Solo founder · Learning & education
Building for how
people learn.
After 18 years building software for other people — banks, sports tech, Amazon, brain research at EPFL, Swiss media, and an AI startup as CTO and co-founder — I'm building my own. The focus is learning: tools that help people build real skills and make them stick.
I build learning software — the tools people use to study, practice, and get genuinely good at things. My bar is behavior change, not completion: learning that shows up in real life, not content that just gets marked done.
I'm Dhanesh Neela Mana. I've built software since 2008: .NET banking systems at TCS, recruiting products used by 100,000 athletes at Front Rush, front-end at Amazon, semantic search for brain research at EPFL, and a legacy-platform rescue at Tamedia in Switzerland that I'm still proud of. Most recently I was CTO and co-founder of an AI startup, where I built a voice-first roleplay training product end to end.
Every side project I've ever loved was about learning — flashcards, e-book tools, teaching apps. Now it's the main project. I live in College Station, Texas.
I build in public. X for the day-to-day, Substack for the longer write-ups.