Product · 3 min read
I missed Tech Roast. My printed face made it on stage.
My flight from Chicago was delayed. Utkarsh took a printed photo of me to Tech Roast Show in Montreal. Somehow, paper me still made it on stage.
Air Canada decided to humble me. I was in Chicago for business, needed to get back to Montreal, and my flight got delayed. So I missed Tech Roast Show. 😭
My cofounder, Utkarsh, was already going. Naturally, I sent a printed version of myself with him for the joke. Somehow paper me still made it on stage. The version of me with no legs had a more successful travel day than the actual person.
Remote work has gone too far
Look at the photo of me sitting in the theatre. No laptop. No phone. No flight notifications. Just a printed face leaning against a backpack, waiting for the show. Honestly, the most relaxed I have looked during this entire build.
Utkarsh could have gone, enjoyed the evening and sent me a few photos. Instead, there he is carrying his cofounder around on paper. If you’re wondering what working together on vkit is like, this is a fairly good introduction. We take the work seriously. Clearly, there are limits to how seriously we take ourselves.
And this was Tech Roast Show
For anyone who hasn’t come across them yet: Tech Roast Show is the touring comedy show from Socially Inept, built around comedians roasting people who work in tech. Their Instagram account, @techroastshow, had 1.3 million followers when I checked it for this post. The clips travel far beyond the room.
The Montreal stop was at Le National on September 27, 2026. The show listing named Jesse Warren, Austin Nasso and Nikita Oster. Their whole world is tech people, startup people and the things we all say with a completely straight face at work. An excellent place to send a cofounder with a printed headshot, apparently.
Then my face ended up on the big screen. Utkarsh made it on stage. Paper me made it on stage. I did not even make it to Montreal in time. You can see why I needed to put these photos somewhere more permanent than an Instagram story. 😂
Our startup got there before the launch
The part that still makes me laugh: we were pre-launch. We had been quietly building vkit for months and had not even properly introduced it yet. Somehow our startup had already made it to Tech Roast. That was not on any launch checklist.
I spend a lot of time thinking about content because I’m a creator myself. And then something like this happens. A delayed flight, one ridiculous idea, a printer and a cofounder willing to go along with it. There’s your story. I couldn’t have planned that photo if I’d tried.
This is the bit of building a company I want to remember as well. The product matters. Getting it right matters. But so do the people you’re building it with, and the completely unserious moments in between. This one deserved a place on the blog.
Anyway. Back to building vkit.
Behind the printed face is the thing Utkarsh and I have been working on: vkit. A place to create content, publish across your connected accounts and automate Instagram replies. The idea came from doing this work myself and wanting fewer tools, fewer handoffs and less copying the same link into everyone’s DMs.
I’ve written the longer version of why I started vkit if you want that story. This post is the version where my cofounder goes to a comedy show and I become office supplies.
Thank you to Utkarsh for representing both founders, despite one of us being completely two-dimensional. And thank you to the Tech Roast Show crew for a very funny addition to our pre-launch story. Next time, I would like to attend in person. Paper Parul has had enough attention.
Sources and verification
Show details and the Instagram audience figure were checked using the sources below.
Built by actual people. Usually in three dimensions.
That’s a little of the story behind vkit. If you’re curious about what we’ve been building between all of this, take a look at the plans. I promise the product does more work than paper me.
Put it into practice
