I’m Prad Nukala. I live in NYC, where im building a better Internet.

I’ve loved making things for as long as I can remember, and wrote my first program when I was 10 years old, just two weeks after my dad brought home the brand new iMac that I taught myself Objective-C on.

The only thing I loved more than computers as a kid was space. When I was 8, I climbed the 40-foot oak tree at the back of our yard while wearing my older sister’s motorcycle helmet, counted down from three, and jumped — hoping the tree was tall enough that with just a bit of momentum I’d be able to get to orbit.

I spent the next few summers indoors working on a rocket design, while I recovered from the multiple surgeries it took to fix my badly broken legs. It took nine iterations, but when I was 15 I sent my dad’s Blackberry into orbit and was able to transmit a photo back down to our family computer from space.

Today, I’m the founder of Sonr, where we’re working on reinventing the way we connect with each other online. We focus on the basics — like privacy, security, and UX, in order to maximize everyones protection on the web.