Kristel Kruustük
Kristel Kruustük is co-founder and CEO of Testlio, an end-to-end QA management platform and community of highly vetted testers that help businesses deliver amazing customer experiences. Despite her recognition as a top-level tester, she didn’t feel valued. She realized that the pay-per-bug model didn’t incentivize testers like herself to dig deep into the product, work collaboratively, and identify the most frustrating user issues. At 23, she quit my job as a QA tester, and along with co-founder Marko Kruustük (who is also her husband!), entered one of the world’s largest hackathons: AngelHack. They took first place and used the prize money to build Testlio. Today, Testlio is the originator of, and leader in, networked testing, supporting clients like Microsoft, Amazon, CBS, Etsy, Hotels.com, and the NBA (who collectively power over 1.5 billion users worldwide). The company has 80+ full-time distributed employees (Europe & US) and powers a network of 10K+ vetted, expert, professional testers in over 100 countries.
Artists: Parul Gupta (India)
(Image credit: Estonia World)
Artist
The line is Parul Gupta’s visual language, her artistic medium. A commerce graduate from Delhi University, Gupta pursued a master’s in fine arts from Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Hairfall, a video documentation of her falling black hair building up on a white sheet over several days, forms the genesis of the idea of the line; the video even featured in her recently concluded exhibition, Let’s Proceed In Parts, at the Instituto Cervantes in Delhi. The straight line continued to remain the material with which she later started to explore architectural spaces and how our bodies understand them. We are all performers when we navigate such a space, she says, with the architect as the director who has preconceived where we enter the space and where we turn. “I try to break that perception, create a rupture in what we know," Gupta says. In Let’s Proceed In Parts, she elevated the floor and also had a pillar that disrupts our perception of the exhibition space by moving ever so slowly. In spatial drawings, using light against thread, she allows viewers to move into it through the shadows created, in an attempt to break the notion of a drawing as a still object. In her site-specific work at the Sarai Reader 09 show at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, she says her attempt was to respond to the given space rather than occupy it. The exploration of space is taking her conceptual art, which can be priced from Rs50,000 to Rs5 lakh, in varied directions. In one of her recent performative pieces, she gave herself instructions: Sit in a room and work from 10.30am to 5.30pm for 10 days. The idea was to explore how programming works on the brain and the tussle between the conscious and subconscious mind—when tired or in pain, Gupta found her conscious mind urging her on. She made a 22ft drawing in five parts. “It was to question the idea of a collection. So each collector will only have a part of the work, never the whole."