#1 — Anmol Maini (Part 1) | #YuvaStories
Anyone who has been a part of Indian Startup Twitter would have found it hard to miss out on Anmol Maini (@anmolm_)
Thanks to his Bay Area presence, Anmol has an unique point of view on the Indian startup ecosystem . He has had quite a riveting journey spanning across engineering, product, investing and advising various startups.
A front-end engineer currently at Fast, Anmol has previously spent time at Postmates, InnerChef, Little Black Book and his own venture Doodh.Delivery.
With this journey in mind, Manan & I were particularly curious to hear out Anmol’s story as it brings a unique perspective of completing high school in India and then moving to the US for college, starting his own venture in India in the midst of his vacations and then finally going back to the US.
What follows is our chat, edited for length and clarity.
Manan: Cutting right to it, how did you stumble into the startup space? What got you interested in the ecosystem?
Anmol: In 2013 during my 11th grade, I was procrastinating on my final exams when I saw GSF India doing a program called HighSchoolGeeks where they invite high school students to be an “Entrepreneur in Residence - EIR” at their accelerator, that was my entry point. Back then not many people were doing "startups" - It was only Flipkart & Ola all around.
M: What was the reason behind you moving to the US to pursue engineering after high schooling in Delhi?
A: I was born in the US and planned to go to college in the US from the start. I never wanted to study engineering in India, hence applied to the University of California San Diego.
(Anmol majored in Math and CS at UCSD from 2014–2018)
M: InnerChef-ClimbCredit-LittleBlackBook, you have had your fair share of internship stints across your time at college! How did you land up at these companies and what do you think is pivotal while interning?
A: ClimbCredit happened through a warm intro from my dad to someone there, InnerChef happened because Rajesh knew me from my time at GSF, LBB happened because I saw an application on their site for interns and decided to fill it up.
I didn’t know about the power of cold emailing and I also realized millions of people are applying to that position that you want, you need to do something that stand-out and is significantly better than the rest.
If you have to find a job for yourself, you pretty much need to do it yourself, hit a company up directly than applying online and waiting for a callback.
A lot of companies aren’t as open to interns, some have very high expectations and some have GPA criteria to filter the crowd out, it’s extremely variable.
M: What is your take on interning at seed-stage startups like the ones that are a part of Sequoia’s Surge vs a Series-B/C startup? What advice would you give to youngsters?
A: I think it boils down to what you want at the end of the day, do you want a structured role vs an unstructured role? Do you want to have a fixed internship project versus something extremely dynamic? It comes down to the individual.
For me, personally, I realized I liked working on stuff in small teams and I assumed big teams generally bring in friction, so I always tried to work in small companies.
M: What was your approach towards optimizing your GPA?
A: I think it believes what you as an individual want to optimize for. If you want to go to grad school, GPA is important. Personally, I wanted a cool job so stopped caring about my GPA after my 3rd year.
M: What did you define as a cool job, back then?
A: I think doing engineering at Series A company or seed company is what I would have defined as a cool job, back then.
M: Were side-projects alongside college the norm back in your time?
A: College was pretty hectic and we had classes throughout the day. Free time was very less. If you’d wanted to do well in your academics and it was very assignment intensive, the last thing I (and most) people wanted to do after a tiring day at college was to build more.
M: Did you ever consider dropping out?
A: I personally never really thought of dropping out because I could always start a company in India/US, whenever I wanted to. Didn’t envision dropping out.
M: You chose to work at a startup when you could have picked up a FAANG company. What are your feelings around that?
A: I moved to SF with four of my roommates from the first year and all of us work as engineers in various startups, I think the decision to join a startup as an engineer in the US isn’t very difficult because you are paid very well compared to engineers at Google/Facebook, the quality of life hasn’t decreased from working at Facebook to a Fast/Postmates. I think it has become quite normalized to work at startups straight out of college, at least on the engineering side.
M: How did your parents react to you doing all this since most decisions at school/college age are parent-driven?
A: I was on extremely privileged side where my parents didn’t really care as long was I’m happy doing whatever I was doing. They weren’t against me working for startups and were like it is your decision to do whatever you want to do in life, we give complete autonomy to you.
M: Who were your mentors through this journey?
A: Rajesh at GSF, helped me a lot. I learned a lot about how to think about building products from Dhruv (LBB) & Manvi (InnerChef). Manvi also helped me with a bunch of introductions while I was interviewing for a full time job in the US.
2nd Part of Anmol’s story will be out soon.
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