Ankit Gupta
Founder, Pulse
What were you up to before you came to the d.school?
I did my undergrad in Computer Science from IIT Bombay and came to Stanford right after for a Masters in CS as well.
How did you hear about the d.school? Why did you come?
Initially, I actually wasn’t planning to come to Stanford. During the decision making period, a friend of mine at Stanford pointed me to the dschool website. And I thought, “man! this is really cool! I wonder if places like this exist anywhere else”. I eventually decided to come to Stanford and I am sure the charm of taking clases at the dschool was a factor in tipping me over.
A week into my first quarter at Stanford, I made friends with Akshay (who is now my cofounder) who was an engineer taking the bootcamp class at the dschool. I would hear about the class when we met, and get super excited every time! But it was too late to apply for the bootcamp at that point; So, I applied to almost all winter classes at the dschool .. and eventually took Transformative Design. Best decision of my life! 
I guess I came to the dschool because I wanted to learn design thinking. I had heard about it from friends taking dschool classes and was fascinated by it. Coming from an engineering background, design thinking was a completely new way of solving problems; totally different from what I had been taught before and much more creative and free form. Eventually ended up taking dschool classes in 3 out of my 6 quarters at Stanford
What did you experience when you got here? Why was it meaningful to you?
The dschool experience was much much better than what I had expected! I learnt skills like brainstorming, interviewing users, rapid prototyping making mind maps etc. that I could apply to any problem out there and come up with creative solutions. I learnt the importance of executing; getting something out there fast and iterating on it with user feedback. Dschool taught me the basics of design thinking and gave me the confidence to keep applying it in my life.
More than the design process itself, I think the classes taught me a lot about interpersonal communication – how to work in teams comprising of people with very diverse backgrounds, how to give/take feedback, how to explain your idea quickly and succinctly.
But, most importantly, I think I learned that creativity is always in hindsight – its not about just coming up with the one genius idea that solves the problem, but trying and failing at 100 other solutions before arriving at the best one. And the dschool taught me to fail fast.
What are you doing now? How do you use what you learned at the d.school?
In my last quarter (Spring ’11), me and Akshay (my cofounder) took Launchpad at the dschool. The idea was extremely simple – create the best news reading experience on mobile devices. We created and launched an iPad app (called Pulse) during the class. Got great feedback and have now turned it into a company. Pulse has now grown to 8 people with apps on on iPad, iPhone and Android platforms.
The dschool has helped us tremendously in launching Pulse. We were working out of cafes while building Pulse. This allowed us to code something up, test it with our users (who were around us sipping coffee) and iterate on the app multiple times a day. Even now, we have multiple user testing/iteration cycles before launching any feature. We have team brainstorms around a pov about couple times every week; coaching new employees on brainstorming along the way.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I love spending time at the dschool and recommend it to any Stanford student I come across I am a huge fan and always will be!
