Kaavya Kochar · Portfolio
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Cassiopeia never sets from Berkeley, so it’s up every night of the year.
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Berkeley, California
37.8715° N, 122.2730° W
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Tonight over Berkeley
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The sky behind this page is the real sky over Berkeley at this moment, worked out live from a star catalogue and the planets’ orbits. As you scroll, it turns the way the night does.
I build products from 0→1, find problems worth solving, and put the solution in people’s hands.
Physics student at UC Berkeley and a 3× founder. I like messy, undefined problems: talking to the people living them, figuring out what matters, and building the simplest thing that moves the needle.
Product · Strategy · Growth · 0→1
Start with a problem, build the smallest thing that can solve it, and learn from the people who use it.
Co-Founder & Product Lead
The queue ends here.
An ordering and fulfillment layer for small food businesses that don’t need, or can’t justify, complicated POS systems.
Identity verification infrastructure for operational workflows.
A verification and visitor-management platform for hotels, schools, hospitals and other places where knowing who is entering matters.
I turned 1.2 million rows of public data into a tool for asking better questions.
An interactive dashboard for exploring socioeconomic outcomes across demographic and economic groups, built to make large-scale public data easier to compare and understand.
CarpeDiem Capital
May–Jul 2026
Evaluated early-stage companies across product, market, competitive landscape, founder background, financials and investment fit. Ran founder diligence and synthesized findings for the investment team.
Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India
Jun–Sep 2025
Analyzed e-SHRAM data and registration funnels across a system with 300M+ registered workers, found the high-drop points and helped design fixes to lift completion. Built a Labour Market Intelligence API that cut analyst onboarding from about two weeks to three days and was adopted by the ministry’s data team.
UC Berkeley Disaster Lab
Nov 2024–Aug 2025
Led product and research for a climate-resilience project with UC Berkeley, two state agencies and three NGOs, and owned a ~$1M grant application. Took an AI and IoT early-warning pilot from concept toward deployment, contributing to 30% faster emergency response and a live tabletop exercise with county emergency staff.
Go there. Talk to them. Watch what they’re doing. Ask what is actually getting in the way.
If a manual process can answer the question, I’ll use it. Build the ugly version, put it in front of someone, learn what breaks.
I care less about whether someone asked for Feature X than why they need it.
From the first conversation to the first real user, and everything that breaks after.
Physics student. Product obsessive. Runs spoken word nights.
I’ve spent the last few years building across identity infrastructure, food ordering, consumer commerce, government data and climate resilience. I’ve built software from scratch, sold physical products store to store, worked with government data, evaluated startups, and worked across technical and non-technical teams.
I’m most interested in product, strategy, growth, and the messy space where those overlap.
Photo of you
Building
Spoken word night
With the team
Candid
Something you loveSignals from the night shift
What I listen to while I build.
Reading catalogue · 5 objects · brighter is a favourite
| Cat. no. | Brightness | Title | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| KK 1 | Gulmohur Quarterly Read my poem | Includes a poem of mine | |
| KK 2 | 1984 | George Orwell | |
| KK 3 | Flowers for Algernon | Daniel Keyes | |
| KK 4 | The Green Mile | Stephen King | |
| KK 5 | Totto-Chan | Tetsuko Kuroyanagi |
Thanks for staying up.
If you’re building something and need someone who can find the problem and ship the fix, I’d love to hear from you.
A few moments from along the way.
