- IIT Bombay graduate Aman Goel quit a $8,000 US internship to start a company in India
- He interned at Rubrik in Silicon Valley, which inspired his passion for entrepreneurship
- Goel focused on learning business skills during his final college year in India
An IIT Bombay graduate has caught social media's attention after revealing that he left a Rs 7.5 lakh ($8,000) internship in the US to launch a startup in India. In a now-viral post, Aman Goel, co-founder of GreyLabs AI, detailed that his time in Silicon Valley served as a turning point, helping him realise his true long-term professional calling back home.
Goel recounted that he was just 20 years old when he moved to San Francisco to join the software engineering team at Rubrik, a fast-growing cloud data management and AI company.
"I was earning $8,000 a month. It felt like a dream. 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," wrote Goel in an X (formerly Twitter) post.
While the internship was going steadily, Goel realised that he did not want to build his life in the Bay Area. Instead, he wanted to return to India and build something of his own.
"Seeing the startup energy up close lit a fire in me that has never gone out. When I returned in July 2016, I made a decision. My fourth year of college was not going to be just about courses," said Goel, adding that he decided to learn everything there was to learn about building a company.
"Entrepreneurship courses, product thinking, sales, marketing. Engineering was never my constraint. Business-building became my obsession."
Fast forward 10 years, Goel stated that his company had scaled to over 85 employees, raised nearly Rs 100 crore, and achieved 3x year-on-year growth.
"None of this was obvious. None of it was guaranteed. But it all started with a summer in Palo Alto, a great mentor, and the courage to come back home and bet on myself," said Goel.
"If you are an intern somewhere right now, pay attention to what excites you and what does not. That signal is worth more than the stipend."
Check The Viral Post Here:
'Courage Is What It Takes'
As the post went viral, social media users lauded Goel for returning home and developing something from scratch.
"Aman, it gives great pleasure to see you are building something in our own country. All the best," said one user while another added: "Remember reading your Quora articles during high-school years, and they helped a lot!"
A third commented: "Courage is what it takes. to leave comfort and become an entrepreneur. It's never easy. Your journey is inspiring from IIT to what you are today. Congratulations."
A fourth said: "This guy is the reason I started software development in 1st year of college, hats off to his Quora posts."
