Three days before his Accounting and Finance final exams, Vardhan Agnihotri ’24 had a choice to make.
He wasn’t that prepared for either of them. He knew that, if he studied as hard as he could for those next three days, he could probably manage to do well on both of them.
Or he could fail the finals and go compete against hundreds of other college students, professional engineers and professional researchers for a spot on the xAI team and an all-expenses-paid trip to a SpaceX launch.
“In my mind, I asked myself, ‘Why not take the risk?’” Agnihotri said. “When you’re young, it’s the time to take such risks. When you’re 35 years old, and you have a family to feed, you’re risking a lot of people’s lives or wellbeing as opposed to just your life or wellbeing.”
So he booked a flight to his hackathon and didn’t look back.
At the xAI hackathon, Agnihotri and his team built Vector, an AI-powered platform designed to turn user feedback into actual product features automatically. The system uses Grok, xAI’s artificial intelligence model, to monitor replies on X when developers announce new products. When users request features, a Grok agent chats with them in direct messages to understand their needs, and then a secondary coding agent deploys the changes.
The idea: users feel ownership over products they love, and developers don’t waste hours sorting through feedback manually.
It won.
Now, as a result of his success at the event, Agnihotri has been offered a job at xAI, for which he has paused his college education.
The willingness to take that kind of risk—betting on himself against professional engineers—wasn’t something Agnihotri always had.
During his time at the school, Agnihotri was a key member of the highly successful Quizbowl team, going to competitions across the country. But when he started in middle school, he was no better than anyone else. He learned that success came from showing up and putting in the work, not from natural talent.
“Nothing comes innately to anyone,” Aghinotri said. “Tom Brady wasn’t born good at football. He realized he really liked it, and then he built himself into a Hall of Fame quarterback.”
The lesson that competence comes from effort, not innate ability, became the foundation for everything he’s done since graduation.
Agnihotri’s Instagram account, which now has over 60,000 followers, taught him another crucial lesson: how to handle rejection and public failure.
Today, he posts about his current projects and shares informational videos about his college experiences. At first, he was terrified.
“At first I was kind of scared,” Aghnitori said. “I didn’t want people to find out about it. But you have to not care about what anyone else says. There were people who were badmouthing me, but you just have to keep going.”
The account didn’t start smoothly. The early videos were rough—admittedly bad, even. Former classmates questioned what he was doing, and some criticized it openly. Agnihotri kept posting anyway, one video every single day.
That summer, while interning at a medical health tech startup in New York, he maintained the same relentless schedule. Working fulltime during the day, editing reels late into the night. Most nights, he didn’t go to bed until 3 a.m., sitting alone in his room overlooking the World Trade Center, cutting footage and writing captions.
It didn’t feel like a grind, though.
“For me that was fun and it didn’t feel like work,” Agnihotri said. “So in my mind, I told myself, ‘I’ll keep doing it.’”
By the start of sophomore year, the account had grown to around 20,000 followers. The criticism hadn’t disappeared—but his response to it changed. He learned to use the backlash to improve his work rather than let it shut him down.
“My confidence has definitely been built up as a result of posting,” Agnihotri said. “Posting has no downside. People should understand that, no matter how normal you perceive yourself to be, you definitely have some interesting qualities that the world will appreciate.”
His confidence and his ability to put himself out there without fear of failure has reshaped how Agnihotri thinks about success.
“At first, I had a very one-dimensional mindset that I wanted to make a lot of money and be very famous, but I eventually realized that if you prioritize creative value and helping people, then the dollars will find themselves in your bank account,” Agnihotri said.
At xAI, Agnihotri sees an opportunity to apply his interest in robotics and computer science in ways that actually affect people’s daily lives. He’s less concerned with job titles or salaries than with building things that matter.
“College is about experimenting and exploring, not about getting a good job that pays well,” Agnihotri said. “I hope that I can help people learn that they can explore something on their own and change the world.”
Agnihotri doesn’t know where he’ll be in 10 years. He’s interested in too many fields to predict which one will pull him in next. But he’s learned that uncertainty isn’t something to fear—it’s the point.
“All you have to do is control your inputs, and then your outputs will speak for themselves,” Agnihotri said. “If you work hard, whatever the (doubters) say does not matter at all.”
His advice to current students is the same advice he wishes he’d internalized earlier: take the risk.
“Follow your passions,” Agnihotri said. “Be unafraid to do things your own way. Be unafraid to post the first reel online. Be unafraid to go to a hackathon when you don’t know anything about coding.”
Three days before finals, Agnihotri placed a bet on himself. It paid off. But even if it hadn’t, he’d still tell you it was the right call.
