Mamekam Learning - Startup Stories

  In the heart of Mumbai, as the world grappled with the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, two childhood friends-Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra-found themselves back home, their Stanford dreams on pause. The city’s streets were eerily quiet, but inside their homes, a new kind of frustration was brewing: grocery deliveries that took days, not hours, to arrive. For two young technophiles with entrepreneurial fire, this was more than an inconvenience-it was an opportunity. A Friendship Forged in Innovation Aadit and Kaivalya’s journey began long before Zepto. Both born and raised in Mumbai to engineer fathers, they shared classrooms in Dubai and a relentless curiosity for technology. In their teens, they built GoPool, a ride-sharing app that turned a tidy profit and was eventually sold-an early taste of startup success that only fueled their ambitions. Pandemic Pivot: The Birth of an Idea When the pandemic forced them back to Mumbai, they took a gap year from Stanford and dove...

  The Dream Begins In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Adam Neumann, an Israeli entrepreneur, and Miguel McKelvey, an American architect, saw an opportunity in the empty office spaces scattered across New York City. They envisioned a new kind of workspace-one that would foster community, collaboration, and flexibility for freelancers, startups, and even large enterprises. After a successful first venture called GreenDesk, the duo sold that business and, in 2010, launched WeWork, opening their first location in SoHo, Manhattan. WeWork quickly became more than just a place to rent a desk. It was a movement-a promise to “create environments where people and companies come together and do their best work”. The company’s spaces were designed with glass walls, stocked fridges, and a vibrant energy that attracted thousands of young entrepreneurs. By 2014, WeWork was the fastest-growing lessee of office space in New York, with investors like J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bench...

  On a quiet April Fool’s Day in 1976, in the unassuming garage of the Jobs family home in Los Altos, California, three men-Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne-set out to change the world. Wozniak, a shy engineering wizard, had just built a simple, elegant computer circuit board inspired by the Homebrew Computer Club’s passion for personal computing. Jobs, the charismatic dreamer, saw not just a hobby but a revolution in the making. Wayne, the seasoned draftsman, joined to help formalize the partnership, though his time with Apple would be brief. To fund their fledgling venture, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak his prized HP calculator, scraping together $1,300-just enough to buy the parts for their first batch of computers. Their first product, the Apple I, wasn’t a finished computer but a bare motherboard, sold for $666.66. It was a leap of faith for both the creators and their first customers, who had to add their own keyboard and monitor. Jobs, ever the salesman...