A cash register is a peculiar place to look for a life’s work. It sits at the end of the transaction, where everyone would prefer to finish quickly. Rajeev Viswanathan helped build a company around the proposition that this little endpoint could do considerably more. Years later, his name appeared on a project tackling another neglected corner of commerce: the ringing telephone. Between those two counters, there was an app venture with his father.
Those projects make an interesting sequence. Instore, originally known as Own, connected the shop to software. Get@ gathered destinations from across the mobile web. Cyborg Squared connected a caller’s request to a merchant’s point-of-sale system. Read together, they suggest a recurring interest in the awkward handoff: the moment a person wants something and several separate systems stand between the request and its completion.
This is an interpretation of the work, rather than a theory Viswanathan has publicly named. But it gives his career a useful shape. The products change. The small interruption keeps returning. A sale needs recording. An app needs finding. Somebody needs to answer the phone before the customer gives up and orders elsewhere.
The register had other duties
Viswanathan was an early chief executive of Own, the business that became Instore. His co-founders included Erol Ahmed and Verdi Ergün. The business pursued software for independent merchants, with the point of sale as its starting place. Selling a merchant a register meant entering the part of the business where customers, money and operations already met.
There is something appealingly unglamorous about that choice. An independent shop has transactions to complete, customers to remember and staff to organize. A useful system has to earn its place amid those jobs. The counter is a demanding stage: a product may have a beautiful explanation, but the queue is still waiting.
By December 2011, Own had appointed Alicia Policinski as chief financial officer. Viswanathan welcomed her financial and digital experience as the company prepared for further product and client growth. His stated ambition centered on customer loyalty, operations and revenue. That is an executive’s vocabulary, certainly, but it also establishes the breadth of the assignment. Taking payment was one part of the work.
“We’re committed to leading the point-of-sale industry and enabling store owners to maximize customer loyalty, operations, and most importantly, revenue.”
Rajeev Viswanathan, December 2011
Instore’s product description eventually included labor management, rewards, customer relationship management, gift cards and reporting. These are the administrative relatives of the sale, the jobs that arrive after the receipt. A shop owner buying software for one task could end up using it across several. Viswanathan’s early role belongs in that effort to make the register useful beyond the instant of payment.
A company can outlive your job title
His Instore chief executive period is listed as 2010 to 2012. The company’s story continued well beyond it. Slice acquired Instore in 2020, and Slice Register followed in 2021 as a point-of-sale offering for independent pizzerias. By that chapter, Matt Niehaus was the former Instore CEO moving into a payments leadership role at Slice.
The distinction matters in a founder’s biography. A company’s eventual destination belongs to its history; it does not make every subsequent decision the early founder’s decision. Viswanathan helped establish a business whose technology found a later home. The people who carried it through that later chapter deserve their own verbs.
Still, the destination was fitting. Slice built its offering around the operations of local pizza shops. A general merchant system had become part of a more specific trade. That is one of software’s less theatrical endings: the product carries on, acquiring different customers, different responsibilities and a different name. The register keeps working after the original pitch has left the room.
Early company identity · Acquired in 2020 · Register launch in 2021
His father’s retirement came with an app
In 2015, Beloit College recorded the retirement of chemistry professor Rama Viswanathan after thirty-two years of service. The next step was a business venture in California with his son Rajeev. Their first product was Get@app. It is a wonderfully compact retirement announcement: three decades at a college, then a new product to get out the door.
The family connection gives this chapter a texture that startup job titles tend to flatten. Rama brought a background in chemistry and computer science and served as GetAt’s chief technology officer. Rajeev’s founder and CEO tenure is listed as 2013 to 2019. Father and son were colleagues in a consumer software venture, bringing an academic career and an entrepreneurial career into the same project.
Get@ offered access to content and destinations across apps and websites through one place. Its examples were deliberately ordinary: Facebook, shopping, a restaurant search. A person could use a query such as sushi@yelp rather than treat every destination as a separate expedition. Discovery, collecting and sharing were part of the pitch.
The irritation behind the idea is familiar. A smartphone makes many things reachable while asking its owner to remember where each thing lives. Get@ proposed another entrance. Its product description advertised more than 5,000 destinations organized around tastes and interests. That figure describes the catalog it promoted, rather than a count of customers or evidence of adoption.
As a career choice, it took Viswanathan away from the merchant’s side of the counter and toward the person holding the phone. The question of access remained. Could several separate services feel closer together? The father-and-son venture addressed that question through a consumer interface, with a name that looked halfway between a command and a suggestion.
There is a difference between putting many destinations on a screen and helping someone choose a useful route through them. Get@’s published examples make that distinction tangible. The search starts with a person’s intention, such as finding a restaurant, and gives it a destination. In a profile full of company names, this is a helpful detail to hold onto. It describes an actual interaction someone was meant to have, rather than asking the reader to admire an abstract ambition.
Then the telephone rang
In November 2021, Viswanathan appeared among the creators of Cyborg Squared, alongside Arjun Vasan, Vasan Varadarajan, Robert Nessler and Sam Aoki. The project joined AI phone answering to Square’s point-of-sale and loyalty systems. A restaurant employee could attend to the people in the shop while the service handled a call and sent the resulting information into Square.
The team described a familiar grievance: long holds, unanswered calls and phone customers missing the loyalty treatment available elsewhere. Their approach kept people involved behind the AI. That human assistance was part of the design. The project also acknowledged a difficulty that anyone who has endured a telephone menu can appreciate: a customer’s previous experience with automation might make them reluctant to try again.
The project entered Square’s Build What’s POS_sible competition, held from October to November 2021, and appears in its gallery as a winner. The event asked developers to build useful merchant tools using customer point-of-sale APIs. In that setting, Cyborg Squared brought a spoken request into the same operational world as an order and a loyalty record.
This is a pleasing return to the merchant counter. Get@ had worked on finding a destination; Cyborg Squared worked on reaching a business and completing a request. The telephone, an object quite capable of interrupting a room without doing any of its work, had become an integration problem.
For a small business, a handoff has a cost even when nobody puts it on an invoice. Someone repeats a request, checks another screen or interrupts a colleague. Thinking about those moments gives these projects a common scale: the single person trying to finish a task. It also keeps the biography close to the work. A founder can describe a platform at considerable length; the customer usually has a shorter sentence in mind. The interesting engineering begins where those two descriptions have to meet.
The founder who leaves room for “student”
Viswanathan’s public descriptions include a less conventional assortment of titles: founder, creative, student, and business and product “Sherpa.” His At Wave Engineering entry describes research, prototyping and experiments. He also lists AdOptics, an audio fingerprinting venture, among his earlier projects. The vocabulary leaves room for trying things as well as running them.
On LinkedIn, he introduces himself through a journey from Wisconsin to San Francisco and an enthusiasm for learning and solving problems. The fractional joke in his self-description, “3.5x Founder,” is a small departure from the usual solemn arithmetic of a professional biography. It makes room for an unfinished edge.
People who have worked around him describe the same appetite from another angle. Christopher Cravens calls him creative and driven. Soham Mazumdar recalls their shared interest in local commerce and Viswanathan’s ideas for connecting separate app experiences. These are colleagues’ assessments, useful glimpses of how his interests register with other people.
The recurring connection in this career is concrete enough without a grand slogan. There is a merchant, a customer, a piece of software and something that does not quite pass between them. Viswanathan has repeatedly worked near that gap, sometimes as a chief executive, sometimes as a collaborator, sometimes alongside his father. The counter and the phone are ordinary objects. They have given him plenty to work on.