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.

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

Professional portfolio

Finance, inspectable decision studies, and an agenda that keeps the day honest.

Engine
LINES
MICRORAPTOR · the finance engine
A finance engine for trend research, trade simulation, backtesting, and valuation models.
See it Lines: MICRORAPTOR · the finance engine
Open →
Professional
DECISION LAB
inspectable decision studies
Ten working studies where changing an assumption changes the decision—and the memo walks with you. Synthetic operating cases and dated public research, kept separate. Stress a reserve basket, protect a PMO deadline under a capacity cut, or read net interest spread on a banking ladder. No login, no live trading, no 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
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.
Personal build — not a public stage
Creative

The workshop

Games, audiovisual instruments, animation worlds, and the tools that keep them flying.

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
words in bloom
A game of phrases in bloom. One self-contained page — open it and play.
See it Phrasebloom: words in bloom
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 · Audiovisual

Audiovisual

Browser instruments from the AVIARY — one enclosure, many birds.

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 →
Creative · Animation

Animation

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

Game · Film
SAFFRON RIDER
GO! · the aerial-combo brawler
Saffron Rider takes on an asurajin in a golden-hour bazaar: chain lights into a launcher, chase it into the air and finish with a slam, with a counter, a dodge and a meter-funded Agni. Keyboard, gamepad or the on-screen fight stick.
See it Saffron Rider: GO! · the aerial-combo brawler
Play →
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

Most of these run in the background — the rigging that keeps the stage lit. A few more are still in the wings.

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 · FLYWHEEL · NEST
memory, momentum, files
Bestiary holds the reusable standards and guides; Flywheel keeps work turning; Nest keeps every file in its place.
Runs in the background · Bestiary library →
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
Tool
TAXONOMY FIXER
the Spotify library tool
Tidies a Spotify library's taxonomy — retagged, refiled, untangled.
See it The Library Atlas viewer on its demo data: liked songs by genre
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
Lab
PARADOX LAB
higher-dimensional mischief
Officially: a place to poke at odd physics. Unofficially: we're making a time machine — or at least a way to visualize higher-dimensional physics without needing a second brain.
In the lab · bring your own spacetime