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Shiv Sundar Took a One-Way Ticket to the Edge
A career spent making phones work became a company devoted to the screens nobody thinks about - until they fail. Shiv Sundar’s route from Microsoft to Esper runs through a one-way ticket, a useful mistake and a talent for matching stubborn hardware to real work.
Yadhu Gopalan and the Long Memory of Machines
A childhood coder kept the devices of his Microsoft years in a box. Decades later, their unfinished lesson became Esper: build the hard infrastructure once, then let everyone else get on with the invention.
Vishal Modi
Vishal Modi is the founder and CEO of Spoonified, a Dallas-area startup building what it calls the world's first intelligent utensil - AI-enabled forks and spoons that identify food, measure portion sizes, and track how fast you eat to automate nutrition logging for chronic-care programs. He spent nearly two decades shipping consumer hardware before this: launching Google Nexus and Moto G phones at Motorola, running Chrome OS and tablet product operations at Lenovo, and building business development and partnerships at edge-device-management company Esper. A Kellogg MBA and computer engineer, he started Spoonified in 2021 after his own struggle with weight management convinced him that the hard part of nutrition tracking is the very first step - getting the data off the plate.