IIT produces the world’s best employees. And some of the worst founders. Here’s why.

Every year the smartest youngsters in India crack JEE Advanced and make it to IIT. Four years later they’re at Google, Goldman, McKinsey.

But India still hasn’t produced a Google, an Apple, an OpenAI. Decades of IITs and nothing. I feel there’s a reason. Apart from the brain drain…

Yeah IIT gave us unicorns. But Flipkart is Amazon for India. Ola is Uber for India. Razorpay is Stripe for India. None of them original, just Indian copies of things that already worked in the US.

And even those - who actually built them are mostly the ones who struggled/ were frustrated inside the system. Bad grades, boring curriculum, no dream placement. The system pushed them to the edge and they had no choice but to figure something out.

The ones who nailed the system went and built great careers for someone else.

Inside IIT it’s simple. Mug up a week before exams, vomit it out, get the grades, get placed, done. No learning. No curiosity. Just doing what’s required and moving to the next checkpoint laid down by the seniors/ curriculum.

One thing I’ve seen that I still think about is, E-Cell, IIT Bombay’s famous entrepreneurship cell. Ask anyone there why they actually joined. Honest answer? POR. Position of responsibility. Resume point. Consulting shortlist. The cell literally built to create founders became just another checkbox on the way to McKinsey. Nobody’s building anything. Everyone’s just trying to look like they are.

The root of all this is JEE.

JEE doesn’t test intelligence. It tests pattern recognition. Two years of the same spoon fed questions from coaching institutes on repeat until your brain just memorises the pattern. IIT runs the exact same game for four more years.

Life is multidimensional. IIT makes you linear. In the real world nobody hands you a perfectly scoped problem with a clean answer. You have to find the problem yourself, sit with the uncertainty, and figure something out from scratch. Finding the real problem is harder than solving it.

The system optimised so hard for one type of intelligence that it forgot to develop another. And now we wonder why the best minds in India are building the world’s best products - for American companies.

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