The last six kilometers
Bombay. One hundred degrees. A marathon in its final stretch. The human body had been moving for over four hours and the rational decision was to stop thinking and just survive the road ahead. Rish Gupta chose that moment to start a company.
The thought wasn't poetic. It was practical: "If I can push through this, I can start the company tomorrow." He finished the race. He started the company. That company became LetsIntern.com - an internship platform that bridged the gap between India's universities and its workplaces at a scale nobody had managed before. Four million users. Sixty employees. Acquired in 2015.
The marathon origin isn't just a good story. It tells you something about how Rish operates. He's made for long games. He doesn't quit when it hurts. And when the world is screaming at him to slow down, he finds clarity.
Before LetsIntern, there was the bus advertising business he built at 19 - placing ads on vehicles traveling through rural India and generating several million rupees in six months. Before that, there were math Olympiads and swimming pools and the kind of childhood in Delhi that prepares you for a certain kind of intellectual ambition but not necessarily for starting companies with no money and no blueprint.
He sold LetsIntern and moved to Silicon Valley. Not for the weather. For the intersection of hardware and software - a conviction that crystallized in his first year at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where he studied alongside two people who would become his co-founders: Tanuj Thapliyal and Sud Bhatija.
The three of them had a question that seemed almost too simple. Everywhere they looked, companies had cameras. Thousands of cameras. Hours of footage accumulating daily. And nobody was using any of it unless there was already a crime to investigate. The footage was an asset that cost money to maintain and delivered almost no ongoing value.
What if that changed?