About.

I'm Kalyan Chandana, a product designer who builds. These days that means CubeX, where I'm working on an agentic company OS for small and mid-size businesses, built from modules that can be tailored to how each company actually runs. It also means shipping my own apps. The latest is Yohoho, a voice dictation app for the Mac.

By training I'm an industrial designer and an engineer. I spent my student years designing and building race cars, then moved into UX and UI, and never stopped coding. Somewhere along the way the two halves merged: design the thing, then build the thing. AI has made that loop faster than it has ever been. Off the screen there's a camera and a ukulele, and both get regular use.

Kalyan Chandana, smiling, in front of two paintings
First do it, then do it right, then do it better.
Addy Osmani

Through my lens.

Photos are being picked out. They'll land here soon.

Videography and music are next. Same page, later.

Reading.

Reading now

  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

Read

  • Strange Houses by Uketsu
  • The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
  • Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever
  • Sprint by Jake Knapp
  • Hooked by Nir Eyal
  • Jobs to Be Done by Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman & David Farber
  • Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout
  • Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
  • Alchemy by Rory Sutherland
  • Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen & Roy Schwartz
  • Zero to One by Peter Thiel
  • The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
  • Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan
  • Measure What Matters by John Doerr
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins
  • Start with Why by Simon Sinek
  • The Portfolio Life by Christina Wallace
  • Designing Your Work Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
  • Radical Candor by Kim Scott
  • Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
  • Drive by Daniel H. Pink
  • Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson et al.
  • Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
  • Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish
  • Deep Work by Cal Newport
  • The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
  • Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  • The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
  • Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
  • The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll
  • The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
  • The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
  • The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz
  • Becoming Supernatural by Joe Dispenza
  • Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
  • Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  • The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Say hi.

Always up for a good chat or brainstorming ideas, be it design, building products, photography, music, or race cars.