For many engineering students in India, a summer internship in Silicon Valley is seen as a finish line. A high stipend, a famous startup, California offices, and the possibility of staying back in the United States, the script is familiar.
Aman Goel followed that script once. Then he walked away from it.
In a post shared on X, the Aman Goel recalled landing in San Francisco nearly a decade ago as a 20-year-old student from IIT Bombay. He had secured a software engineering internship at Rubrik in Palo Alto and was earning $8,000 a month.
“It felt like a dream,” he wrote.
The internship exposed him to the pace of Silicon Valley startups, engineering teams building products at scale, discussions around backend systems, and a work culture shaped by speed and experimentation. Goel wrote that one of his mentors, an IIT Bombay senior, introduced him to databases and scalable systems in a way that changed how he thought about technology.
At the time, Rubrik itself was still growing. Years later, the company would go public. Goel remembers being there before that phase arrived.
But the larger shift happened elsewhere.
He says the internship gave him clarity, not comfort. While many around him were trying to build lives in the Bay Area, he realised he wanted to return to India and build something of his own.
That decision came in 2016.
Back in India, Goel says he spent the final year of college learning things he believed engineering classrooms did not teach enough, sales, product thinking, hiring, marketing and business building.
“Engineering was never my constraint. Business building became my obsession,” he wrote.
Over the years, that decision led him into startups. He later co-founded Cogno AI, which was eventually acquired, and is now building GreyLabs AI.
His post did not read like a startup success thread filled with funding numbers or motivational slogans. Instead, it read like a reflection on ambition, geography and timing, questions many young Indian engineers continue to grapple with.
The reactions under Goel’s post reflected that sentiment.
One user called his choice “a quiet but consequential bet”. Another wrote that building in India was no longer “a fallback”.
The line that stayed with many readers, however, was simpler.
“I wanted to go back to India and build something of my own.”
For years, the larger aspiration among top engineering graduates was to move westward: American universities, Silicon Valley jobs, stock options and long-term relocation plans. But a parallel shift has slowly emerged. More founders now see India not as a backup option, but as a place where products, companies and AI systems can be built from scratch.
(IndiaToday.in has not independently verified the claims shared in the X post. The report is based on content publicly posted on social media.)
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