Maneet Khaira and the Trouble Before Play

Maneet Khaira was an intern with an idea and access to a very large company's email system. In 2018, while working at YouTube, he put together a presentation about gaming's next decade. Then he sent it up the hierarchy. By his own account, 15 percent of Google had read the deck before his last day. A farewell lunch would have been a simpler ending. This internship helped produce a controller.

The percentage is memorable. The more revealing detail is what had caught his attention beforehand. Khaira and his friends were playing Fortnite on their phones. Here was a device everyone already owned, running a game they wanted to play together, with controls that made the arrangement feel like a compromise. A business opportunity had arrived wearing an ordinary inconvenience.

Backbone, the company he co-founded in 2018, grew out of that gap. Its first controller wrapped around an iPhone. Its later ambitions stretch across televisions, computers and headsets. Through those changes, Khaira has kept returning to a small, stubborn question: how much work should someone have to do before the fun starts?

A runner, a researcher, a player

Before the startup, there was a track. Khaira came to Columbia from Portland, Oregon, having attended Sunset High School. He appears on the university's 2015 cross-country roster as a first-year distance runner. It is an appealing detail in a career now associated with sitting down and playing games: he had also spent time getting somewhere under his own power.

At Columbia, he studied computer science. His university life extended beyond coursework: he organized a hackathon with more than 500 participants, worked in the Wu Lab and wrote for the Columbia Spectator. His LinkedIn profile also records an artificial intelligence concentration. A faculty teaching statement places him among students who helped define their own areas within a research project on Twitch.

That combination matters to the shape of the business he would build. Games, the technology behind them, the audiences watching them and the ways people share an experience were already overlapping in his work. His personal website lists internships at Intel, Avnera and Google, alongside Google's associate product manager program and a Greylock X fellowship. The route into consumer hardware passed through software, research and product work.

The phone everyone had in common

The founding puzzle was social before it became industrial. During his time at YouTube, Khaira shared a San Francisco house with four friends. Their phones gave them common ground for Fortnite, even though they had other gaming equipment. Matching a group of people to matching hardware is a surprisingly elaborate invitation to send.

A cloud-gaming demonstration supplied another piece of the idea. Khaira saw how a game could be streamed onto an older phone. The screen in someone's hand no longer had to do all the heavy computation. He began thinking about the business that might sit between those games and the person trying to reach them.

His presentation took that thought into Google. Years later, he would describe the deck as the beginning of Backbone. The interesting leap was from spotting new technology to deciding what people would need around it. A streaming demonstration could show that a game would run. A controller and a coherent interface could make someone want to keep playing.

The first Backbone One reached the market in October 2020. Physical buttons addressed one problem. Software addressed others: finding games, talking to friends, capturing a clip and sharing it. The product treated those activities as parts of the same evening. In Khaira's account of the original idea, improving them together was the point.

The Sunday lunch and the expanding bridge

An investor meeting provided a compact version of his pitch. Over a long Sunday lunch, Khaira showed Index Ventures the Backbone One and explained his view of mobile gaming. The demonstration let a prospective backer hold the argument. There is a particular advantage to selling a vision that comes with thumbsticks.

In February 2022, Index led Backbone's $40 million Series A, joined by Adjacent and investors including Discord's Jason Citron, Rec Room's Nick Fajt and Sonos's Patrick Spence. Their businesses offered useful points of reference: communities, shared play and hardware connected to services. Khaira was building across all three.

The early hardware also had an unglamorous assignment: fit different phones. Design partner PA Consulting worked with Backbone on concepts, physical mock-ups and a bridge mechanism that allowed the controller to expand and contract. The dimensions of a customer's existing device were a constraint the startup had to accommodate. People were bringing their own screens to this party.

Backbone One won a 2022 Red Dot Design Award. The recognition followed a development process in which proportions, button placement, materials and portability all had to coexist. Khaira's vision depended on the resulting object feeling straightforward. The amount of work required to achieve that simplicity was the company's problem to absorb.

A hundred microns of disagreement

Ask Khaira about controls and the conversation can become very small indeed. In 2023, he described how a difference of a hundred microns on a surface could change the feel of a controller. Players notice details that a specification sheet struggles to express. A button can be correctly placed on a drawing and still be wrong in a hand.

His stated goal was to make input devices feel invisible. That is a curious aspiration for someone selling a physical object, and a useful one. The player wants to think about the game. Every awkward reach or uncomfortable edge asks for attention that the game was supposed to receive.

Customer feedback also led to a more practical refinement: phone cases. Updated USB-C controllers introduced magnetic adapters to accommodate compatible cases. It is difficult to sound grand while discussing the prospect of removing a phone cover. It is equally difficult to make a product feel convenient while asking people to remove one every time.

By May 2025, Khaira had a new set of development figures to share. His announcement of Backbone Pro counted 9,347 part iterations, 32 research studies and 1,167 days. Those are his published counts, rather than an independent audit. They also describe part iterations, which should not be mistaken for thousands of complete controllers.

Pro connected directly to a phone through USB-C and added Bluetooth for other screens. The accompanying FlowState feature let players switch connections through the app. The broader idea was becoming visible: Khaira wanted the controller to travel with the player, rather than remain assigned to a particular box beneath a television.

Leaving room for a surprise

There is a danger in a founder's origin story: every later development can start to look foreseen. Khaira has offered a useful correction to that habit. When retro-game emulators became available on the iPhone App Store in 2024, people started using Backbone to play older games. He acknowledged that the popularity of this use had surprised him.

“It was really unexpected,” he said in 2025. That admission gives the ambition some room to breathe. A device built around easier access can become useful in ways its makers did not plan. The company can supply the controls; players are quite capable of supplying their own reasons.

His ambitions remain larger than an accessory business. There are practical demands hidden in his talk of building a platform. The hardware has to work, the app has to earn a place on a phone, and the relationship between different services has to feel understandable to someone who simply wants to play.

“We don't intend to just build a product, we want to build a platform.”

Maneet Khaira, 2025

That also means learning from behavior beyond the original use case. A player interested in a childhood favorite and a player streaming a newer release may arrive through different doors. Khaira's proposition is that they should find familiar controls and a useful starting point once they get there.

A place beside the headphones

In December 2025, a collaboration with Kith gave Khaira another way to describe the audience he wanted. The limited-edition Backbone Pro had a translucent chassis, exposing its internal circuitry. His accompanying message put gaming beside fashion, music, sport and film. He wanted it to fit into people's existing lives and tastes.

He wrote about friends playing across cities, parents finding time between meetings and people who love a game without adopting the identity of a gamer. The controller belonged in a bag with everyday possessions. This was a cultural ambition as much as a product brief: liking games should not require a costume, a dedicated room or an explanation.

The company's August 2026 announcement of an Xbox 25th anniversary Pro edition carried that interest in physical objects forward. It paired three heritage colorways with blind-box packaging and an announced October 20 shipping date. For a business associated with streaming, the pleasure of opening something tangible still has a place.

Khaira's path began with friends trying to play together and an intern willing to send his argument upstairs. It has since required investor lunches, adjustable hardware, software decisions and repeated revisions to small surfaces. The presentation was the quick part. Years later, he is still working on the interval between wanting to play and actually getting to do it.

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