Behind the H: The Story of Raveen
Who, exactly, is Hammerhead? We get versions of this question often. We’d like to introduce our community to some of the names and faces behind the brand. This week, we tell the story of Raveen, one of Hammerhead’s three co-founders.
In the West, the country of India is not often associated with competitive cycling culture by any stretch. So how did Raveen, a technologist and hacker from Chennai, near Bangalore, take to the sport, and help establish a company in the USA that would set out to revolutionize the intersection of cycling and technology?
Born and educated first in India, Raveen spent 11 years working as a full-stack developer in Switzerland and the United States, mountaineering throughout the Alps and the White Mountains in his spare time, before heading to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA, to earn his MBA in Entrepreneurship. While there, he competed regularly in regional software hackathons, including large events at Princeton and UPenn – and winning more than a few.
Following his graduation in 2013, his résumé was strong, and a wide variety of career options presented themselves. High on the list was a senior position in software at an equity management company, offering generous compensation and a relatively straightforward professional roadmap for him. It would have been the easy way to the top, and it would have afforded an especially comfortable life for his wife and two young daughters.
But then Raveen crossed paths with a young fellow named Piet Morgan, in a fortuitous meeting at a deli in New York City. Piet showed Raveen a very basic prototype of a bicycle navigation device that he was working on, which used simple light sequences to intuitively guide the way for cyclists. He had no company, no capital, and no office, but he had something the equity management company didn’t: ambition. Where they were otherwise complacent in the idea simply continuing to succeed, Piet had set his sights on the distant and audacious goal of becoming the definitive software platform for bicycles. He had focus and drive, and despite being a native of South Africa, Piet’s mission invited uniquely “American” risk-taking otherwise absent in Raveen’s prior work in India and Europe. Despite the uncertainty facing both his career and his young family, he was inspired. He called the equity management company and turned down their lingering offer.
In the summer of 2013, Raveen moved into an apartment in Bayonne, New Jersey, with Piet and Laurence, where they collectively started Hammerhead. Those hot, humid months would lay the groundwork for the company. The three worked especially long days, but Raveen even more so, who would push deep through the night to Skype with his wife and daughters back in India before going to bed. He would eventually mobilize again, bouncing between India and New Jersey for the next 18 months, while the team turned the crude, blinking device that Piet had first showed Raveen into Hammerhead’s first product, the H1, which would go on to sell in more than 50 countries around the world.
Throughout this time, however, Raveen was still only a casual cyclist. Like Piet, he recognized how leveraging existing technology and software solutions could improve the experience of competitive and casual cyclists alike, and at the time, that was enough for him to do his job well. That all changed, however, when Laurence took Raveen to see the 2014 Red Hook Criterium, in Brooklyn, New York, less than an hour’s drive from their Bayonne apartment.
The speed and intensity of the race, the engineering of the dialed-in machines, and the faces of those machines’ riders, conveying the strain and the thrill of the endeavor — it was an unforgettable spectacle. Raveen decided instantly that he wanted to try racing for himself. Back home in India, he purchased a Fuji Roubaix frameset, built it up with parts he was able to find, and began entering local criteriums and road races around Chennai and the larger nearby city of Bangalore.
Raveen’s relentlessly methodical, almost academic approach to professional challenges was now deployed in a completely different direction: to go faster on a bike. The more he rode and raced, the more variables he uncovered and manipulated, in an endless study of performance. “A race is like an exam,” he says, “because you have so many factors. You do this, you have a benefit, you do this, you have a negative. It’s also a bit like learning a new language.”
Piet, Laurence, Julio, and other members of the Hammerhead team already spoke that language, but to learn it now was enormously empowering for Raveen. When Hammerhead began its journey of developing Karoo — taking lessons learned from H1, and proving them on a much larger, more complicated stage — Raveen’s racing experience began to heavily influence the product. His own preferences, trial, and error informed myriad decisions made by the team, from data readout formats and interface insights, to rider profile creation and Strava integration, and much more. “You can actually affect the sport, and affect performance, with technology,” says Raveen, who, with his down time, tinkers endlessly on the forthcoming Karoo’s firmware.
So does Raveen’s approach to racing (and work) pay off? “I don’t look like a racer,” he admits, “but at times, I’ve been able to drop the ones who do.” He now rides regularly with both established and aspiring pros on Bangalore’s burgeoning road racing scene, who train and compete in Europe, and are keen to give ample feedback on various products on the market — and on Raveen’s own proposals for product features or enhancements.
Today, Raveen oversees the majority of Hammerhead’s software team, based at our office in Bangalore. His long-term goals in both cycling and in developing Karoo are similar: to be the very best possible in each respective category. At 39-years-old, Raveen wants to be competitive “at a high level” in Bangalore in the Masters category of road racing, which he’ll enter de facto when he turns 40. His incremental improvements over the last few years have been steady. While he concedes that being a champion cyclist one day isn’t the explicit focus of his training, he’s not so uncertain about Karoo.
“It will be the best,” he says, “for all cyclists, but also for my own sake, in the pursuit of my own goals. I will not let it be any less.”
