Tech entrepreneur Siddhartha Saxena has opened up about his journey from a small Indian town to building multi-million dollar companies in the United States. In a recent vox pop-style street interview with content creator Viraj Ala, the IIT Kanpur-educated entrepreneur revealed how he achieved an astonishing financial milestone by making $8 million in just one day.
Siddhartha Saxena is the co-founder of Merlin, a startup valued at $50 million.
From IIT to $8 million payday
During the rapid-fire interview, Viraj Ala asked Saxena about his educational background. Saxena revealed that he studied Computer Science at , claiming that it is 20 times harder to secure admission to that course than getting into Harvard.
“What’s the most money you made in a single year?” Ala then asked the entrepreneur, who responded by offering a much shorter time window instead.
“I’ll give you something better,” Saxena replied. “I made $8 million in a single day.”
The milestone effectively turned him into a millionaire overnight at the age of 26. When Ala pressed him on whether he essentially achieved millionaire status in one day, Saxena smiled and responded, “Yeah, kind of.”
Who is Siddhartha Saxena?
Siddhartha Saxena is the India-born, San Francisco-based co-founder of Merlin, a ChatGPT Chrome extension tool.
Saxena founded the startup in 2022 along with two friends from IIT Kanpur, Pratyush Rai and Sirsendu Sarkar. The company is currently valued at $50 million.
He holds a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) in Computer Science & Engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT Kanpur). According to his LinkedIn profile, he graduated from IIT in 2019.
Saxena was born in , a small town in Rajasthan, and went on to become an entrepreneur in the US.
Besides Merlin, he is also the co-founder of Thine.
In 2017, Saxena worked as a research and development intern at Envestnet | Yodlee in Bengaluru and as a research intern at Wadhwani AI in Mumbai in 2019. He also worked as a researcher at Finland’s Aalto University in 2018.
Following this, he worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Jumio Corporation in 2019 in Montreal, Canada, before co-founding Merlin.
Overcoming the Scarcity Mindset
During the interview with Ala, Saxena confessed that growing up in a modest environment, he didn’t always envision his current reality.
When asked if he expected this level of success at age 16, he admitted, “Not at all.”
Siddhartha Saxena highlighted a major cultural difference in the startup landscape, pointing out that many Indian founders have to break out of a “scarcity mindset” to be able to build successful companies.
“We come from a , whereas for building companies you need an abundance mindset. You can take a lot of risk in life. We come from a place where we don’t have a lot of money, and that is something which is very different in America where like there’s this abundance mindset where everyone is doing things just because they love it and not because they just need to do that,” he explained.
