Welcome to PQ Labs.
What used to take a team of six engineers six months now takes one person a week. Sometimes a day.
With the massive leaps in agentic coding and frontier LLMs, the traditional moats of software development have evaporated. You no longer need millions in funding to compensate a massive headcount just to get an MVP out the door. Today, the only real limit is your product sense.
My name is Pravin Santhanam. I’ve spent my career in data science and applied ML, shipping products across industries that have nothing to do with each other—from the Kansas City Royals front office, to national defense, to news prediction markets, and currently leading public sector Generative AI research at Unstructured.
Working across sports, media, and government taught me that the real superpower of applied ML is taking a messy business problem and translating it into a concrete technical solution. That skill transcends the industry. If you can do that, you can build anywhere—and AI just put that ability into overdrive.
That observation is why I launched PQ Labs.
PQ Labs is the umbrella brand for the projects I’m building. The goal is simple: do real research, build novel, state-of-the-art applications of ML and AI, and ship them as real products. Pure research often misses the strongest signal that something is actually valuable—someone pulling out their wallet to pay for it. I’m not here to write papers. I’m here to ship products with real business models.
This Substack is where I document the entire process in public.
What to Expect
We publish twice a week. No hashtags. No disclaimers. Just the work.
Fridays (The Build): We talk product, tech, and tools. This is the build log. If you are building something ambitious by yourself, or want to see the reality of agentic product development—the architecture, the mistakes, the costs, and the wins—this is for you.
Mondays (The Receipts): We put the products to work. Right now, that means showcasing StringTheory—the first project out of PQ Labs. It is a digital map of the US political system built to track money, bills, and votes. On Mondays, we use it to investigate historical events and analyze what’s actually happening in US politics today, relying purely on primary-source data.
If you are an engineer or founder trying to move fast in the AI-native era, or if you are just tired of editorialized noise and want to see what happens when the data speaks for itself, you are in the right place.
Subscribe to come along for the ride.
