@viraj.ala: Some founders build for Silicon Valley. Gaurav left it for India.. and built a $400 million healthcare company. CEO of Tata 1mg. Around $400 million in revenue. IIT Delhi. A school ten times harder to get into than Harvard. Before this, he ran FarmVille at Zynga. At its peak, 20 to 22 million users, making over a million dollars a day. He left all of that in the US to build in India. What does the world get wrong about India? Most of it is just misinformation. In the US, his managers used to say India doesn't do technically hard work. That's not true. What would he tell his 23-year-old self? Stop judging a book by its cover. At 23, he was obsessed with raw intellectual sharpness. Whether someone could wow him with insight. Today he values a much wider set of traits. The ability to ground him. Loyalty. Staying calm under stress. The person who can tell him it's going to be okay when he can't say it to himself. Did he believe any of this was possible growing up? Absolutely not. He was seeking safety. The status quo. Does he have a scarcity mindset? He still does. He's not comfortable spending money. He just wants to save. Even running a company that makes nearly half a billion a year. That mindset came from his mom. But somewhere in the Bay Area, he realized he wasn't an idiot. That maybe a startup could be fun. Are young people making enough dumb decisions? He doesn't think so. He learned to swim for the first time at 35. At the JCC in Palo Alto, in a class full of seven-year-olds who feared the water far less than he did. It was embarrassing. A big tech job behind him, finally learning to swim. But a lot of his pain is really just chasing the joy of learning something new. Die tomorrow. The message he'd leave behind: A startup isn't the only reason you're here. Discovering all the other parts of life matters just as much. And he hopes he's discovered enough of them by the time he's done. Whatever done ends up looking like.

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Thursday 17 September 2026 17:01:28 GMT