My Journey to Hollow-Bamboo Innovations

Spoken from my heart, Niv Sharma

“Work is Love Made Visible”. Khalil Gibran.

A question in 2016 that jolted me awake. Followed by a burnout phase" in 2017 that broke it open again. A quest for the song I was meant to sing, and the journey that led me to Hollow-Bamboo.

Building a Career in Technology and Business

I was born in India and came to the States in the nineties to study engineering - a master's at Purdue, in electrical engineering. I then worked as an R&D and Systems Engineer at a Fortune 500 company. I was designing the brains and networks for diesel engines – electronic controls. And then did technology strategy & planning work.

As I did that work, I got interested in the business side of things, which took me to a full-time MBA at Indiana University in Bloomington. Right after my MBA, I came to the Twin Cities to work for 3M. I spent twelve years there, in strategy, marketing, new business development. In short, I created new businesses for them, with new technology platforms, taking them into new markets.

I was already working with machine learning algorithms and getting exposed to what was coming. In the last two years of my time there, I was leading governance for digital transformation at the corporate level — across marketing, sales, customer service.

2017: The Question I Could Not Keep Avoiding

Then came a key disruptive event in 2017. I'd been asking myself, since the year before, what else I really wanted to do with my life. I'd gone through a retreat where I envisioned my own death - what I'd feel on my death bed looking back, about what I still wanted to do. The answer emerged, and also the insight: why am I not doing it now while I am alive?

So, I took stock and decided to take a pause. Honestly, with how the past few years had been, I was exhausted, burnt out - and I wanted to take care of myself, to nourish myself. I don't say burnout lightly; it's taken me a while to be able to call it out loud. I took time to travel the world and go deeper into meditation and inner work. This work took me deeper than any leadership skills I'd spent a career building, real as those were.

What Opened

What happened in that work was different. My heart opened. The blockages I'd been carrying started to release. There was a different vibration, a different vitality, a flow that I started to feel. And I started to experience a connection with my own spirit - meditation lets you connect with yourself deeply first, and then with something larger than yourself. Whatever you choose to call that – your higher self, Universal Consciousness, Existence, God, Truth.

What I started to recognize was that this feeling of being connected - to myself, to others, to my puppy, to the trees, to the world - was emerging from inside. I didn't have to force it from outside anymore. It was like a “knowing” or rather recognition, coming from inside of me.

A Season of Care, and a Shift That Stuck

During this time, I also went to India to care of my mother, who was unwell, for about three years, working from there. When I came back to the States, something had shifted deeply enough that I didn't want to return to the old way of working. I had the instinct to try something different - which took me into startup and venture studio creation for advanced mobility, then my own consulting work over the past three years, much of it in Digital and AI transformation.

Seeing How AI Governance Was Actually Happening

That's when the dots really connected. I'm a creator, an innovator at heart, I love technology - I've always put my energy into new creating things with technology that make our lives better. And here we were, dealing with AI – a powerful technology with tremendous potential yet the trajectory it was on was extremely concerning. As I worked with companies, I saw how governance decisions were actually being made - what questions got asked, and what didn't.

I saw this in different companies, different contexts: people who felt they had no real choice or were constrained, because of their management, their stakeholders, whatever the pressure was.

So, I came to see it this way: there are external guardrails, and then there's the inner capacity of the human being to actually hold them - especially when things get hard, when it takes a different level of conviction, a different level of courage, to withstand or shape external pressure in matters of great consequences.

I also see that AI holds tremendous potential for good - but its current trajectory, and where AGI is headed, is genuinely concerning. AI governance frameworks are only as strong as the humans holding them. Wise and courageous leadership is needed at all levels - not just with formal titles and positions - and it needs to be consciously cultivated.

The Gap Between Ambition and Wisdom

The Future of Life Institute’s 2025 AI Safety Index found that none of the eight leading AI companies scored above a ‘D’ in Existential Safety planning — for the second consecutive year — despite leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind predicting AGI within 2-5 years.

This is not a criticism of AI developers and builders. Most people working in AI genuinely want the same thing - humans to thrive and AI to serve life. As a technology innovator myself, I know that practitioners will welcome rigorous frameworks that help them build responsibly. Their futures are at stake too.

But what is clear is that the gap between ambition and wisdom has never been wider.

Two Crises, With the Same Answer

As I reflected on the unfolding disruption — AI displacing the intellect, reshaping human experience deeply — I saw this was a two-fold crisis, not one.

Humans need to grow into their fuller capacities - beyond intellect - to thrive, innovate and lead. Tremendous courage, creativity, and resilience will be needed to navigate through the uncertainty ahead.

Two crises. The same answer: growing consciousness. Growing wisdom. Growing the inner capacities of the humans involved — so people can thrive, and so AI can be steered toward life.

How Hollow-Bamboo Was Born

I'd been conceiving the idea behind what became Hollow-Bamboo ever since COVID, when I finally had time to really think. Somehow, I couldn't quite pull it off — until I got the answer in the spring and summer 2025. The insight: I had developed a strong outgoing capacity — achieving, manifesting, building things into the world. And I had developed a strong receptive, incoming capacity — rest, intuition, creativity — from meditating for so long. But these two energies were operating in silos when it came to this project. They were not supporting each other - a level of integration in these two energies was needed.

Even just the recognition of that shifted the dynamic. Just the awareness released something, unfolded something — and things started shifting. A few months later, support was coming from both sides, and I was finally able to manifest this: Hollow-Bamboo Innovations.

What I'm Building Now

My immediate focus is on two things. First, a wisdom-rooted governance framework. Most frameworks talk about technical safety, about preventing harm — but not about how to help humans flourish, how to help life flourish. I wanted to add that dimension, and I have a model now that is being vetted with partners and collaborators.

Second — this September, I'm running the first pilot retreat to do the actual capacity work. Two days of deep inner work: meditation, energywork, contemplative inquiry — something that actually shifts things, a felt experience, not just another idea in your head. Out of that comes one day of leadership conversation: how you take that inner state and translate it into wiser leadership and AI governance decisions.

The Opportunity and the Invitation

Here's the opportunity in all of this: the wisdom already exists. The methods to cultivate it are already proven — refined over millennia across every tradition, and in Star Sapphire's case, over 35 years of direct practice. What's been missing is the bridge, connecting that wisdom directly to how we build, lead, and govern AI. That bridge is what we're building now.

And the momentum is real. Wisdom 2.0 conferences drawing technologists into these very questions. Harvard Medical School researching the depths of advanced meditation as serious science. MIT convening AI leaders around consciousness itself. The conversation is moving into the center of the room - no more at the margins.

There's much more to this story than I've gone into here - that's for another time and place. What matters more to me is what it opened up: what's possible for anyone willing to journey inwards — what can be accessed, and transformed, in you. Every step forward matters. Every step reveals richer insights and discoveries, making life more joyful, more loving, more meaningful. Everything that emerges from that state has beauty and life-affirmation. As a wise person said: compassionate humans will create compassionate AI.

If any of this resonates - if you sense a call within you - I invite you to walk this path with me. Through the retreat this September. Through the framework as it takes shape. Or through your own inward journey, wherever that begins for you.

This is my journey to creating Hollow-Bamboo, spoken from my heart.