Leaving Pixxel

I’m wrapping up my time at Pixxel this month, almost a year to the day since I joined. Before I close my laptop and head into whatever comes next, I wanted to write a proper thank-you note to the company and to everyone I got to build with over the past twelve months.

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The Beginning

We somehow went from “a few weeks of lockdown” to never-gonna-be-normal-anymore, stuck inside a pandemic that refuses to end. More than anything, I hope everyone reading this is staying safe and holding up okay.

When I first joined Pixxel, I had no idea what to expect beyond a few conversations about space tech and satellite imagery. Half of me still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that a group of people my age in Bengaluru were building satellites from scratch. It sounded crazy, in the best possible way. I had spent the previous few years grinding hard on software and machine learning, and I wanted a place where I could throw everything I had at a hard problem. Pixxel gave me that room immediately.

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The People

First, a huge thank-you to @Sanket, @pradeep, @Puri, and @Ajinkya, who worked alongside me every single day and put up with all my shenanigans. You never once made me feel like the new guy, and working with you made even the longest debugging sessions fun.

Thank you to @chaitanya, @Dimple Jain, @KarthikBilla, and @rahulraj for patiently walking me through the worlds of GIS, remote sensing, and geospatial ML, things I never would have picked up half as fast on my own. And a big shoutout to @Jaya Venkatesh and @Atom, whom I worked with during my first few months (I still regularly marvel at how sharp you two are).

A special thank-you to @Thanvi, who held everything together and looked out for all of us. Even though remote work meant I didn’t get as much time as I wanted with the satellite hardware crew and the wider org, I loved the days I spent in the office with the team. Above all, a huge thank-you to @RichaHukumchand for her mentorship, patience, and trust; she gave me the room to own real problems and figure things out.

And finally, thank you to @Awais and @Kshitij for dreaming this place up and letting me play a small part in it.

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The End

I’m stepping away now to take a breather before my next chapter (I’m heading to Boston for grad school next). Looking back, my year at Pixxel was some of the most meaningful, stretching, and flat-out fun work I’ve ever done. It’s rare to be surrounded by people who are simultaneously this smart, this relentless, and this kind.

We didn’t get everything right on the first try. We broke pipelines, argued over architectures, and learned the hard way more than once, but we always owned our mistakes and came back sharper the next morning. Leaving a team like that is easily one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make.

Thank you again to everyone at Pixxel for trusting me, letting me be myself, and welcoming me in. I’ll be watching every time a Pixxel satellite goes up. Stay safe, take care of each other, and keep building cool things. I’ll miss you all.