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IIT Bombay alumnus recalls leaving $8,000 a month US internship to build startup in India: ‘Bet on myself’
An Indian co founder recalled leaving a high paying US internship to build startups in India.
An Indian cofounder’s reflection on his journey from a high paying internship in the United States to building startups in India has struck a chord online. Aman Goel, cofounder of GreyLabs AI, shared on X how a summer internship in Silicon Valley helped him understand what he truly wanted to do with his life.
(Also read: ‘Can’t even jog in this life race’: IIT Bombay graduate opens up about pressure, expectations)
In his post, Goel wrote, “Ten years ago, I landed in San Francisco as a 20 year old kid from IIT Bombay, headed to Palo Alto to intern at Rubrik's Software Engineering Team. I was earning $8,000 a month. It felt like a dream.”
He said the internship gave him exposure to strong engineering culture and product building. “My mentor was an @CSE_IITBombay senior, who made me fall in love with databases and scalable backend systems. The work was exciting. The culture was electric. Rubrik went on to go public. I was one of the early interns, in 2016, before any of that happened,” he shared.
(Also read: IIT Bombay alum stunned by ₹4 lakh UKG fees: ‘My fees for 4 years was half that’)
‘I wanted to go back to India’
However, Goel said the experience gave him something more valuable than money. “But here is what that internship really gave me: Clarity. I realized I did not want to build my life in the Bay Area. I wanted to go back to India and build something of my own,” he wrote.
After returning to India in July 2016, Goel said he decided to use his fourth year in college to learn entrepreneurship, product thinking, sales and marketing. “Engineering was never my constraint. Business building became my obsession,” he added.
Quoting Bill Gates, he wrote, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” He said the quote “hits differently when you actually live it.”
Goel concluded that the journey from Rubrik intern to cofounding Cogno AI, seeing it acquired, and now building GreyLabs AI, began with “a summer in Palo Alto, a great mentor, and the courage to come back home and bet on myself.”
Take a look here at the post:
Internet reacts
The post has received more than 112,000 views and several reactions. One user wrote, “$8000 a month in 2017 is crazy.” Another commented, “Remember reading your quora articles during high school years and they helped a lot!”
A third user praised his decision, saying, “You have made a quiet but consequential bet.” The user added that young entrepreneurs like him were proving that “building in India is not a fallback, it’s the frontier.” Another wrote, “10 years and Aman is still showing up somehow in my feed. From Quora to Twitter. Anyways, congrats.”
One person said, “Courage is what it takes to leave comfort behind and become an entrepreneur.” Another added, “Well done and many congratulations.”
HT.com has reached out to the user for his comments, and the copy will be updated once his response is received.
(Disclaimer: This report is based on user-generated content from social media. HT.com has not independently verified the claims and does not endorse them.)
