Why Two IIT Engineers Turned Down $550K Jobs To Build A Startup
In a Nutshell
Two IIT engineers rejected $550K quant offers to join YC, pivoted from edtech to AI customer support agents after open-sourcing fine-tuned models, and won enterprise deals like DoorDash and Zepto by delivering working product with an 8-person team. They succeeded by validating real customer willingness to pay before building, focusing on product quality over sales, and fully committing without backup options. The core lesson: in AI, low build costs let founders test whether actual customers will pay for value delivered, rather than chasing ideas or market size analysis.
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Varun and his co-founder applied to YC with an edtech idea using LLMs. During the interview, Harj (HJ) told them the edtech idea would not work and to pick something else. They had prepped extensively for typical YC questions about ideas and TAM, but the interview focused entirely on their engineering background instead. Varun thought the interview went poorly and they would not get in.
"I was just panicked because I never prepared for anything."
Harj told them: "You guys are really good engineers. Just pick something else and work on it." Varun stated they would not have existed without Harj taking a bet on them.
Varun grew up in a small town in Andhra Pradesh where both parents were government teachers. He attended IIT in electrical engineering. His first two years were during COVID with limited studying. In his third year he began research on LLMs at Stanford, working on transformer models like BERT during the pre-ChatGPT period.
Varun received a $550K offer from a leading quant firm in New York and a PhD offer from Stanford. He and his co-founder decided to apply to YC instead. They got in three days before Varun was scheduled to join the quant firm. The co-founder was third-ranked at IIT with only one B grade across his entire academic career.
Varun's co-founder was described as very much a "book guy" who excelled academically. Varun described himself as more of a hacker who had poor grades but participated heavily in Kaggle competitions, earning approximately $50,000. He was eventually banned from some competitions for gaming the system. This experience helped him land a high-frequency trading job. Over time both founders became hacker-type builders.
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