Before Zyber, I spent my time as a business analyst at McKinsey, and before that, building Studomatrix, a national students' organisation. Both jobs put me in front of a huge number of ambitious young people across a huge number of institutions. The same observation kept repeating, in almost every one of them: the opportunities that actually changed someone's trajectory rarely came from an application. They came from a person, usually met by proximity, rarely by design.
The part nobody builds for
Colleges and companies spend enormous effort on formal systems: applications, interviews, referral portals. Almost none of them spend any effort on the informal layer underneath all of it, the hallway conversation, the senior who happens to live on your floor, the classmate building something you could actually help with. That layer decides more outcomes than the formal one does, and it is left entirely to chance, which means it systematically favours whoever already happens to be well-placed.
Running Studomatrix showed me what a decentralised, builder-led network can do when you trust the people closest to the problem to run it themselves, rather than controlling everything from the centre. That belief carried straight into how Zyber got built: not through a marketing budget, but through more than 500 student builders, on their own campuses, who understood the problem better than any outside team could.
Why proximity, specifically
Prestige and who-you-already-know are both close to fixed. Proximity is not. Where you physically are, who else happens to be nearby, and whether you are both free right now, all of that is solvable with the right matching, regardless of which college is printed on a degree. That is the entire premise behind Zyber: a real-time, proximity-based social and networking app for ambitious young people in India, built to manufacture the right hallway conversation on purpose, for anyone, not just for whoever already got lucky.
The best opportunities I saw were never in an application. They were in a room, next to the right person, at the right time.
Falit Sijariya, Founder
Consulting taught me to see a system and ask what it was actually built around. Most networking infrastructure, it turns out, is built for people who are already connected. Zyber is my attempt to build the version that works for everyone else instead.
Stop Scrolling. Start Connecting.
Download Zyber free and start meeting people nearby, right now.