Bio

I’m PK — an entrepreneur, technologist, product builder, writer, and, perhaps more than anything else, a relentlessly curious human being. I have spent more than a decade of my professional life moving through software engineering, product management, technology leadership, and entrepreneurship. I enjoy building things, but I am equally fascinated by understanding why things are the way they are. Whether it is a communication network, a company, the human mind, society, or an idea about God, my instinct is usually the same: take it apart, question the assumptions underneath it, and try to understand it from first principles.

I’m currently building Tnumber, an idea that grew from questioning something most of us never think about: why should a phone number — an identifier created for twentieth-century telecommunications networks — continue to function as our identity for communication on the internet? Tnumber is my attempt to rethink that architecture around internet-native identity, consent, privacy, and control. The first version of the product reached hundreds of thousands of users before I eventually shut it down. Years later, I returned to the problem because the fundamental idea never really left me. The second journey is not simply about rebuilding an application; it is about seeing whether an alternative communication network can actually be built at meaningful scale.

Alongside Tnumber, I have built LocalFirst, a product for local businesses that emerged partly from another problem I became obsessed with: distribution. Building useful technology is one problem; getting millions of ordinary people to adopt something new is an entirely different one. That experience has made me interested not only in engineering products but also in networks, incentives, human behaviour, adoption, business models, and the messy realities involved in turning an idea into something people actually use.

My relationship with technology goes beyond entrepreneurship. I want to understand computers deeply — operating systems, networks, distributed systems, databases, security, artificial intelligence, computer architecture, and the mathematics underneath them. I am fascinated by the enormous layers of abstraction humanity has constructed, from electrons moving through silicon to billions of people communicating through global networks. There is something beautiful to me about understanding a complicated system well enough that what initially looks like magic becomes explainable.

But computers are only one category of questions occupying my mind. The much harder questions are about us.

I think constantly about consciousness, intelligence, psychology, evolution, morality, free will, suffering, love, death, meaning, civilization, and the peculiar nature of human existence. We have learned how to split atoms, manipulate genes, build machines that reason, photograph distant galaxies, and connect billions of people almost instantaneously — yet we still cannot satisfactorily explain why subjective consciousness exists, whether free will is ultimately real, what constitutes a genuinely meaningful life, or why there is something rather than nothing.

And eventually, almost every sufficiently deep question I ask seems to collide with the question of God.

Faith has played a profound role in my life. Christianity has shaped how I have interpreted many of my experiences, decisions, successes, failures, suffering, hopes, and ideas about purpose. At the same time, I have increasingly become unwilling to accept an answer merely because it is comforting, traditional, or something I desperately want to be true. I want to know what is actually true. That means allowing myself to ask uncomfortable questions about God, religion, scripture, science, suffering, human psychology, and even my own beliefs.

I find myself living somewhere between faith and relentless inquiry. I can believe deeply while still questioning deeply. I don’t think those things necessarily have to be enemies. If God is real, questions cannot make Him unreal. And if something I believe is false, refusing to examine it will not make it true. I would rather live through the discomfort of uncertainty than manufacture certainty simply because uncertainty frightens me.

That search has pushed me toward philosophy, theology, psychology, neuroscience, physics, mathematics, history, economics, and evolutionary biology. I don’t study these subjects because I want a collection of impressive labels attached to my name. I study them because the world seems impossible to understand through a single discipline. Understanding human beings requires biology and psychology; understanding societies requires history and economics; understanding consciousness leads into neuroscience and philosophy; asking about existence eventually brings physics, cosmology, philosophy, and theology into the same room.

There is another side of me that is intensely ambitious. I want to build consequential companies. I want to understand computer science at a serious level. I want to write books. I want to become physically disciplined. I want to learn languages, understand cultures, travel, read widely, build wealth, create useful things, and spend my life continuously expanding the boundaries of what I understand and what I am capable of doing. I am less interested in arriving at some final version of myself than in seeing how much a human being can learn, build, change, and become over a lifetime.

Entrepreneurship has also taught me considerably more about failure than success. I have built things, shut things down, started again, made decisions I am proud of and others I deeply regret. There have been periods when the future looked extraordinarily promising and periods when almost everything seemed to collapse. Some of my strongest convictions have been challenged by life itself. Starting over has therefore become an important part of my story. I no longer think resilience means pretending failures did not hurt. It means accepting what happened, extracting whatever truth can be extracted from it, and continuing to build.

I am particularly drawn to unanswered questions. Not merely questions that I personally don’t know the answer to, but questions for which humanity itself does not yet possess a convincing answer. Consciousness is one. The ultimate origin of existence is another. The relationship between the brain and subjective experience fascinates me. So does the tension between determinism and free will, the origins of morality, the nature of intelligence, the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, and the question that human beings have carried across civilizations for thousands of years: whether there is a God behind all of this.

I suspect this curiosity and my entrepreneurial instinct come from the same place. I have difficulty accepting something simply because “that’s how it works.” When I encounter an established system, I want to know who designed it, what problem it originally solved, what assumptions it depends upon, whether those assumptions still hold, and what would happen if we started again from zero.

Sometimes that question leads me into computer science. Sometimes it leads to a startup. Sometimes it leads to philosophy. Sometimes it leads to God.

I don’t know whether I will find satisfactory answers to many of the questions I am pursuing. Some may remain unanswered throughout my lifetime. I also don’t know whether the companies I build will become enormous successes or simply become chapters in a much longer journey.

But I know what kind of life interests me.

I want to build things that matter, understand things that are difficult to understand, question things people take for granted, remain willing to change my mind when reality demands it, and spend my limited time on this planet pursuing ideas and problems worthy of that time.

Technology is part of that journey. Entrepreneurship is part of it. Science is part of it. Philosophy is part of it. Faith is part of it. Failure, ambition, curiosity, doubt, and wonder are all part of it too.

In the end, perhaps my life revolves around two very simple impulses:

I want to build. And I want to understand.

Everything else seems to emerge from those two.