The Disruptor

Anand Agarwal loves to hack into things. The CEO of STL is a curiously enthusiastic geek. His hobby is to disrupt things, and then build, repair and reboot them. Often one can find him surrounded with unassembled audio systems, laptops and all kinds of digital devices. A PhD in material sciences, he is an electronics and network enthusiast at heart.

"I love to get inside the hood of things and then to change them to my liking," says Agarwal. "The feeling of being able to break things apart, fix them and put them back together is immensely satisfying. It keeps the student in you alive, and we are always learning, aren't we?" It is with the same eagerness that he drives STL to reinvent digital networks with open-source radio and fibre optics. The lockdown has given him opportunities to boost his home Wi-Fi to a sixth-generation mesh network with a fiber and radio frequency-based firewall, says Agarwal, who is rebooting his kitchen garden these days.