Fundamentals, Friends, and Failing Forward: Two IITG Alumni on Making the Most of Campus in the Age of AI

Tarang Vaish (Class of 2005, CTO and co-founder, Granica) and Alexander Seelam (Class of 2025, 2une at Physics Wallah) on what they built at IIT Guwahati, how they recovered after setbacks, and what they’d tell students starting out.

Published 30 September 2026 | Office Dean of ACIR | Category Guest Lectures

When Alexander Seelam went looking for the first customers of his startup, twenty prospects turned him away. He didn’t read the refusals as a verdict on himself or his product. “My timing was bad,” he told himself. He kept going, and the twenty-first prospect became a customer.

Tarang Vaish’s route to success also began with a setback. He did not clear JEE on his first attempt. He studied in a school of overachievers and was rarely seen as an academic superstar by teachers and peers. Today he is at the cutting edge of technology as co-founder and CTO at Granica, helping enterprise AI run more efficiently.

Two decades separate their graduating classes, but their stories meet in the same place. Both returned to campus in September to anchor a 48-hour hackathon for students. We asked them about their time on campus, their careers, and how they built resilience.

Learn the fundamentals, even when AI makes them feel optional

We asked Tarang why an engineer would learn to code or study mechanics when AI can do so much. His answer zoomed out to what comes after graduation. “Engineers have to build products that customers want to use,” he says. Code generation, code review and end-to-end testing still exist; they are simply done differently now.

He explains the shift with an analogy. The engineer’s job is moving from fixing every machine on the factory floor to being the foreman, who may not build the machines but must understand how every piece fits together. That is why skipping the basics is risky: a student who does so won’t know when an AI agent has gone wrong. “It’s not the finger muscles anymore, it’s your brain muscles of comprehending things,” he says. “Physics always matters. Fundamentals always matter.”

Alexander’s work points the same way. At 2une, which brings together the people, environments and processes needed to validate data for AI systems, he helps frontier AI labs find where their models break. And to find where a system fails you need to know how it ought to work. The fundamentals always matter.

Build your people before you build anything else

While fundamentals give you the judgment to question what a machine tells you, it's important to have a group of supportive people around you. The social fabric anchors your ability to take action.

Tarang found that his close peers, the people he could walk with and talk problems through, were an important part of the campus experience. Talking, he says, also lets the subconscious keep working on a problem in the background.

Alexander took this idea further, and made it part of his decision to come to campus. He chose IIT Guwahati deliberately, drawn by its coding culture and the alumni network that helps people grow. That network paid off early: when he started sharing his startup ideas, his seniors gave him his first angel cheque.

And his friends also shaped how he thinks about setbacks. “Your friends should be able to tell you that any setback is a small thing,” Alexander says. Setbacks rarely feel small while you’re in them, which is why friends like that matter. They allow you to see failure as temporary and help you see the way out.

Love your courses, and learn how you learn

Good friends keep you steady, but the work itself has to give you something to hold on to.

Tarang published papers during his time in IIT Guwahati, and went on to become the first IIT Guwahati alum to study at Stanford University. But he doesn't describe his journey as one long success story. Instead, he tells students to explore, because a college curriculum is full of subjects students meet for the first time. “You have to start loving your courses,” he says. “The courses you love are what you do well later in your career.”

His own career bears that out. In his third year, Tarang took a seminar-based course on data compression with Professor S. V. Rao. It was open-ended and largely self-directed, with help from the professor. Years later, his company is working in that same area. “How you learn matters the most,” he says.

But Alexander believes that that kind of self awareness also means being honest about where you stand. Alexander notes that many students arrive as JEE toppers and suddenly find themselves in a much larger group with a high bar for academic excellence. He asks students to challenge the story they tell about themselves. Being at IIT, he says, is proof that you are smart enough to sit with the smartest people. And the point is to grow together with them, not to rank yourself against them.

Ownership is what lets you start again

Even when everything is in place, setbacks are inevitable. But both men tell you that there is a way to prepare yourself to recover.

For Alexander, the test came with his first startup, which began with a problem he had seen up close: the analog registers that run the short-term rental market. He digitised them and added payments, card payments and even a loyalty layer. He understood the market and used his coding skills to solve it. Then, in September 2025, an abrupt regulatory intervention hit the business model his company depended on, and the startup was effectively over. “It was heartbreaking,” he says. What pulled him back was pride in ownership and the joy of solving a problem for a customer. He moved from proptech to helping frontier AI labs, but the idea of joy in ownership stayed constant.

Tarang met his test much earlier. For him, ownership began with a bad outcome in JEE, which he calls the most stressful exam a student can face. In the year that followed, he took charge of how he handled it. He trained himself to solve every problem he could first, and to look at the hard ones without being rattled once he had built a bit of confidence.

The habit stayed with him long after the exam. It is also why he urges students to learn design, entrepreneurship and agentic workflows, but also, "find what interests you, brings you joy. But accept that you may not be the best at every subject."

Looking at both stories, it’s seems like ownership does not mean taking the blame for outcomes. It meant owning the response: how do you work through a problem, and what you do next?

So what should a student starting out take from all this?

Their advice is practical. Find your people early. Learn the basics even when they feel optional. Treat a setback as a chapter and not the end of the story. And hold on to whatever gives you joy.

It’s advice that reaches well beyond campus. And it may be the most valuable guidance for young professionals trying to build decades-long careers in a world that seems to change every month.