Adit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra were students at Stanford University, California, studying computer science, when they dropped out of college and decided to create a ten-minute delivery startup that is now valued at $5 billion. At the NDTV World Summit, Mr. Palicha described how Zepto was built and how his parents reacted to his decision to drop out of college.
“On the outside, it sounds like a very clichéd Silicon Valley story, you drop out of college to start a company, but before you took that step, Kaivalya and I were talking about this for a year. We were brainstorming and as kids we used it to make small projects for fun. We were supposed to go to California, but during the first wave of Covid, we were sent back to Mumbai, I didn’t really see any value in online education during that period, so we decided to take a year off and create something interesting,” Mr Palicha said.
“Most of our peers at Stanford were doing their internships at Google and Goldman Sachs, we had nothing like that and we decided to start an experiment,” he said.
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On how he came up with the idea of instant delivery, the Zepto CEO said, “We were sitting in Sher-e-Punjab in Andheri East, Mumbai, and during the pandemic, you couldn’t deliver groceries offline. The options were mostly closed and it took seven days to get online, so we started with a WhatsApp group and spent a year talking to customers and tweaking the model.”
“We started building the first version of Zepto a year after the WhatsApp group and had reached a meaningful scale before deciding to exit,” he said.
How did the parents react?
“It was shocking for the parents. I remember Kewaliya’s mother burst into tears and said what have you done to my son, you have ruined his mind…but our There were real figures to rely on. We were doing a few million dollars at the time.” in revenue and we were growing rapidly… We had the wherewithal to take decisions with conviction… Our father was a little comfortable with it because he had seen the figures,” he said. “Kaivalya’s mother often Says what is beautiful is that you have given up life.”
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Zepto competes in India’s highly competitive grocery delivery sector. Rivals in the market include the India unit of e-commerce giant Amazon and domestic competitors like Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit and conglomerate Tata Group’s BigBasket.
Adit and Kaivalya were included in the list of richest Indians released by Hurun this year. Twenty-one-year-old Kaivalya Vohra’s net worth is Rs 3,600 crore, while 22-year-old Adit’s net worth is Rs 4,300 crore.
