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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.

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

LINES

MICRORAPTOR · the finance engine

My personal markets desk: compare exposures, explore spreads and hedges, and work through debt-cycle scenarios. A research workbench, not a trading service.

See it

Open →

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

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

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

Play →

Game

GYRE

free flight in 3D

SOAR's sibling, off the rails — full three-dimensional flight in the same sound-world.

See it

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

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

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 →

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.

Game · Film

SAFFRON RIDER

GO! · the aerial-combo brawler

A playable aerial-combo brawler set in a golden-hour bazaar. Chain attacks, launch, chase, and slam using a keyboard, gamepad, or on-screen fight stick. A separate film workstream explores concept art, music, and AI-assisted action cuts; those are developing experiments, not a finished film.

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

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

View →

Photo

PHOTOGRAPHY

field work, off-screen

Landscapes, temples, and birds — shot in the field, live on Instagram.

See it

@birdboimedia →

Full galleries in the darkroom — coming soon

Creative · Tools

Tools & systems

A few things that make the next thing easier. Heron is open to explore; the backstage tools 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 →

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 · NEST

memory, coordination, files

Bestiary holds standards and guides; FLYWAY coordinates work across repositories; Nest helps organize local files. FLYWAY is workflow infrastructure, distinct from the Brain Flywheel idea.

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

Soon

DAW · STREAM MIXER

production software

A fuller DAW / production surface and a stream mixer — still in the wings.

Coming soon