This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rohan Bhide, who moved from New York to Pune, India in 2024 to launch his startup. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his employment history.
I always knew I wanted to build something of my own.
I came up with my first idea in my second year of college, when I was studying overseas at the University of Pennsylvania. During a trip back home to India, I built a version of a learning management system and reached out to schools to try to get them to adopt it.
It didn’t work out, but I learned an important lesson about myself. I realized that I loved how founders end up wearing so many hats. You’re not just an engineer or a product designer, but you’re also a content creator, lawyer, and accountant.
That drove every single other career decision I made in my professional career.
Step 1: Take a job with Meta
I’m a risk-averse person, and launching a business straight out of college didn’t feel like an option. So I started preparing to be a founder and collecting experiences that would help down the line.
Even early on, I was sure I wanted to work on building consumer products. When it was time to look for jobs, I only applied to Meta and Google, companies well known for developing products for the masses.
I interned with Meta and landed a full time role at the company after graduating in 2018. The offer was a huge deal for me, and I remember calling my parents back home to share the news right away.
My family knew my long-term goal was to work for myself, and they worried that the years would pass and I would never leave Big Tech and its comforts.
At Meta, I was careful to select projects that would enable me to become a jack of all trades. I was taking on projects where I could work across several different domains instead of specializing in computer vision or machine learning, for example. I earned a reputation for being an engineer that could get things out the door — whether it was by learning the technology myself or by putting together other engineers for the project.
Step 2: Quit Meta to see how startups work
After four years at Meta, I understood that big companies have a way of pigeonholing employees into one role, and I felt like my learning had stagnated.
I quit Meta in 2022 and moved to the ticketing platform StubHub, a smaller company. I had an engineering role there, too, but I was also tasked with cross-functional roles like product management and data analysis. I learned how startups had to iterate quickly and work with limited resources. It gave me my first experience leading a team, which I really enjoyed.
Besides gaining technical skills, I was also saving so that I could eventually bootstrap my own company. After work, I took online courses to learn accounting and finance and spent time with my brothers, who have experience in management and venture capital.
Step 3: Moving to India
Living in the US, launching a startup in Silicon Valley felt like an obvious choice, but I was more excited about business prospects back home in India. Internet adoption had skyrocketed since I left in 2014; the population size made it a hotbed for a consumer tech product; and government initiatives like an instant payments system and acceptance toward greater tech adoption made doing business a lot easier. I knew that if I were to set up my own business, it would be for the Indian market.
I finally made the call to move home last year after my fiancée proposed to me. We knew we wanted to settle down in India, and our wedding next year became a deadline to get the ball rolling. We decided I would return first, and I quit my job at StubHub and moved back in January this year.
My friends had bets on whether I would ever leave the US or a salaried job, and I managed to shock them and collect some money when I announced my decision to quit.
I left behind $580,000 in total compensation at the company.
Since then, I have brought on a cofounder, a high school friend who also moved back from the US a couple of years ago. We are working on launching a consumer tech product in the next few months.
I love being back, especially because it means being close to my family and my culture again. There are challenges, too — I’ve had to get used to driving on India’s busy roads.
Even though I’m glad to be back in India, I definitely think the US is my second home now. I was visiting my fiancée in New York this summer and felt a bit sad when I got on a plane back to India. It’s a strange situation, because I always felt upset every time I got on a plane to the US over the years.
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