Hi, I'm Harsh. People call me Prodigy. I'm still waiting for the paperwork.

HarshRajat

Serial founder and full-stack operator architecting decentralized, cross-chain, wallet-native communication infrastructure since 2009, with an $800M launch valuation and a forthcoming long-form thought-leadership publication.

Building since
2009
Last launch
$800M
Based in
Dubai
Get chapter one
Ask Chai

Unicorn meter

Launched at $800M.

Push Protocol, born EPNS in 2020. A unicorn is $1B. You can do the maths, I already have.

Launch valuation$800M

$200M to go. Builds character.

On stage or judging at

Featured in

Questions

Everything people ask me, answered once.

So I can stop answering it at parties and get back to the snacks.

I build things, then explain them like I'm fifteen. For seventeen years that meant an iOS browser, an app-deals service, a game, a search engine, and a company that taught crypto wallets how to receive a notification. Right now it means a book, because I kept giving the same six explanations to everyone and decided to outsource myself to paper.

Long story. The short version: it stuck before I could object, and now it's a username I can't give up. I treat it as a performance review I have to pass every year.

Depends on the year. I build things for the industries that need them most, and so far that has meant AI, blockchain, SaaS and games. I think of every wave the way I think of servers in 1999: important, overhyped, and eventually boring. Boring is the happy ending. Nobody writes think-pieces about DNS.

360 Web Browser, for iOS. Tabs, downloads, a file manager, Firefox Sync, back when Safari thought one tab was plenty. It has a Wikipedia page, which is more than I can say for myself.

A bunch of AI personas I built to fight with me before any big decision. Each one is wired to want something different, so they never agree, and neither do I. I lose roughly half the arguments. A council that agrees with you is a mirror with extra steps.

Probably. I've been on stage at EthCC, ETHDenver, Messari Mainnet, Schelling Point, ETHAmsterdam, NFT NYC and EDCON, and judged more hackathons than I've slept through. I'm training myself to keep any answer under two minutes. This one is already over.

Dubai. It's hot. Next question.

The story so far

A short history of almost.

Seventeen years of building. Every chapter has the same word in it. I've stopped fighting it and started collecting it.

  1. 2010. Almost a browser company. Shipped a full iOS browser, 360 Web Browser: tabs, downloads, Firefox Sync. It has a Wikipedia page. Safari has the default slot. Guess which one matters.
  2. 2012. Almost a media company. 3 Magic Shots: paid apps, free for a day, announced by push notification. One indie game we featured did 26,000 downloads in a day. The notification did the work. I wrote that down.
  3. 2016. Almost early. GrabShack, a search engine for Indian e-commerce, before Indian e-commerce had decided what it was. "Early" and "wrong" look identical from the inside. You find out which one later.
  4. 2016. Almost a game studio. Boo Adventures, a physics puzzle game where you toggle gravity. I enjoyed building it more than anything before or since, which told me something about toys I took another decade to act on.
  5. 2020. Almost a unicorn. Lost money in a DeFi liquidation nobody alerted me to. Built the alert. Push Protocol launched at an $800 million valuation. It invented communication for web3 and Push is synonymous with notifications now.
  6. 2026. Almost on time. In Simplest Terms, a book of beliefs with the scars attached. Writing is slower than software. Fewer bugs, so far. Chapter one is almost ready, in the same sense everything above was almost something.

Almost is where the lesson lives.

Done is where the receipt lives.

I collect both.

The book

In Simplest Terms

A founder's book for people who nod along in meetings and understand nothing. I was one of them. Each chapter is one belief, the real moment that taught it, and the system I built so I'd stop forgetting it.

One email when it ships. Two if I'm proud of it.

A few beliefs from the ledger

  1. Belief 01: Level 2 ideas win

  2. Belief 02: In simplest terms

    If you can't say it in simplest terms, you don't understand it.

  3. Belief 12: Symbiotic beats parasitic

    Symbiotic vendors get paid only when you grow. Parasitic vendors charge regardless of outcome. A parasitic platform may not be worth it at a given stage.

  4. Belief 15: The universal floor

    Pizza and simple melodies cross every culture. Fermented fish and quarter-tone scales stay local. Virality is discovering the layer that needs no teaching.

  5. Belief 16: Everyone is gullible

    Everyone is gullible because of the way they are.