Applied Intuition is a bit of an “if you know you know” company. For years, they didn’t talk about what they did publicly. Co-founder and CEO Qasar Younis didn’t even have a Twitter.

Malhar Patel started back when the company was just called “NewCo” on LinkedIn, joining a crew of engineers working out of a rented space above a bar in Sunnyvale. They had a no-shoes policy — only because their office was a literal house, so it felt odd to keep them on.

Today, Applied Intuition is a $15B company, and as they’ve grown into a leader in physical AI, they’ve started to talk about themselves a bit more (Younis even set up an X recently).

For our second installment of “Firsthand,” our as-told-by series spotlighting the early employees at some of the most distinctive companies in tech, Patel brings us inside the halls of Applied’s Sunnyvale campus, where they’re in-office five days a week, and it's not unusual to find folks staying late for a call at 11PM with customers in Tokyo. He’s now Deputy CTO, and he’s worked across just about every function at the company throughout all its phases of scale.

In this essay, he shares what’s kept him there — and what makes the culture so uniquely “Applied,” which has somehow stayed pretty constant over the years (they still take their shoes off, even in their several-hundred-thousand-square-foot HQ).