Two people from completely different fields — async prep, focused sessions, real output. A podcast, a tool, a roadmap, a demo. Anything someone can build on top of is a win.
I believe the best ideas live at intersections.
Not inside one field — but in the conversation between a sales planner and an AI engineer, a neuroscientist and a product designer, a filmmaker and a roboticist. When two people from completely different worlds work together, something tends to appear that neither could have reached alone. A question nobody had thought to ask. A tool neither would have built. A direction that only appears in the gap between them.
That is what I am trying to create deliberately. Two people. A focused session. Something real at the end — a prototype, a note, a video, a roadmap, a clear direction. Anything someone can build on top of.
Right now I am running these sessions myself — working with people across AI, operations, and organisational behaviour. The longer plan is a platform where any two students or professionals, anywhere, can do the same.
If you are curious about something and want to work on it with someone who thinks completely differently — I want to hear from you.
— PrabakaranAsync prep
Share what you are curious about and what you are working on. Find a co-builder from a different field. Plan together — no fixed agenda, just a shared direction.
Co-build sessions
A focused stretch of time — online or in person. Bring your perspective, they bring theirs. A series of sessions if the thread is worth pulling further.
Output
Something concrete at the end. A tool, a video, a roadmap, a set of notes, a demo, a podcast episode. Anything someone else can build on top of.
The best sessions come from unexpected pairings. Two people who would never normally work together, looking at the same problem from completely different angles. Here is what some of them look like — including what is happening right now:
A behavioral economist and a pharmacist sit down together. They start wondering why people reach for certain OTC drugs the way they do — the psychology, the habits, the moment of decision. They sketch a small study. Neither could have framed it that way alone.
An engineer and someone who loves exploring the city pull open a public dataset together. Within an hour they have mapped something interesting that nobody had looked at quite that way. A small finding. A beginning.
Two people read the same paper on how language models behave and decide to run a quick experiment to test what they read. They write it up — something small and real they can both point to.
An economist and a software engineer spend a session trying to understand the same concept — how it's defined on paper, where it actually shows up in the world. They end with something neither had going in: a shared picture of it.
A practitioner in sales and operations planning reaches out wanting to understand generative AI. We sit down — her, an AI engineer, an operations researcher. Within the session we sketch a tool that none of us would have thought to build alone. It took someone from the applied side to see the gap. That thread is still running.
What you are looking for is not the thing you arrived with. It is what appears when two people start explaining their own world to each other — and neither of them expected it. What the session is actually for
More happens in a focused session than you'd expect. You can gain real clarity on a concept you've been circling for weeks. Sketch a clean structure out of something that felt formless. Run a quick experiment to test an intuition. Read a paper together and write up what you both noticed. Pull open a dataset and find something in it worth looking at twice. Define a problem statement that didn't exist when you sat down. One step forward is the goal — not the whole staircase.
AI is a third partner in the room. When you need to understand something quickly, prototype a rough version, or run an experiment — it helps you go further than either person could reach alone. You spend the session thinking, not searching.
No fixed agenda, no audience, no performance. You build what it leads you to. The output could be a prototype, a note, a clear question, or just a direction you both believe in. If it is a seed for something bigger, you take it from there.
Real connections
You meet through the work, not through small talk. The person you built something with becomes someone you keep in touch with — and come back to.
A new lens
Explaining your own work to someone from a completely different field changes how you understand it yourself. That shift tends to stay with you.
Something made
A small experiment, a sketch, a published note, a clear question. Something concrete — and a seed for whatever comes next.
The harder thing to describe is what comes after. You met someone real, thought together in a way you rarely get to, and something came from it — in ways you couldn't have predicted. A friendship. A way of seeing something you didn't have before. A direction that only appeared because two different people looked at the same thing. That is what it's actually for.
Co-builds can take any form. A podcast episode counts. A shared document counts. A demo, a dataset, a five-minute video. What matters is that something real comes out — something you can point to, or hand to the next person to build on.
Some of these will become co-founded companies. A few will become friendships that do not need a reason. At least one will become something we will not name here. The oyster, it turns out, contains multitudes.
These are the questions currently on the table — threads being explored with people from different fields. If any of them pull at you, that is a good place to start.
Organisational Behaviour Simulation using Multi-Agent Social Systems
RL and World Models in Localisation and Navigation
RL for Agent Memory for Business Applications
LLMs in Sales and Operations Planning
Not limited to AI. These are the threads open right now — but co-builds are genuinely open to any field. The more different the two worlds, the more interesting the emergence.
The phrase is Shakespeare — The Merry Wives of Windsor. "The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open." The oyster is closed. Guarded. The world does not open itself. And the pearl — the rare thing inside — does not form cleanly. It forms because something foreign gets in, something that does not belong, and the oyster has no choice but to transform it. Friction becomes the thing worth keeping.
A senior told me "the world is your oyster" during a difficult stretch of my life. It stayed. The name is a quiet nod to that — and to the idea underneath it: the rare thing tends to appear not despite the collision of two different worlds, but because of it.
That is what a session is trying to be.
Prabakaran Chandran
I research and build at the boundary of AI, causal thinking, and complexity science — currently an MS candidate at Columbia, running the FAIRE research program in parallel. Six years from sensors to tensors, shaped by control science and a long-running belief that the best questions appear when two completely different fields look at the same thing. Oyster Club is my attempt to make that happen deliberately — for anyone, not just those with the right network. If the idea resonates, run your own.
Right now, Oyster Club is me running sessions — finding interesting people and making them happen. I am personally working on four threads right now, and planning IRL meetups in New York and the Bay Area.
But the longer idea is a self-serving platform: any two students or professionals, anywhere in the world, can find a co-builder from a completely different field and run their own sessions — without needing to know me or be in the right city.
What I am advocating for is this: a world where your co-builder does not depend on your zip code or your network. Where emergence through collaboration is infrastructure, not accident. Where a researcher switching fields, a student in a new city, a practitioner curious about something adjacent — anyone can find the right person to build with.
That is what this is building toward.
Tell me about yourself and what you are curious about. Right now I match people myself — over time, this becomes a platform. I read everything and reply to all of it.