About

I'm Savar Gupta. I study Mechatronic Systems Engineering and Business at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and right now I'm a Technical Product Manager co-op at TELUS↗ on the Internet Hardware team — working on how Wi-Fi gateways, access points, and the software stack behind them actually serve customers.

On the side I co-founded Unify↗, a mobile app that helps newcomers settle in Canada — community, settlement guidance, and a RAG-powered AI companion that keeps itself current by scraping Government of Canada sources daily. 250+ users, 16 partnerships, and a few million social impressions in.

Before product, I was the hardware kid — PCB design in KiCad, embedded firmware in C, a stretch on SFU Rocketry hot-firing a LOX/Ethanol engine, and a multi-sensor water testing prototype that hit 90%+ accuracy across pH, turbidity, and temperature. That part of me hasn't gone anywhere — it's just learned to share the room with software.

What I'm paying attention to now: consumer hardware, AI tools (mostly Claude Code), product management as a craft, and personal finance. I write about all four occasionally on X as @SmartCompounder. Long term I want to be building hardware that meets software where it's actually going.

What I Believe

Start with the customer and work backwards. Almost every product question gets easier once you decide whose problem you're actually solving.

Building beats planning. You learn more in a week of shipping than a month of strategizing — usually about whether the plan was right in the first place.

Stop-gaps aren't fixes. It's easy to patch the symptom and move on. The systems work — the part that addresses the cause — is the real work.

First principles over precedent. The way something has always been done isn't a reason to keep doing it. Question whatever assumption you can afford to.