He picked up an iPhone when he was just 10, as the app industry was beginning to gain traction. Now at the age of 24, Rohan Kapur’s ascendance in the world of coding and his ability to develop mobile applications make him a shining example of a modern-day geek
By his own telling, Rohan Kapur is an Apple fan boy. From a very young age, he became captivated by the tech giant’s iPhone and its capabilities. Quite like a budding IT geek, he began hacking. “My friends would give their phones to me and I would hack them to unlock more features or cool little things that you couldn’t otherwise access,” he says. It would lead him to the art of coding—with very notable success.
To perform the hack, Kapur says he had to download an app called Xcode, which is an integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS that is designed to help developers create software for Apple’s various platforms, including macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
As he had already invested five dollars into the app, he decided to explore its full potential and see what else he could do with it. “Basically, from the time I got home from school and even during school, I would just be reading as much as I could, watch as many tutorials as I could on YouTube about how to code and build apps,” he tells The Indian Sun over Zoom from his San Francisco home.
At the same time, Kapur was closely following the latest developments and updates from Apple, monitoring significant announcements and events such as keynotes and presentations by the then-CEO, Steve Jobs.
Kapur, who was born in Melbourne but moved to Singapore when he was 10, says by the time he was 13, he won a scholarship to attend Apple’s coveted yearly developer conference. He was one of the 150 worldwide student invitees. It was a platform to meet top executives at Apple with opportunities to network.
For Kapur, the important highlight of that trip was briefly meeting Apple CEO Tim Cook. But it was also during that same trip that he met Lenny Khazan, a developer from New York, who was around his age. “We hit it off straightaway,” says Kapur.
Kapur and Khazan’s friendship led to a successful business together, building various apps, games and websites for companies. What was also common about the two was that both spent their free time in elementary and middle school “coding up apps and websites and jailbreaking friends’ iPhones”.
When they turned 14, Kapur and Khazan created and released several fun random apps on the App Store. Their work caught the attention of Apple’s PR team, and both received the prestigious “20 Under 20″ Award for their exceptional talent—marking their excellence as young developers in the mobile world.
Although Kapur enrolled for a degree in Computer Science at Stanford University, he has kept college on hold as his life changed completely within two years of college life.
He had just turned 19 when a company called Backbone approached him to work on a very complicated gaming application. It would lead to Kapur joining the team and co-creating the iOS software for Backbone, delivering “a beautiful, artisanal hardware-software integration that transforms your phone into a full bleed console with powerful gaming features”.
Backed by big names in venture capital, gaming, and entertainment, Backbone is now the market leader in mobile gaming controllers.
That’s not all. Kapur has worked on many more products for large companies and small start-ups through the years. He has architected and built a new food delivery platform Neighbors from scratch. Neighbors is a DoorDash/UberEats competitor that connects food lovers to local makers like home chefs, farmers, bakeries, and restaurants.
He also built from scratch an interactive love quiz for new dating entertainment brand Nectar, an offshoot of Jubilee Media. The quiz allows you to calculate and understand what type of lover you are, and how ready you are to find and share love. The website quickly went viral on TikTok in its first week of launch leading to traction on Nectar’s YouTube channel.
Kapur also built out the technology division for an advertisement agency called AdFairy, including their primary product—a mobile app that connects brands to TikTok creators to facilitate automated advertisement deals.
And not to mention the Winno news app that broadcasts the timelines of facts in ongoing global news affairs, of which he is also co-inventor. The high-quality content, sleek interface, fun animations, and sticky, frictionless UX earned it an “App of The Day” award from Apple three times. Winno was accepted Y-Combinator W22 and has since pivoted to a B2B company.
Beyond just application development, Kapur also authored an artificial intelligence (AI) publication that became reference material for Ivy League university courses, and was featured by one of the top venture capitalist’s (a16z) in the world.
These are just a selection of a wider array of products, companies, and technological initiatives that Kapur has been a part of creating. Given his credentials, Kapur could well be the quintessential IT geek for a generation growing up online. He is well known within the wider circle of entrepreneurs who need top talent to build their software.
Asked if he has ever faced challenges, Kapur says, “Technical challenges happen all the time as a developer but the way I think as an engineer is, every problem is solvable.
“It’s natural to feel intimidated and doubt your ability to accomplish it. However, breaking down the challenge into smaller components can make it more manageable. For example, whatever you need to create—whether it’s an entirely new product, a feature for an existing app, or just a small new custom animation—you can spend a week or two analysing each specific part and figuring out how they fit together. By taking a step-by-step approach, you can overcome your initial doubts and achieve your goals.
“Eventually you can build anything you want as long as you think of each problem as something that can be broken down into the littlest thing. It’s a matter of understanding that everything that you see in the design can be broken down until you have the answers that you need. They are just intimidating problems that haven’t been fully determined,” says Kapur, whose forte is building apps from scratch.
He adds, “With a small company, it’s really about working very quickly to constantly try and experiment new ideas, to tweak existing ideas and test different variants of ideas to see what captures users’ attention and sparks enjoyment.”
Kapur is upbeat about mobile gaming particularly with the emergence of cloud gaming technology, where the games are run on remote servers and the player can access and play the game through an internet-connected device, such as a computer, tablet, or smartphone.
“With this new technology, gaming companies are now able to stream their games directly to mobile devices, much like how we stream videos on YouTube. Mobile gaming has been on an upward trend right now. It’s going to continue that way,” he says.
Being in an ever-evolving industry, Kapur says, “It is competitive, you can make a lot of money in it, but you can also very easily be made redundant because of how quickly these technologies are moving.”
“There’s been a lot of developments in AI last month that have moved so quickly, they can even pose a threat to the job of a lot of engineers. So you have to jump in and say ‘how do I learn to use this instead of being anxious about how it affects my role in the industry’.
“For me, a lot of it is staying plugged in to my community of developers, network of CEOs and entrepreneurs, tech news on Twitter, latest frameworks of companies, reading developer blogs to understand the latest advancements in web technologies, etc.. I think it is just staying plugged in to all these information to understand what the new things are out there and then pick your battles.”
The industry right now, rues Kapur, is going through its hardest in 20 years. But he expresses his commitment to being a developer. “Computer science had an upper edge but, perhaps, it is finance today. But I would stick with what I do. I got into it because I was passionate about it, and even if it was not a lucrative field, I would have stuck in it.”
For a young boy who picked the iPhone when he was just 10, Kapur is quite the natural geek on an ascendance. He has not ruled out college but says, “It’s hard going back to school when my talent is needed in a lot of these companies.”
Kapur has a fully established life in San Francisco. He unwinds with his dog, an Australian Shepherd, and pursues his other passion—music. Rest assured, Kapur has positioned himself to succeed in the tech industry. And that’s inspiring!
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At the age of 10, he was hacking into iPhones to unlock more features. At 24, he is a sought after talent in the tech world. Meet Melbourne-born Rohan Kapur, who is now based in San Francisco. #TheIndianSun @indira_laisramhttps://t.co/PRhrl9vmSy
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