Senior environmental science and policy major
“Hey Anand. Congratulations, you have been shortlisted for the Thiel Fellowship. We’ll send you an itinerary for your travel to San Francisco, and we look forward to welcoming you here and hearing about your business plan,” a woman told me on the phone in April. She works for Peter Thiel, an investor behind Facebook, Paypal, Spotify and LinkedIn.
The story gets twisted, but before I proceed, I’d like to digress.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written six books with the same theme: The world is flat. I’m sure most of you must have figured that concept out for yourselves by now, whether through your connections all over the country and world on Facebook, the international news and opinions available to you 24/7, Skype chats or even the information people tweet from random corners of the world.
At a macro level, the very idea of trade and intercontinental commerce is feasible because of the Internet. For instance, it makes sense for Nike to have multiple factories around the world only because strategic and logistical information can be relayed within seconds using the Internet.
My story, however, highlights some of the peculiar implications of the “flatter world,” as they occurred in my own life.
I vividly remember Google-ing my name in 2006. Even with the junk the site gives you when you search for a name, I was surprised by the number of people with whom I shared my full name. But one online profile stood out. An Anand Gupta in Palo Alto, Calif., was in the same high school class as I was. Here I was, musing thousands of miles away in an Indian city called Pune. I noted it.
By 2010, Anand Gupta was a freshman at Harvard interested in entrepreneurship, much like I was. What are the odds that you can not only observe but also connect with someone who shares your name, is the same age and shares similar interests with you? Whatever the odds, it can get quite confusing.
When Thiel launched his fellowship, which encouraged students to drop out of college for the love of entrepreneurship, in 2010, I applied. I didn’t make the final cut and forgot about it. But I was now a data point on their records. For the second season, the other Anand Gupta applied and impressed the venture capitalist with his idea. Thiel, probably in the forgivable miscalculation of not accounting for the minuscule odds, mixed up the records and decided to give me a call instead.
“Oh wow, sure, yeah, thanks,” I responded to the woman. “I look forward to seeing you all in Silicon Valley.” Then, as I hung up, I wondered why such things were happening to me. Suddenly, I remembered Anand Gupta, now living in Boston, and began to wonder. My suspicions were later confirmed.
In fact, people still bump into my personal website trying to find him. Since I’ve made my contact details available, I got a call from a high school friend of Anand’s in Palo Alto a month ago: “Hey, so good to finally get in touch with you,” she said, not waiting for me to respond. “By the way, why does your number show as Maryland and not Massachusetts?”
The peculiarities of the Internet.
Anand Kumar Gupta is a junior agricultural and resource economics major. He can be reached at kumargupta@umdbk.com.
