Manav Agarwal

I'm not the best engineer in the room. I'm the one who figures out what's worth building.

The real skill is knowing what to ignore.

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02 / About

The short version, since you're busy.

I grew up taking things apart to understand how they worked — remote control cars, Python scripts, eventually entire business models. That curiosity brought me to computer science, but what kept me there wasn't the code. It was the problems. The complexity. The moment when something that seemed impossible suddenly has a clear, elegant answer.

Over four years at VIT Chennai, I co-founded a startup, led design through a national hackathon final, shipped AI systems inside a global enterprise, and learned that the most important question is never "how do we build this?" — it's always "why does this problem exist, and are we solving it for the right people?"

I'm joining EY as an Associate Consultant in Cyber — working at the intersection of AI, risk, and enterprise systems. The longer arc I'm building toward is education, entrepreneurship, and systems that work at scale — eventually through an MBA and ventures of my own.

Six numbers. Each one says something about how I work.

Top 5 of 300+ teams at Smart India Hackathon — after our problem got cancelled mid-event.
Top 12 of 100+ teams nationally — T$O Hackathon, IIT Bhubaneswar.
97%ile CAT 2025 — and I skipped Quant on purpose. Scored 4 in Quant. On purpose. 97th percentile overall — by deciding what not to study. Ask me about ROI sometime.
20+ user interviews before we built WorkWave — and we still validated the wrong thing.
15+ languages my ABB query system understood — no SQL, no developer needed.
1 startup — built, launched, and learned more from killing it than keeping it.
03 / Receipts

Work that meant something.

Proof, because you asked. Three of these went well. One didn't — and it's the most useful one here.

Startup · HR Tech · 2023–2024

WorkWave

We built the wrong product for the right problem. Here's what that cost — and what it taught.

  • Pre-Incubated
  • 20+ User Interviews
  • Full MVP Built
  • New Task Framework

IGNORED: building more features. The problem was the market, not the product.

EdTech · AI · Design · National Finalist · 2024

SproutJourney

India's EdTech market is enormous. Nobody was solving for joy, values, and curiosity in kids aged 6–12.

  • Top 12 / 100+ · T$O, IIT Bhubaneswar
  • Pitched · IIT Bombay Eureka
  • Full Brand Identity
  • AI Personalization

IGNORED: test-prep, where the money is. We built for curiosity instead.

GovTech · UI/UX · National Finalist · 2023

NERAP

Our problem statement was cancelled mid-hackathon. 48 hours to find a new one, validate it, and ship. We made Top 5 of 300+.

  • Top 5 / 300+ · SIH 2023
  • 48-Hour Concept Rebuild
  • UI/UX Lead
  • Flutter Frontend

IGNORED: the original brief. It got cancelled. We found a better problem in 48 hours.

Enterprise AI · Internship · Bangalore · 2025

Intelligent Enterprise Search @ ABB Digital Systems R&D

Enterprises waste engineering hours because non-technical staff can't retrieve data without a developer. I built the layer that changed that — in 15+ languages.

  • 15+ Language NLP
  • Full-Stack ERMS
  • White Papers Authored
  • Worked with Eng Leadership

IGNORED: making it technically impressive. Nobody there needed impressive. They needed access.

05 / Thinking

How I see it.

Things I've noticed while building things. Short. Honest. Probably controversial to someone.

We validated the wrong thing.

We did everything right. We interviewed users — over 20 of them. We built an MVP. We mapped journeys. We got pre-incubated. We were convinced we understood the problem. Then our incubator told us we were targeting the wrong sector.

We'd built an HR attendance and task tool for IT companies. But IT companies already have this solved — a dozen enterprise tools do it, often for free. The real unmet need was in FMCG and field operations, where teams are semi-literate, mobile-first, and have zero digital infrastructure for accountability. We'd talked to the wrong users and validated the wrong assumptions.

The lesson isn't that we failed. Lots of startups fail. The lesson is that user interviews only tell you whether people like your idea — not whether your idea is for the right people. Those are two completely different questions, and we confused them. Real validation is the person who says: "I need this right now and I have no alternative." If I started WorkWave again tomorrow, I wouldn't start by building. I'd start by finding the person who couldn't sleep because of the problem.

AI doesn't fix culture. It exposes it.

At ABB, I built a system that let anyone query a database in their own language. Hindi, Chinese, German — type a question, get data. No SQL. No developer. No waiting. The engineering was the straightforward part.

What was harder to sit with was the question underneath it: why did this problem exist in the first place? The data existed. The databases were maintained. But it was practically inaccessible to anyone without a specific technical skill. Because in large organizations, technical capability is often used as a gatekeeping tool — consciously or not. Knowledge gets siloed. Access gets restricted. That dependency becomes structural.

AI can remove the technical barrier. A natural-language layer means anyone can ask questions. But it cannot remove the organizational incentive to keep information siloed. When you deploy AI in an enterprise, you don't just make things more efficient — you make the existing power structures visible. That's either the most valuable thing about it, or the most uncomfortable, depending on who's in the room.

I skipped Quant. Scored 97 percentile. Here's why that made sense.

I gave CAT 2025 while managing final-year placements and semester exams at the same time. I had already secured a full-time offer. I wasn't under pressure to crack CAT for immediate placement. I wanted to test where I stood for a future MBA, but the timeline was mine to set.

So I made a deliberate decision: I would not spend significant time memorising Quant formulas. The ROI wasn't there. Quant has a very specific ceiling — you either know the formula or you don't. Grinding formulas for weeks to move from 4 to 25 wasn't worth the cost to everything else I was managing. I scored 4 in Quant. I scored 97 percentile overall.

This isn't a flex about CAT. It's about resource allocation. Most people optimize by effort — work harder on the thing you're weak at. I optimize by ROI — figure out which inputs move which outputs, and cut the ones that don't move the needle relative to the cost. The highest-leverage thing I did before CAT wasn't studying. It was deciding what not to study. That same thinking shapes every project I work on.

06 / Contact

Let's talk.

01 Freelance — design (UI/UX, branding, social) and web development.

02 Collaboration — educational content, product ideas, hard problems.

I read every email. I reply to the interesting ones faster.

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