The air on campus was different,” Umar Raja recalls, leaning back in his chair overlooking the San Francisco skyline. “It was demanding, almost unforgiving. The Topi hills weren’t just a picturesque backdrop; they represented the isolation required to build something truly difficult.” That isolation, he explains, wasn’t loneliness—it was focus. He came to GIKI not just to earn a degree, but to prove a concept: that world-class innovation could be born far from Silicon Valley.
During his final year, fueled by countless sleepless nights and subsidized tea from the Mess, he worked on a simple, yet elegant project: an algorithm to optimize supply chains in developing markets. “Everyone else was chasing the shiny new social media apps, but I was fixated on logistics. I realized that the biggest problems often have the least glamorous solutions,” he says.
Today, that modest final-year project is the foundation of a multinational logistics platform that services three continents and employs hundreds. He traded the demanding environment of the GIKI workshops for the intense pressure of scaling a global technology firm, but the lessons remain the same. The real code, he insists, wasn’t written on a screen. It was written in the resilience he built while trying to solve impossible problems in a classroom far away. His only regret? “That I didn’t appreciate the taste of the Mess food more. You learn quickly that hunger is the best sauce, whether for a plate of rice or a startup idea.