IIT Dropout Series: He dropped out of IIT-Delhi to join a startup, now co-owns food-tech brand

“In those years qualifying JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) was considered a huge achievement. I vaguely remember that the highest rank anyone from our city (Ambala) had got was 27 and I decided to crack the exam and achieve any rank between 1 and 27,”  Rhythm told indianexpress.com.

When Rhythm began to study for the JEE, his family, though unsure of his success, supported him. In 2011, he cracked the JEE and secured rank 27.

“When I got my results, I was happy to achieve what I had aimed for. But the question ‘what next’ bothered me. I opted for the computer science branch in IIT-Delhi as it was one of the most popular courses in those days. All these decisions were based on external factors and I had no long-term goals for myself,” Rhythm shared.

The pressure to ‘go big or go home’ indeed led him to one of the best institutes of the country, but the uncertainty of the future haunted Gupta even during his years in IIT-Delhi. For a year in college, he practiced vipassana, wrote a paper on Naxalism and also visited Chhattisgarh to study the impact of government subsidies on tribals. But this didn’t serve the mission statement in his life which was ‘to maximize the impact that he wants to have on people’. This is when he decided to join a start-up as a part-time member in the second year of his college.

“As I was attending classes, certain questions always bothered me —  will I be able to create an impact on society? Do I want to be stuck in a corporate career with no room to explore my capabilities? This is when it hit me that instead of doing a regular job I wanted to explore the world and seek what’s best for me. Therefore, in my second year of college, I decided to quit IIT and join a start-up,” he said.

However, the idea of quitting IIT didn’t settle well with his family. When Rhythm informed them about his decision, his parents packed their bags and came to meet him in person the same day.

“Shocked would be an understatement to define how they reacted. My parents were convinced I was under some bad influence and completely boycotted the decision. They sternly told the founder of the start-up to never contact me again. Somehow their emotional state did impact me and I called off my decision only to act upon it a year later,” Rhythm shared.

Even though Rhythm gave in to parental pressure in the second year, he did not give up on his plan. During the second and third years of college, he worked as a freelance app developer to save money for his first start-up. In the fourth year, he finally called it quits and bid adieu to IIT-Delhi in 2014.

In the next few months after quitting, he worked on developing a P2P payments system and named it Cibola. However, the app could not see the day of light due to certain RBI guidelines. His ideas and capabilities were appreciated by many industrialists and he was later hired by coaching institute FIITJEE where he also served as the CPO at the age of 23.

Rhythm later quit the position to launch his own AI-powered food tech startup Easy Eat. The software platform aims to solve the problems of restaurants which is building direct connections between the customers and restaurants by taking restaurants online.

“The idea behind launching Easy Eat came when I once went out with a friend for dinner. Even after waiting for over 30 minutes, we could not get a table at the restaurant in the rush hours. And when we finally got one, we had to patiently wait for a longer time to place the order. This is when I realised the need for digital menus and order placing,” Rhythm shared.

Rhythm believes that it’s not the campus or the teachers that make an IIT special, but the super-smart peers one spends their time with. “The Internet is the IIT of the modern world. You can learn from smart people by following, interacting with, and hanging out with them online. Just make sure you’re following the right people. Today, I see many young bright students hustling on Twitter to gain access to opportunities that were previously unattainable,” he said.