour bazaar.

Tokusatsu · Production studio
SAFFRON RIDER
a Tamil tokusatsu world, and the studio behind it
A full Tamil tokusatsu concept with its own production studio: characters, stories, 3D models, audio, and a PMO for managing the studio process. Reusable assets connect work across film, games, comics, and 3D prints. GO!, the playable aerial-combo brawler, is one expression of the world, not the whole project.
  • Production studio
  • 3D models
  • Audio
  • Studio PMO
  • Film
  • Games
  • Comics
  • 3D prints
See it Saffron Rider: GO! · the aerial-combo brawler
Play GO! →
Art
MOLT
the world engine
A photo/video world engine — imagery shed and regrown into navigable scenes.
See it Molt: the world engine
Enter →
Art
PIXELSCAPES
coarse-grain scenes
Scapes built pixel by pixel — small worlds, rendered coarse. Also the visual donor behind Heron's calendar weather.
See it Pixelscapes: coarse-grain scenes
View →
Photo
PHOTOGRAPHY
field work, off-screen
Landscapes, temples, and birds — shot in the field, live on Instagram.
See it A wood duck among lily pads, from the @birdboimedia Instagram
@birdboimedia →
Full galleries in the darkroom — coming soon
Creative · Tools

Tools & systems

Workbenches and tools that make the next thing easier. Heron and Bowerbird are open to explore; the backstage systems are local or private.

Calendar
HERON
agenda-first calendar
An agenda-first calendar PWA: the day as a list of intentions, with a seeded Pixelscapes scene as the weather outside the schedule.
Open Heron →
3D print workbench
BOWERBIRD
from digital models to physical studies
Inspect 3D models, explore multicolour print preparation, and work with model kits, colour swatches, and peg-fit tests. A print workbench with a public 3D viewer; physical print validation is still in progress.
  • 3D viewer
  • Multicolour 3MF
  • Model kits
  • Print preparation
Explore Bowerbird →
Backstage
LODESTAR
personal operating system
One CSV source, agent handoffs, and the day's true north — not a public entertainment product.
Runs in the background
Backstage
WATCHTOWER
fleet monitoring & reading
Status for the flock, Bestiary-backed Focus views, and a protected workshop reader.
Runs in the background
Backstage
BESTIARY · FLYWAY
shared knowledge & project coordination
Bestiary holds reusable standards, guides, and project knowledge. FLYWAY coordinates work across repositories, keeping context and methods connected. Workflow infrastructure, distinct from the Brain Flywheel concept.
Runs in the background · Bestiary library →
Local tool
NEST
a home for scattered files
A local file-organization workbench for understanding what is on disk and bringing order to scattered project material. File discovery and rule-based sorting, separate from the fleet's shared knowledge and coordination systems.
Local workflow
Tool
PHOTO SHARINGAN
assisted culling for Lightroom
Thins a 2,000-photo album down to its keepers. The machine triages, I confirm.
See it The Photo Sharingan web viewer: bursts grouped for review, with pick, reject and AI-judge controls

Bursts grouped, borderline shots flagged, decisions back in Lightroom. Next up: keywording, metadata editing and bird detection.

Runs in the background
Tool
VIDEO SHARINGAN
raw footage to a cut timeline
Finds where each shot naturally changes and hands back a cut Premiere timeline, or a finished reel.
See it A Video Sharingan storyboard: Lake Quinault drone footage cut to a two-minute reel, each shot labelled with its move

Raw drone footage, cut to a two-minute reel where its energy curve peaks. Also feeds Saffron Rider.

Runs in the background
Soon
DAW · STREAM MIXER
production software
A fuller DAW / production surface and a stream mixer — still in the wings.
Coming soon