This featured essay is based on an interview with Rohan Bhide, who moved from New York to Pune, India in 2024 to launch his startup. Edited for length and clarity. Business Insider confirmed his work history.
I always knew I wanted to do my own thing.
I got my first idea during my sophomore year of college, when I was studying abroad at the University of Pennsylvania. On a trip back home to India, I created a kind of learning system and went to schools to try to get them to use it.
It didn’t work, but I learned a valuable lesson about myself. I realized that I love how founders end up wearing so many hats. You are not only an engineer or a product developer, but you are also a content creator, a lawyer, and an accountant.
That has driven every decision I’ve made in my professional career.
Step 1: Take a job with Meta
I’m a risk averse person, and starting a business right out of college didn’t feel like an option. So I started preparing to become a founder and gather experiences that will help down the road.
Even at the beginning, I was sure that I wanted to work in building consumer products. When it came time to look for jobs, I only applied to Meta and Google, companies known for creating crowdsourced products.
I joined Meta and got a full-time job in the company after graduating in 2018. This offer was a great deal for me, and I remember calling parents at home to share information immediately.
My family knew my long-term goal was to be self-employed, and they worried that the years would pass and I wouldn’t leave Big Tech and its comforts.
At Meta, I was careful to choose projects that would help me become a jack of all trades. I would take on projects where I could work in a variety of different areas rather than focusing on computer vision or machine learning, for example. I gained a reputation as an engineer who could get things out the door – either by learning the technology or by recruiting other engineers for a project.
Step 2: Leave Meta to see how startups are doing
After four years at Meta, I understood that large companies have a way of putting employees into one job, and I felt that my education had slowed down.
I left Meta in 2022 and moved to the ticketing platform StubHub, a small company. I had an engineering role there, but I was also given different tasks such as product management and data analysis. I learned how startups have to iterate quickly and work with limited resources. It gave me my first experience leading a team, which I really enjoyed.
In addition to gaining technical knowledge, I was also saving money so that I could eventually start my own company. After work, I took online courses to learn accounting and finance and spent time with my brothers, who have experience in business management and finance.
Step 3: Moving to India
Living in the US, starting a startup in Silicon Valley felt like an obvious choice, but I was very excited about the business prospects back home in India. Internet adoption had increased since I left in 2014; the large population has made it a hot spot for consumer technology products; and government initiatives such as instant payment and acceptance systems leading to greater technological awareness have made doing business much easier. I knew that if I were to start my own business, it would be for the Indian market.
I finally made the call to move out last year after my girlfriend beat me. We knew we wanted to live in India, and our wedding next year was the last day to get the ball rolling. We decided that I would come back first, and I quit my job at StubHub and went back in January of this year.
My friends were betting on whether I would ever leave the US or a paid job, and I was able to scare them and raise money when I announced my decision to quit.
Bhide on the left and co-founder Sunny Doultani on the right. Rohan Bhide
Since then, I have brought in a co-founder, a friend from high school who also left the US a few years ago. We are working on launching a consumer technology product in the next few months.
I love to come back, especially because it means being close to my family and my culture again. There are problems, too – I had to get used to driving on the busy Indian roads.
Although I am happy to be back in India, I think the US is my second home now. I was visiting my girlfriend in New York this summer and felt sad when I boarded the plane back to India. It’s a strange situation, because I used to get confused every time I got on a plane to the US over the years.
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