EO StudioHow I Got Half a Million Users in Just 16 Weeks | Rocket.new, Vishal Virani
Episode Details
EPISODE INFO
- Released
- November 14, 2025
- Duration
- 10m
- Channel
- EO Studio
- Watch on YouTube
- ▶ Open ↗
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Meet Vishal Virani, cofounder and CEO of Rocket, and the first engineer in his family. He grew up in Surat, the diamond capital of the world, where nine out of ten diamonds are manufactured and where resources and tech role models were almost non existent. No Ivy League. No Stanford. No IIT. Just curiosity, grit, and the belief that you can build from anywhere. Vishal faced more than forty rejections from investors who quietly judged his college and his zip code. Instead of complaining, he stayed in learning mode and read everything he could find on the internet. Right after college he launched his first startup, a Figma to code platform that grew from zero to three hundred fifty thousand users. When GPT 3 arrived, he instantly understood how fast the world was going to change, and that moment pushed him to create Rocket. Rocket is a platform where you bring the idea and get a real product you can launch without worrying about engineering or infrastructure. In just fifteen weeks, Rocket raised a fifteen million dollar seed round from Salesforce Ventures and Accel, and in the first sixteen weeks people built millions of applications on the platform. In this interview, Vishal shares how growing up in Surat shaped him, why location does not matter, how to turn rejection into momentum, and his mission for the next five years to remove mundane, clerical, repetitive work from every users life so they can focus on what actually matters. 00:00 Intro 01:50 The First Engineer from a Farming Family 02:57 You SHOULD Be Ready to KILL Your Success 05:01 How to Know Your Conviction is Right 06:31 You Haven't Failed Until You've Spent the Last Penny 08:27 Don't Take Any Advice Before You Know THIS Would you like to take part in Rocket? Try it now! 👉 here: https://www.rocket.new/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=EOpodcast&utm_campaign=founderstory EO stands for Entrepreneur& Opportunities. As we're looking to feature more inspiring stories of entrepreneurs all over the world, don't hesitate to contact us at partner@eoeoeo.net LinkedIn | @EO STUDIO X | @eostudi0
SPEAKERS
Vishal Virani
guestFounder of Rocket.new, discussing product vision and startup fundraising journey.
EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode of EO Studio, featuring Vishal Virani, How I Got Half a Million Users in Just 16 Weeks | Rocket.new, Vishal Virani explores bootstrapping from Surat to Rocket: product conviction beats pedigree always Vishal Virani shares his non-elite background and argues that location, pedigree, and “zip code” matter far less than sustained learning and execution.
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