Terra Team Spotlight: Meet Gursukh

Team Spotlight: Introducing Gursukh

Every month we ask a Terra team member to let us know who they are. Here’s Gursukh:

What wearables do you use?

I used to wear the Garmin Vivoactive 2 watch, but when I won the Terra Steps Challenge — I was awarded the winning prize of an Apple watch which I’ve been using ever since. 

Is that how you heard about Terra — through the Steps Challenge at Imperial College London?

Yes, I’m currently studying Computer Science at Imperial, and I received an email with an invite to join the Terra Avengers Steps Challenge back in March. I had just completed an Ultra Marathon, which was a 56 km long run — I figured if I could complete an Ultra Marathon, I would have a decent chance at competing for the win in the steps challenge. 

I remember you completely dominated the Steps Challenge back in March… were you offered a role at Terra based on your physical traits?

Haha, unfortunately not! However, I was fast-tracked to an interview with the team and after completing all the stages I was lucky enough to be offered a part-time role as a Full Stack Engineer. Back then I was selling pre-workout to students at Imperial in my spare time and I was looking to gain some more experience in understanding how to run a startup. 

What are your main hobbies outside of work?

I’ve been passionate about arts, design, and technology for a long time. I actually built my first web game in year 9 with a tool called Construct —  despite its rudimentary graphics, the game ended up getting thousands of downloads. During secondary school, I developed a passion for a variety of arts from making music to drawing. To this day I still love to play piano or sketch in my spare time. I also used to produce music for artists around London while in sixth form.

Outside of school and work, I love working out and I’ve been heavily influenced by our team at Terra to hit the gym more, haha! I'm also quite a fan of MMA and combat sports in general. I used to do kickboxing from when I was 8 to 12, and then I've also been practicing Muay Thai at a gym just outside of London since I was 16. Admittedly, my attendance has been a bit intermittent due to injuries, but despite this, when I do train it's always the highlight of my week. In the future, I would also love to join the Brazilian jiu-jitsu society at Imperial. I've attended a few jiu-jitsu sessions at my current gym and it's definatly something I want to start doing more often.

What inspired you to study computer science?

Although I had a strong passion for the arts, I figured that studying computer science would let me add more utility to my creative endeavors. Also, I was really interested in the mathematics behind neural networks and machine learning before applying to Uni, and I built a functional language detection model before pursuing my CompSci degree at Imperial. Besides, my experience with building a web-game from scratch fuelled my interest in front-end development which also influenced my decision to pursue a CS degree. 

What is it like working at Terra?

What I think is truly unique about Terra is the amount of control and autonomy you’re given for each task. We work in small teams and you’re given full ownership of each project/task you’re working on, which means it’s entirely up to you how you go about solving a given task. 

Also, the culture at Terra is a lot more candid compared to a corporate company — it’s not a flat structure. For example, I report directly to the CEO of the company on a daily basis and the dialogue is very informal. 

What’s been some of your main projects at Terra?

I’ve been put in charge of maintaining our landing page and leading new implementations and features related to this to be launched every week. When I came in we used first principles to re-build the landing page from the ground up. It was really cool to be given that level of ownership and learning to think in a bottom-up approach, which has been applicable to a variety of projects, both at Terra and at Imperial. 

What do you think is the future of wearables? 

I believe it will be a lot more integrated and not just limited to wearables. For example what Elon Musk is working on with Neuralink to embed devices inside your body. In my opinion, the transition will be slow with only a few people using the embedded devices in the beginning, but my bold prediction is that sometime in the future — it will be the standard to have a chip or device embedded maybe not in your brain, but in your body to monitor your biometrics continuously.