Maneesh Sethi

Early years

Sethi grew up in Fair Oaks, a suburb of Sacramento, California. He began using computers and writing software in middle school, and started "StandardDesign", a web design company, when he was twelve years old. He tutored other students in programming and video game design, and wrote his first book, Game Programming for Teens, at the age of fourteen.^[3] At sixteen years old, he held monthly segments on video game programming on TechTV.^[4]

College years

Sethi began classes at Stanford University in 2005, majoring in science, technology and society under B.J. Fogg^[5]. He studied abroad in Florence, Italy, where he read The 4-Hour Workweek, after which he took a two-year leave from his classes in 2008. Sethi took an absence from Stanford, during which time he authored several books and traveled. ^[1]

Pavlok

In July 2014, Behavioral Technology Group created its first product, Pavlok.^[11] Parallel to the interests of Sethi's Hack the System, Pavlok is a wearable device that modifies behavior through operant conditioning, using audio and haptic feedback. Pavlok claims to help users break habits and addictions through courses similar to aversion therapy, and establish new routines by pairing behaviors with positive stimuli.

After having raised funds through angel investment, Sethi launched a fundraising campaign for Pavlok on Indiegogo. He used Bolt, a business incubator, for hardware production, before moving into Pavlok's WeWork office in October 2014. Soon after, Pavlok was accepted into the 2015 MassChallenge startup accelerator program.^[12] Sethi pitched Pavlok on the season seven finale of Shark Tank^[13]. He was called a "con artist" by Mark Cuban after he could not produce sound studies backing claims about his product.^[14][15]

Pavlok has raised funds from Maneesh's contacts in the blogging world including Steve Kamb, Matt Kepnes, Ramit Sethi, John Romaniello, Dave Asprey and more.^[16]