About

I’m Nirvana Tikku. I grew up in Hong Kong, came to Boston for college, and now live in Brooklyn with my wife—whom I met at Tufts—and our kids.

My relationship with computers began in 1994, when my dad gave my older brother a 386. It felt like being teleported into another universe. Then came the 486, Pentium, Pentium II, and a constant progression of chipsets and machines to understand. I grew up through DOS, Windows 3.1, and the Windows generations that followed—from 95 and 98 through ME, 2000, NT, and 2003. Before college, I was a serious Windows power user and fanboy and earned an MCSE certification. How times have changed.

Hong Kong’s computer centers were the backdrop: dense, unruly places full of hardware, games, and pirated software. Wild times, but also an extraordinary environment for learning. I spent hours mucking around with Visual Basic, Macromedia Flash, Adobe Premiere, and whatever else I could get my hands on. By ten, I was learning to code at NIIT.

Gaming drove much of the progression. Early on, it was King’s Quest, Monkey Island, Prince of Persia, Mario, and Mario Kart. Then came Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Unreal, Halo, and other first-person shooters. Consoles and arcades mattered too: Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Sega, and Xbox—and games like FIFA, 1080° Snowboarding, Street Fighter, and Winning Eleven. Good times.

Counter-Strike was the highlight—and a full-on effort. I spent countless hours practicing and playing against clans around the world, from Sweden to Singapore. It was also one of my earliest experiences of leadership: assembling teams, setting direction, and learning how to get people to play as one. I became a pseudo-pro gamer, playing toward the CPL and World Cyber Games. LAN parties were esports before esports was really esports. It was a deep passion and, honestly, a deep addiction. When college began, that chapter ended. But gaming had already pulled me into CPUs, GPUs, operating systems, networking, and hardware.

The network came alive through USRobotics 9600-baud modems, then 14.4k, 56k, and eventually broadband. Telecommunications always fascinated me. So did the emerging world of handheld computing—Nokia phones, PalmPilots, Compaq iPAQs, and the sense that computers were about to become truly personal. Mobile devices became the area of electrical engineering I most wanted to explore.

I had played with Unix in the early days without quite grokking it. In 2006, when Macs moved to Intel, I moved to the Mac. From there, I found my way back into the Unix world through Linux.

An internship at Nuance Communications put me in IVR, followed by work in mobile speech recognition. I spent time in ecommerce and mobile app development, building for BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone, before returning to voice AI—first on mobile devices, then across televisions, smart speakers, second screens, remotes, watches, cars, and other connected things. That eventually led to enterprise and healthcare chat and natural language systems.

At Nuance, I eventually helped start a DIY developer platform that took speech recognition, natural language, and chatbot technologies developed in-house and made them available to the broader community. The platform grew significantly. It gave me the opportunity to lead, work alongside remarkably talented people, and help build a community of doers. This was just before ChatGPT and large language models reshaped the field. Nuance’s acquisition brought me to Microsoft, where the broader move beyond narrow intelligence and toward agentic systems became the next chapter.

The thread through all of it has been building—and empowering other people to build. Long before today’s AI/SI renaissance, that was what drew me to developer platforms. I loved hackathons. I still love realizing an idea, making something from nothing, and helping others do the same. That is my passion.

I’m fascinated by technology, markets, psychology, and the future. I used to think of myself as living in the future and working toward it. These days, I’m trying to be more present.

My family means everything to me. I’m inspired by my wife and feel blessed to have her as my partner. I try to be the best husband and dad I can be. My name has framed much of how I see life—not because I’m enlightened, but because I feel profoundly fortunate to do what I love. At the end of the day, I want to bring value wherever I can.