Our Founder

Hey — I'm Ritikesh. I started this when I was 21, three years into a degree I ended up walking away from.

Not gonna dress that up. I dropped out. Everyone around me was chasing the same thing — get good at tech, get into a good company, that was supposed to be the safe bet. And then I watched that "safe bet" start eating itself. The same jobs we were all being trained for were the first ones getting handed to AI. I kept thinking, okay, so what's actually left? What can't a machine just… do instead of you?

And the answer that kept coming back was — the hands. Not the code, not the deck. Someone sitting at a loom for six weeks tying a hundred thousand knots, taught by their father, who was taught by his father. That's not a skill you can prompt for. That's centuries. That's the one thing that's actually ours.

And it's disappearing. Quietly. While everyone's busy talking about AI, the actual art humans have been making for centuries — the stuff that got us this far as a species — is fading out because nobody's paying attention to it, or paying for it properly.

So that's why Monolith and Heart exists. No big master plan. I just didn't want to watch this die out while I sat in a lecture hall. I wanted to build something that keeps it alive, pays the people who actually make it fairly, and doesn't cost the planet while doing it. Made by real people, for people who still care that something was actually made, not generated.

It's slower. Harder to scale. I don't care. This felt like the only thing worth building right now.