Indian-origin Stanford graduate built $600 million company; has an ‘alegbra’ advice to succeed in life

Shubham Goel, along with his partner Ray Zhou, founded Affinity after graduating early from the prestigious Stanford University. His company is now worth more than half a billion dollars.

In a brief roadside interview recently, Goel told social media influencer Viraj Ala the one piece of advice he didn’t learn at Stanford but has used in life.

And this has an algebra connection. “The slope is always more important than the Y-intercept,” Goel said.

In fact, while talking about algebra, he said that the lessons also apply to life.

“If you draw two lines on a graph, the reality is that the line with the higher slope will almost always cross the line, no matter where it starts on the graph,” said the Affinity founder, who is on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List.

Shubham Goel said that it does not matter what one’s starting point in life is and he called it the Y-intersection.

“What matters is how quickly you can learn something and improve compared to other people,” he said.

Advice for young people

Shubham Goel had an extraordinary idea for young people who wanted to be successful.

“The truth is no one knows what the right direction is. Just pick something, a direction you believe in, and run towards it,” he said.

When the interviewer said this was the opposite of the general idea given to young people, the Affinity co-founder had an answer.

“If you’re exploring life but building a company, then you can’t be a generalist in how you approach solving problems,” he said.

Who is Shubham Goel?

Shubham Goel, a student of DPS RK Puram in New Delhi, was admitted to Stanford University in 2013, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He left Stanford in 2015 after graduating early from his Undergraduate Computer Science course to start a business with Ray Zhou.

That’s when Affinity stepped in and the duo scaled it into a $600 million business.

Goel called himself a “masochist” when asked why he left such a comfortable position at Stanford to become a “broke” business owner.

“Some of us, I guess, are just masochists. You can be fearless about a lot of things. Fear doesn’t do you any good, it just gets things going, it just keeps your brain busy. So if you perceive it as an emotion and you can process it as an emotion, then you can put it aside and focus on the problem at hand,” he said.