Zepto CEO Shares Story Behind Dropping Out Of Stanford To Build Company

Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra were students at Stanford University, California, studying Computer Sciences when they dropped out of college and chose to build a ten-minute-delivery startup which is now valued at $5 billion. At the NDTV World Summit, Mr Palicha shared how Zepto was built and how his parents reacted to the decision to leave college.

"On the outside, it looks like a very cliched Silicon Valley story, you drop out of college to start a company, but before you took that step, Kaivalya and I were tinkering around for a year and as kids we love coding and we used to build small projects for fun. We were supposed to go to California but during the first wave of Covid, we were put back to Mumbai. I didn't really see a value in online education in that period, so we took a call to take a year off and build something interesting," Mr Palicha said.

"Most of our peers at Stanford were doing their internship at Google, and Goldman Sachs, we didn't have anything of that lined up and we took a call to start experimenting," he said. 

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To a question on how he came up with the idea of quick delivery, the Zepto CEO said, "We were sitting in sher-e-punjab in Andheri East in Mumbai, and during the pandemic, you couldn't get groceries delivered. Offline options were mostly shut and online would take seven days. We started with a WhatsApp group and over a year we kept talking to customers and tweaking the model."

"We started building out the first version of Zepto a year after the WhatsApp group and got to a meaningful scale before we decided to drop out," he said.

How Parents Reacted

"It was shocking for parents. I remember Kevaliya's mother burst into tears and said what have you done to my son, you have brainwashed him...but we had real numbers to bank on. At that time we were doing a few million dollars in revenue and we were growing fast...We had the substance to decide with conviction...Our fathers were a little bit comfortable with it because they saw the numbers," he said, adding, "Kaivalya's mother often says what a beautiful life you have given up on."

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Zepto competes in India's hyper-competitive grocery delivery space. Rivals in the market include e-commerce giant Amazon's India unit and homegrown competitors such as Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit, and conglomerate Tata Group's BigBasket.

This year, Aadit and Kaivalya were featured on the list of richest Indians released by Hurun. Twenty-one-year-old Kaivalya Vohra has a net worth of Rs 3,600 crore, while Aadit, 22, has a net worth of Rs 4,300 crore.