As a child, MVHS alum ‘18 Gautam Ajjarapu dreamed of standing on stage, giving his million-dollar elevator pitch on Shark Tank. Years later, he finds himself in New York City, part of a wave of MVHS alumni tech entrepreneurs. Driven by ambition, these alumni aspire to make a significant impact in the tech industry.
Ajjarapu is the co-founder and CEO of Glide AI, a financial technology startup that helps banks and credit unions automate their back-office operations. Glide AI recently announced raising $15 million in Series A funding, the first major round of venture capital used to help a startup scale its product and operations. Ajjarapu attributes his success partly to the skills he gained from his four years in MVHS DECA.
“One of the games that we used to play in DECA was speech baseball,” Ajjarapu said. “We would get three random terms, and we were given 10 seconds to prep, and then we had to give a presentation in front of everybody. There’s just something about being in front of all these smart people that brings the best out of you, because you don’t want to embarrass yourself.”
Ajjarapu also learned about the mindset of an entrepreneur through DECA, helping him better understand what was required to achieve business success.
“There were these late nights at conferences, staying up to one, two in the morning, working on the slide deck, making sure every square, font and color all look right and just being a perfectionist,” Ajjarapu said. “That’s an attitude I learned and by default, I’ve practiced since then.”
MVHS alum ‘14 Matt Cheung, founder of Ceviche.ai, a financial technology startup that helps automate private equity firm operations, also credits DECA with giving him a peek into the entrepreneurial world. Cheung had also played varsity tennis for all four years of high school, which he believes taught him the work ethic that led the way to his entrepreneurial dreams. Specifically, competitive sports provided him discipline, enabling him to maintain focus on a single area over long periods of time.
Ajjarapu believes there are two key skills to being an entrepreneur in the technology industry. The first is the technical aspect, where individuals have to be able to build things themselves and quickly develop new skills. The second key skill is the storytelling aspect. It’s the ability to pitch a small idea to something much bigger to capture attention. He believes that clubs like DECA and Speech and Debate hone in on those specific skills.
“Many entrepreneurs have an idea, and then they bring in technical people to build the product for them,” Ajjarapu said. “That doesn’t work in today’s world. Founders must be immensely close to the product for it to be successful. I never thought, ‘Hey, how can I outsource this to someone else?’ The way I was trained was, ‘How can I code this myself?’”
MVHS alum ‘09 Vrinda Gupta, the CEO and co-founder of Sequin AI, had spent the bulk of her career maintaining focus in the financial technology sector. Sequin AI is the second iteration of her company and is a part of the Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch, a startup accelerator program and venture capital firm. She began her career at VISA, where she developed popular credit cards and collaborated with numerous financial institutions.
“I realized that banking and financial services are really core to our day-to-day lives,” Gupta said. “But there are many parts that are pretty expensive and hard to personalize at that scale and that’s what AI helps with.”
Gupta later founded multiple companies in that sector. She was named Top 10 Women To Watch in Fintech, WIN Innovator of the Year and 55 Most Inspiring Fintech Women. She traces her success back to the work ethic she built during her time at MVHS. This allows her to take work head-on, an aspect she loves about being an entrepreneur. While Gupta acknowledges the importance of the work ethic fostered in MVHS’s environment, Ajjarapu highlights the unique set of specialized skills and opportunities that students have in MVHS, due to its location in Silicon Valley.
“I think people are becoming real specialists in their craft, and they can improve at their kind of specific things as quickly as a lot of the startups are in the Bay Area,” Ajjarapu said. “So I think there are many opportunities for students, for example, interning at a Silicon Valley startup.”
Even within the environment of opportunities, the path to entrepreneurship wasn’t straightforward for Cheung and Gupta. While Ajjarapu found ambition in the competitive and hard-working culture, Cheung and Gupta initially struggled to envision themselves as the entrepreneurs they would become, due to a lack of representation in their respective fields at that time.
“I’m a female and a first-generation immigrant, and didn’t see any founders who looked like me, despite us being in the land of Steve Jobs,” Gupta said. “I respect Steve Jobs so much as an entrepreneur, but I didn’t necessarily see myself in him.”
Similarly, Cheung’s dreams of founding a company emerged later in college. He felt that he needed to see what was possible by his MVHS alumni peers, to see himself as the entrepreneur he is now.
“When I was in high school, I didn’t actually think I was going to start my own company after graduating,” Cheung said. “The ambition definitely stemmed more so in college. Seeing a lot of the other MVHS students starting their own companies definitely was a pushing factor.”
Many of the friends Ajjarapu made at MVHS remain his closest friends today. Whenever he returns to San Francisco, he enjoys spending time with the many MVHS alumni whom he feels are achieving amazing things and whose connections can be invaluable in the startup world.
“It’s essential to have a founding team or a co-founder,” Cheung said. “Startups are a long journey and are very stressful. It’s always helpful to have a strong co-founder who balances your skill set. Stay in touch with close friends, smart friends and always be experimenting with new projects.”
Cheung also emphasizes that working consistently and making some progress every day is key to finding the right product-market fit. Similarly, Gupta emphasizes that having momentum in a startup is crucial.
“There’s no better time than right now to found a company,” Gupta said. “Don’t overthink it. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or require technical skills. There are so many tools out there to get you some validation around anything you’re passionate about that you think should exist in the world. There’s no need to wait.”
