What impact do you want to have on the world and why? Please limit your statement to 250 words maximum and provide your submission with a link.

I want to build technology solutions at scale that impact bottom-of-the-pyramid users in emerging markets. 

Within the next few years, the majority of smartphone users will be from countries like India and Africa. However, many of these users have not broken out of the shell of using their phone as purely a communication and entertainment device to expand its capabilities into areas like work, education or banking. 

While I grew up in India, I interacted daily with this target audience and experienced for 18 years how different subgroups interact with technology. This, combined with my years studying design and engineering at Cornell and Harvard and internships at Nvidia and Google, allows me to evaluate and build products that have deep empathy for this user group with a strong understanding of how tech products are built. 

This year, I will be joining Harvard Business School’s Digital, Data and Design initiative as the first designer in their Tech for All Lab, focused on broadening the benefits of digital innovation to reach more emerging economies. My product idea for SMBs in South Asia has also been accepted into Harvard’s Innovation Lab. 

The internet is being accessed for the first time by an entire new layer of the societal pyramid. There is an opportunity to move users from being communicators and explorers of the internet, to transactors and mature users. This unlocks not only a huge economic market, but also the ability to have impact at a massive scale.