An Indian startup co-founder’s post about leaving a high-paying internship in the United States to build companies in India has garnered attention online. Aman Goel, co-founder of GreyLabs AI, shared on X how a summer internship in Silicon Valley helped him realize what he really wanted to do in life.
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 with Rubrik’s Software Engineering Team. I was making $8,000 a month, approx. ₹6.9 million. It felt like a dream.”
“I wanted to go back to India”
Goel said the internship introduced him to a strong engineering culture and taught him a lot about building products. “My mentor was a senior @CSE_IITBombay who made me fall in love with databases and scalable backend systems. The work was exciting. The culture was electrifying. The rubric went public. I was one of the first interns in 2016 before any of this happened,” he said.
However, he explained that the experience gave him more than financial success. “But here’s what this internship really gave me: Clarity. I realized I didn’t want to build my life in the Bay Area. I wanted to come back to India and build something of my own,” he wrote.
Read also | ‘He chose India’: Sridhar Vemba on IAS officer who had 32 transfers in 34 years
After returning to India in July 2016, Goel said he spent his final year of college learning about business, product strategy, sales and marketing. “Engineering was never my limitation. Building a business became my obsession,” he added.
“A quote resonates differently when you live it”
Quoting Bill Gates, Goel wrote, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. He added that the quote “hits you differently when you actually live it.”
Read also | IIT Graduate Quits LPA at ₹28 – Says India’s Startup Ecosystem ‘Deeply Disrupted’
Goel concluded by saying that his journey from interning at Rubrik to co-founding Cogno AI, seeing it acquired and later building GreyLabs AI, began with “a summer in Palo Alto, a great mentor, and the courage to come home and bet on myself.”
Social media users praise his decision
The post received more than 112,000 views and generated several reactions online. One user wrote: “$8000 a month in 2017 is insane.” Another commented: “Remember reading your quora articles during your high school years and they helped a lot!”
A third user praised his decision, saying, “You’ve made a quiet but consistent bet.” The person added that entrepreneurs like him prove that “construction in India is not a backup, it’s a frontier”.
Read also | ‘He chose India’: Sridhar Vemba on IAS officer who had 32 transfers in 34 years
Another user wrote: “10 years and Aman still somehow appears in my feed. From Quora to Twitter. Anyway congrats.”
One person commented, “Courage is what you need to leave comfort and become an entrepreneur.” Another added: “Well done and congratulations.”
(Disclaimer: This report is based on user-generated content from social media. LiveMint has not independently verified and does not endorse these claims.)
