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Meet a 23-year old from India running a $20,000,000 company in the US


ShruteSastry

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2 hours ago, ShruteSastry said:

 

kaani..kurrodiki antha american accent eppudu/elaa vachindi? also, it is not clear how he came to US before college..

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Dmitry Dolgopolov and Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, 21 Founder, DigitalBrain

Many Bay Area programmers put their pride on the line during hackathons. But in 2019, Dmitry Dolgopolov and Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran (from left) had much more to lose than that. “There was a point when it was almost like life or death,” says Dinakaran. Both he and Dolgopolov were newly arrived immigrants — Dinakaran from India, Dolgopolov from Russia — without legal full-time working status. Hackathon prize money is paid in cash, so for seven months, that’s how the then-19-year-old friends (who met at, yes, a hackathon) scraped by.

At one hackathon, they built what would become DigitalBrain, a program that sits on top of customer service software to help representatives process tickets more efficiently. They were sure their product solved a real problem, but they weren’t getting interviews with investors or accelerators. “You can’t do hackathons all the time,” Dolgopolov says, “because you stay up all night. It was exhausting and stressful.” They were at their breaking point when they finally got an investment from immigrant-­focused fund Unshackled Ventures. Two months later, they were accepted into Y Combinator, and they’ve now raised $3.4 million. “It was much harder than we expected,” Dinakaran says, “but we realized if we did well, this country would welcome us.” Dolgopolov agrees. “The Bay Area is filled with strange kids who didn’t fit in where they grew up. The wonderful thing about people here is that if you create value, they will listen to you.” 

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