By Jeremy Schwab

A typical college student might have been unwinding from a busy week, at a party or in a friend’s dorm room, binging Netflix, or dancing like a fool. But Rishab Nayak (CAS’21, GRS’22) and his friend Austin Negron (ENG’21) were leaning in. Saturday was about to flip over to Sunday, and they had 16 hours to make real the idea they had just settled on–developing an app to help foreign-language speakers fill out forms in English.

“We kept falling asleep,” Nayak recalls of that HackHarvard competition. But he and his friend would perk themselves up with cans of energy drink and keep plowing ahead. “We saw the sunrise,” he continues. “As soon as we finished we said, ‘OK, we’re just going to leave.’”

They had another hackathon to present at, in BU’s BUild Lab. While Nayak and Negron were presenting at BU, friends of theirs who had stayed behind at Harvard called to say they’d won. So, still running on adrenaline, they hopped in a cab, went back across the Charles and collected their award.

That weekend, in the fall of 2019, was a pretty typical one for Nayak. The chemistry and computer science double major had spent dozens of weekends the year before (his sophomore year) traveling with friends to hackathons around the country, winning a number of them. In fact, in 2018 he and two friends had won a prize from Google at HackHarvard, allowing them to further develop their prototype of a wearable device to assist visually impaired people in navigating their surroundings, which eventually turned into a Google Case Study.

“Right after the Harvard hackathon [in 2018] is when I really felt completely immersed in the entrepreneurial world, the programming world,” says Nayak.

In the three years since, he hasn’t slowed down. His current project (in addition to two part-time jobs) is a software platform to help manage asset fleets, called Mount. The platform won first place in the general ideas track at Innovate@BU’s New Venture competition this spring.

Getting Connected

Nayak’s success in the world of app development comes from his willingness to try new things and his ability to quickly form friendships and collaborations. He attributes this ability to a childhood spent moving from place to place–first from India to the United States, then back, and then among multiple cities in India.

“One thing I really learned was making connections with people quickly, making friends quickly,” he explains. “My parents also got me reading very early, and I think being exposed to things that were advanced for my age, from an early age, was very helpful in bringing me to where I am today.”

A high school course in India was where he got his first experience in app development, although he didn’t think much of it at the time. It was a simple application to solve sudokus, and he and his friend came up with what he describes as a “brute force solution.”

“We didn’t really know algorithms at that point,” he laughs.

His first hackathon, which took place at NYU during the fall of his freshman year, was so much fun that Nayak decided he had to devote some time to software development.

“I spent the entire weekend awake, trying to make an application,” he remembers. “I didn’t realize my love for computer science until I went to that hackathon and made something and it worked. I said ‘Wow, this is something I could do.’”

He picked up a computer science minor, then a major. He became part of the computer science community on campus, joining the BU chapter of Hack for Impact, which helps nonprofits with technology solutions, and BostonHacks, a BU student group that runs a popular hackathon. As a senior in the fall of 2020, Nayak led the BostonHacks tech team through a challenging but successful remote hackathon during the COVID-19 pandemic, describing it as a “huge learning experience managing people during troubled times.” He has also helped mentor students involved in Tech Together Boston, a hackathon for female, femme, and nonbinary programmers where he says he “met a lot of cool people.”

A Side Trip for Fried Chicken

The summer of 2020 was a strange one, and an unsettling one, for many people around the world. For Nayak, it was his time to explore Boston and explore the intellectual world outside of computer science, chemistry, and the engineering courses he had taken at BU. His vehicles for this exploration? A bike, and two intriguing courses: one on modern art, the other on American history through the eyes of the Red Sox.

“Being in Boston and spending the summer here, I think it was the perfect time to learn about history and art,” he says. He spent his entire summer earnings on a new bike, riding it around most of Boston’s neighborhoods and further afield. “That’s honestly what kept me sane,” he adds. “It was interesting to learn about history and then go and actually see these things.”

One day he decided to bike a bit further.

“I think it was a Friday,” says Nayak. “I had nothing to do, and none of my friends were here. So I decided I’m going to just get on my bike and go as far as I can.”

Four hours later, he found himself at a shopping mall in New Hampshire.

“I got an order of Chick-fil-A, and I made my way back. It’s my new fun fact, saying that I biked to New Hampshire for Chick-fil-A.”

Nothing Is Set in Stone

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “The only constant in life is change.” Nayak, who has shifted majors and minors several times and has multiple possible roads in front of him, is living that truth. He’s working part-time at a medical device company, OXOS, as a full-stack engineer helping design the software to run portable x-ray machines. And he is raising money for Mount so he and his collaborators can scale it up to more cities. After he spoke with arts&sciences, he went straight into a meeting with potential funders, and the team has exceeded $100,000 raised on Wefunder.

Nayak is weighing the relative value of these two paths– working on a team at a larger company or continuing his path as an entrepreneur.

“I really enjoy owning the product, working on something I know people will see, and I can hear back from people and say, ‘OK, you don’t like this, I can modify this,” he says. But he cautions that entrepreneurship has its downsides.

“When you’re your own boss you either self-learn or you have to hire people who know more than you,” he says. “As a budding entrepreneur, hiring people who know more than you is very hard because you don’t have the money.”

As he contemplates his own future, Nayak offers some advice for BU and CAS students.

“My experience at college has been a roller coaster,” he says. “It’s been all over the place. That’s why I came to BU. I really liked the ability to create your own path of study. I would say to students: nothing is set in stone. Everything can be changed. If you have something in mind, bring it up with your advisor, with somebody in charge, and there’s a good chance you can get it done.”