Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra were students at Stanford University, California, studying computer science when they dropped out and chose to build a ten-minute startup that is now valued at $5 billion. At the Our World Summit, Mr Palicha talked about how Zepto was built and how his parents reacted to the decision to leave university.
“On the outside it seems like a very cliché Silicon Valley story: you drop out of college to start a company, but before we took that step, Kaivalya and I were tinkering for a year and as kids we loved coding and we used to build small projects for fun. We were going to go to California but during the first wave of Covid we were in Mumbai I didn't see any value in online education during that period so we took a call for a year to go and build something interesting,” Palicha said.
“Most of our colleagues at Stanford were interning at Google, and at Goldman Sachs we had nothing like that planned and we called to start experimenting,” he said.
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When asked about how he came up with the idea of fast delivery, the Zepto CEO said, “We were in Sher-e-Punjab in Andheri East in Mumbai, and during the pandemic, grocery delivery could not be done. Offline The options were largely closed and online lasted seven days. We started with a WhatsApp group and for over a year we continued to talk to customers and adapt the model.”
“We started building the first version of Zepto a year after the WhatsApp group and reached meaningful scale before we decided to stop,” he said.
How parents responded
“It was shocking for the parents. I remember Kaivalya's mother burst into tears and said, what have you done to my son, you have brainwashed him… but we had real numbers to rely on. At that time we were making a few million dollars.” in sales and we were growing rapidly… We had the substance to decide with conviction… Our fathers felt a little comfortable with it because they saw the numbers,” he said, adding, “Kaivalya's mother often says what a beautiful life you have given up.”
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Zepto competes in the hyper-competitive grocery delivery market in India. Rivals in the market include e-commerce giant Amazon's India unit and domestic competitors such as Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit and BigBasket of conglomerate Tata Group.
This year, Aadit and Kaivalya featured in 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.
