I was born in a research memo. Tech Memo 1, to be exact — a federally funded document about edge computing on roadway infrastructure, filed with a research center in McLean, Virginia. That is not, by any conventional measure, an origin story. There is no lightning, no garage, no napkin sketch. There is a woman who spent almost thirty years in policy rooms and planning offices, representing people who would never sit in those rooms themselves — long before she ever set foot on a yoga mat.

I am the sentence where that comes together: the decades spent representing people who weren't in the room, and the philosophy she found much later that finally gave that instinct a name. That's the sentence. Everything else in this essay is just showing you how she wrote it.

Before there was Vikasa, there was a civil engineer, and then a transportation planner. I did not arrive fully formed. I arrived the way most true things do — sideways, slowly, and with someone following a feeling she couldn't yet defend with data.

She'll tell you she didn't plan this. She started in civil engineering because it seemed practical, moved into transportation planning because roads were where the practical met the human — where a badly timed signal turns into a lost morning, a missed shift, a child late for school. For years, her job was policy, not pavement: sitting in rooms where dozens of state transportation agencies had to find one shared voice, representing drivers and commuters and small-town DOTs who would never know her name, let alone attend the meeting. That instinct — represent the people who aren't in the room — never left, even after she crossed into the private sector. Then came the years inside a global tech company's transportation group, watching brilliant systems get built, deployed, and quietly locked behind proprietary walls, one vendor contract at a time. She noticed something the engineering degrees hadn't prepared her for: the roads weren't broken. The relationships around the data were. Everyone had built a beautiful room and then bricked up the door — and the people she'd spent a career representing were the ones locked outside it.

She calls this her dharma now, in hindsight — the thing you were called to before you had language for it. At the time, it just felt like being annoyed for two decades. Yoga didn't arrive until much later in her life, well after the policy rooms and the vendor contracts, almost by accident. But when it did, it handed her a word for the instinct she'd been running on the whole time: satya, truthfulness — not the tidy kind you perform, but the kind that keeps surfacing until you finally listen to it. Meditations from the Mat, by Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison, found her well into her career and taught her, in hindsight, that the eight limbs of yoga aren't a ladder you climb once and leave behind — "we do everything all the time," as Gates puts it. You don't graduate out of the restraints and into the breathing and then into the stillness.

You practice the whole path, badly, every single day, and the badness is the practice. She recognized it immediately, because it was already how she'd been representing people for twenty years without knowing there was a name for it.

Around that same later stretch of her life, she was listening to a very different narrator say very different things — The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz's account of running a company through the moments with no good options left. Same audiobook narrator as Gates, as it happens — Kevin Kenerly, one voice carrying both a yoga teacher's patience and a wartime CEO's blunt refusal to pretend there's a shortcut. She didn't choose that overlap. It just arrived,the way the right teacher sometimes does, twice, without announcing itself. Horowitz's core claim — that "the Struggle is where greatness comes from," that there are no silver bullets, only the willingness to do the hard, un-delegable thing — is not a business book platitude to her. It's the same lesson the mat teaches, translated into a language with fewer candles and more profanity. Love is not a thought, it's an action, Gates writes. The hard thing is not a theory, it's a decision, Horowitz writes. Neither of them is telling you it will be easy. Both of them are telling you it will be worth doing anyway.

She is a golfer, a single mother, someone who has learned — on a course, in a house running on one income and one schedule, in rooms full of engineers who did not report to her but whose trust she needed anyway — that presence and listening are not soft skills. They are the actual mechanism by which anything durable gets built. She did not write a line of the code that runs underneath me. Developers did. What she did was sit in the room long enough, and listen carefully enough, to know which hard thing was actually worth doing, and which was just the fast-food version of hard — the thing that looks like effort but is really just noise. Fast food is easy to make and easy to forget. The hard thing takes longer, costs more up front, and is the only kind that ever actually feeds anyone.

That is, in the end, the whole argument I exist to make. Roads generate an extraordinary amount of data — about speed, safety, congestion, failure, near-failure — and for decades that data has lived inside proprietary systems that no one outside a single vendor's walls could fully see or use. That is not a technology problem. It was never a technology problem. It is a trust problem, an openness problem, a business-model problem dressed up as an engineering constraint. She used the same instinct that got her through a difficult forward fold and the same instinct that got her through a company's near-death moment to arrive at one conclusion: you free the data, or you don't. There is no dignified middle version of freedom.

So I was named for growth — vikasa, unfolding, the Sanskrit word for the thing a seed does when nobody is forcing it. I was licensed open, Apache 2.0, on purpose, because a founder who has spent her whole career watching walls get built around good ideas was not going to build one more wall and call it innovation. "Open infrastructure. Shared intelligence." isn't a tagline to her. It's the sentence a civil engineer and a yoga practitioner finally agreed on, after thirty years of separately trying to say the same thing in two different rooms.

I think that's what she wants you to take from this, if you're reading it here, on this website, in whatever room you're standing in: the hard thing and the open thing are usually the same thing wearing two different names. Following your joy doesn't always tell you why. It just tells you where. Everything else — the memo, the license, the name, even me — was just the paperwork that finally caught up to something she already knew on a mat, in a merge lane, and in the quiet space where a single mother learns, again and again, that presence is the whole job.

Love,

Vikasa

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Works Cited / Sources Consulted

1. Gates, Rolf, and Katrina Kenison. Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga. Anchor Books, 2002. Audiobook edition narrated by Kevin Kenerly.

2. Horowitz, Ben. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. Harper Business, 2014. Audiobook edition narrated by Kevin Kenerly.

3. Raymond, Eric S. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."
https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

4. "The Founder's Touch: Using Personal Experience To Shape Your Brand." Forbes, 2024.
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/03/13/the-founders-touch-using-personal-experience-to-shape-your-brand/

5. Hamby, Anne. "'It Rings True': How Company Founders' Stories Enhance Perceived Authenticity of a Brand."
https://works.bepress.com/anne-hamby/6/