YOUNG, NOT RECKLESS

What it's like to be 23-year-old founders at Zepto

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At 23, Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra are among the youngest founders in India's startup ecosystem. Their journey to building Zepto wasn't a story of impulsive decisions or youthful bravado. It was one of calculated risk, relentless learning and a lot of convincing.

“People think we dropped out on a whim. It wasn’t the case,” Palicha says. “We built the business, found product-market fit in a dark store in Bandra. Only then did we drop out of college in 2020. It was a thought-out decision, not an impulsive one,” he adds.

They were scheduled to enroll at Stanford in September 2020, but pushed it to 2021. By July that year, Zepto had launched. When Stanford came calling again, the decision was surprisingly easy. “It was a five-minute conversation,” Vohra says. “We asked ourselves: What are we going to regret more? Even if this crashes and burns, the amount of learning we've had in the last year was insane.”