Zepto’s Aadit Palicha Looks Back On Exiting Stanford, Shares Co-Founder Vohra’s Mother’s Reaction To The Move

Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, were enrolled at Stanford University when they decided to drop out of the prestigious institution and focus on building their quick commerce platform, Zepto

Two young Indians decided to pursue their dream and what started with a simple Whatsapp group has today become a $5 billion company. Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, were enrolled at Stanford University to study Computer Science when they decided to drop out of the prestigious institution and focus on building their quick commerce platform, Zepto.

How It All Started

Speaking at the NDTV World Summit, Palicha shared the journey for both the entrepreneurs. “On the outside, it looks like a very cliched Silicon Valley story—you drop out of college to start a company. But before we took that step, Kaivalya and I were tinkering around for a year. As kids, we loved coding and building small projects for fun,” he said, talking about how Zepto started.

Later, when they were supposed to begin their studies at Stanford in California, the COVID-19 pandemic came and changed the whole world. Stuck in Mumbai due to the pandemic, Palicha said that they didn’t see the benefit in continuing with online education, reported Moneycontrol.

Therefore, both Palicha and Vohra opted to take a year off to work on something ‘interesting’. This led to the formation of Zepto which transformed the hyperlocal delivery market in the country. The idea for Zepto came from a common problem faced by everyone during the pandemic when people were unable to get their groceries or had to wait a long time for the deliveries.

“We were sitting in Sher-e-Punjab in Andheri East in Mumbai, and during the pandemic, you couldn’t get groceries delivered. Offline options were mostly shut, and online orders were taking seven days,” Palicha reminisced. They found the solution for these problems in Zepto which focused on delivering to customers on a local scale.

The company began as a WhatsApp group where they directly interacted with the customers to understand their requirements. However, both Palicha and Vohra first built their business to a ‘meaningful scale’ before deciding to completely drop out of Stanford. 

This decision wasn’t taken lightly by their families. Palicha recalled Vohra’s mother’s reaction and said, “I remember Kaivalya’s mother burst into tears and said, ‘What have you done to my son? You have brainwashed him!.”

Eventually, their families came around and supported them when they started seeing the early success of Zepto.