Writing code. Owning content. Building what's next.
Sandeep Panda's Twitter handle is @sandeepg33k - the kind of username you pick when you're 21 and absolutely certain that leetcode is a personality. He hasn't changed it. That's telling.
He's the Co-Founder and CTO of Hashnode, a platform that does something deceptively simple: it lets developers publish their writing on their own domains, with their own audiences, without handing ownership to a third-party platform. In a content ecosystem where Medium can change its monetization model overnight and dev.to can shift its algorithm without notice, Hashnode's pitch landed. Hard.
Today, Hashnode hosts 60,000+ active blogs, pulls in 3 million monthly readers, and sees more than 10 million monthly views. The company raised $9.37 million across a Sequoia Surge seed round and a Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Its angels list reads like a roll call for the current wave of developer infrastructure: Naval Ravikant, Guillermo Rauch (the CEO of Vercel), Des Traynor (the co-founder of Intercom), and Ritesh Arora of BrowserStack.
That's not a cap table. That's a thesis.
Every developer should own their content and their audience.
- Sandeep PandaThe thesis is simple and the execution took nearly a decade. Sandeep and his co-founder Syed Fazle Rahman started with devmag.io in 2014 - a developer content discovery platform that was less a product than a very public experiment in understanding what developers actually want to read. They learned. Then they built Hashnode.
From Bhubaneswar to San Francisco, the long way
Sandeep graduated from IIIT Bhubaneswar in 2013 with a B.Tech in Computer Science. He started as a trainee software engineer - the kind of first job that teaches you what corporate structure looks like from the very bottom floor. He didn't stay long.
By 2014, he and Syed Fazle Rahman had co-founded devmag.io. The product never became a household name, but it became the lab. It was where Sandeep first understood the tension between developer content and platform ownership - the same tension that would define Hashnode's entire reason for existing.
Hashnode launched in 2016. The early days were unglamorous: Sandeep and Fazle held other jobs while building it, self-funding until the platform showed real traction. The blockchain detour he later described - going all-in on the 2017 crypto wave - cost them momentum. He's candid about it. That candor is one of his most distinctive qualities in a space where founders mostly discuss failure in retrospect when it's already been reframed as wisdom.
The bootstrap phase ended when Sequoia Capital India's Surge program came in with $2.1 million. Then came the Series A in August 2021: $6.7 million led by Salesforce Ventures, with Sierra Ventures and Accel joining alongside the angel cohort.
The Investor List That Tells the Story
When Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Des Traynor (Intercom), and Naval Ravikant all write checks into the same developer platform, the signal is clear: this is infrastructure for the next layer of the developer economy, not just another blogging tool.
Hashnode isn't a blog host. It's a content operating system for developers.
The simplest version: Hashnode lets you publish on your own domain (yourname.com, not hashnode.com/@yourname) and still reach a built-in audience of developers. You own the URL. You own the readers. The platform just handles the distribution and the infrastructure.
But the product has evolved well past that elevator pitch. Under Sandeep's technical leadership, Hashnode has added:
- -Headless CMS mode - launched in early 2024 with Docker support, letting engineering teams use Hashnode as a content backend for any frontend
- -GraphQL public APIs - launched in August 2023, giving developers programmatic access to their content
- -Docs by Hashnode - a full documentation engine for API references and product guides, launched in late 2024
- -AI writing tools - made free for all users in 2024, including AI-assisted drafting and content search
- -GitHub sync - allowing teams to write in their repos and publish automatically to Hashnode
The technology stack is a deliberate signal: React, Node.js, GraphQL. The tools Hashnode was built with are the tools its users think in. Sandeep didn't build for developers - he built with their mental models.
Sometimes I feel really good about myself and a lot of times I think, I don't know. I don't know anything... generally if you ask me, I still think that I don't know a lot of things.
- Sandeep Panda, Software Engineering Unlocked PodcastThat self-assessment, delivered in a podcast with no apparent irony, is probably why the product actually works. The CTO who admits the limits of his own knowledge doesn't build features out of ego. He builds them because users need them.
The cap table as character study
Hashnode's investor list is not random. Each angel is a builder with direct skin in the developer ecosystem:
He wrote the book before the framework changed
Before Hashnode consumed his professional life, Sandeep was already publishing. He co-authored Jump Start HTML5 for SitePoint and wrote AngularJS: Novice to Ninja - a guide to the original AngularJS framework, published at the moment when Angular was the defining frontend technology in the JavaScript ecosystem.
The Angular 2 rewrite made the first book partially obsolete almost immediately. That's not a failure - that's the cadence of writing about technology. Sandeep kept moving. The ability to document what you know clearly enough for others to learn it is a different skill from the ability to build things, and he has both.
The books also explain something about Hashnode's DNA: a platform built by someone who understood writing as a practice, not just content marketing.
Bug0: the second bet
While still active at Hashnode, Sandeep has co-founded Bug0 - an AI-native end-to-end testing platform for modern applications. The timing is deliberate. AI is reshaping the software development lifecycle faster than most tooling can keep up, and E2E testing is still mostly a friction-heavy, flaky, manual-intervention-required process for teams shipping at speed.
Sandeep's positioning here tracks with everything he's built before: identify a process that developers hate doing, make it feel native to how they already work, and own the distribution through community. Bug0 is early. The bet is real.
Hashnode by the Numbers (2025)
3M+ monthly unique readers • 10M+ monthly views • 60,000+ active developer blogs • Annual revenue crossing ₹6.28 Crore • Employees: ~260 • HQ: 201 Spear St, San Francisco, CA
The record so far
The sequence of bets
The details that don't fit the deck
Sandeep's handle is @sandeepg33k - leetspeak for "geek," frozen in amber from a web era when that was how you signaled belonging. He hasn't updated it. There's a consistency to that: the same person who built a platform for developer content ownership is still using an email-era username on Twitter.
He rides bikes. He writes. He builds tools for people who build tools. He shows up on podcasts and is notably candid about what he doesn't know - an uncommon trait in a space where founders typically present a finished thesis at all times.
On the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast, he talked about self-doubt the way most CTOs talk about product-market fit: matter-of-factly, as a variable to be managed rather than a flaw to be hidden. That kind of honesty either comes from deep confidence or deep weariness. With Sandeep, it seems to be the former.
His co-founder Syed Fazle Rahman is Hashnode's CEO, which puts Sandeep squarely in the technical seat. The division appears to have held through nearly a decade of building together - a stability that's rarer than the funding rounds get credit for.