Anushray Gupta, CTPO, Cuemath, ET CIO

Early Life

Anushray Gupta was born and brought up in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. He completed his schooling at Kanpur, where he is from. Gupta comes from a lower-middle-class family and the only driving force for his parents was Gupta and his two sibling’s education. They have a small business family set up by his father and grandfather in the 90s. It was an MSME business in Kanpur and Anushray mentioned that everyone who contributed to the business worked hard there. Half of the house was converted into a factory which was used as a space to recycle plastics. After his schooling, Anushray joined IIIT Hyderabad for his undergraduate studies.
Gupta was quite the competitive kid during his schooling years. “I used to compete for top ranks. I used to keep a diary record of the people who ranked above me and by how many marks”, he said. He did this to know where he stands among his classmates and improve. He further mentioned that he was a studious kid and his strength was scoring in exams. “I wasn’t good at sports or any extracurricular activities. I was labeled as a geek or a nerd”, he opined. Gupta considers studying computer science from the fourth grade a boon as this paved the way for his professional career. He spent a lot of time in the computer lab writing programs and this ultimately paid off. He further adds that everything he learned in his early undergraduate days was already instilled in him during his schooling years.
At college, Gupta wanted to explore other dimensions and chose to come out of the competitive race. Anushray has taught a handful of his classmates, juniors, and even seniors at times. During this time, he realized his fondness for teaching, something in which he clearly excels at. However, with time he realized it’s not worth it to focus on one particular field. “In college, I became a kid who wanted to explore a lot of things like extracurriculars, leadership, events, being part of the campus life, etc. That experience of being multi-dimensional helped a lot for me”, he further adds.

Early Career

Gupta started his career by working at Facebook in the United States. “Honestly, it’s like a dream job. You coming from India getting your first job in the US, working at the headquarters, and working with smart people. Obviously, you can’t deny paying like that” exclaimed Gupta. Even though he had to stay away from his family, they were the ones to motivate and encourage him to do well in his career. “Fortunately or unfortunately, throughout my career, I have always been happy”, he adds. Gupta also mentioned that every company he worked with has been a successful stint for his professional journey as he learned a lot from them. He worked with Facebook for about 2 and a half years and later came back to India as he wanted to start a venture on his own. “For me to come back and create something of my own in India was the factor why I left the US”, he mentions.

When asked about mentors and people who have influenced Gupta, he talked about how her computer science teacher was the stepping stone that he needed to move forward. She went out of her bounds to teach him as she clearly saw the interest in Anushray’s eyes. He further went on to say that he feels lucky to be surrounded by motivating and positive people. His family has taught him the importance of putting trust and faith in younger individuals. “There’s always a pressure of being successful in life when you come from a middle-class family. My family trusted me in the choices that I wanted to make”, he mentions.

Biggest achievements and challenges

Gupta is still young in his career path and considers that his biggest achievement is yet to turn up. He explains that there’s a lot of potential in him that can be drawn out of him in the future. However, during his time with Facebook, Anushray was part of multiple launches. He was part of the business team where they built new profiles for businesses. All of them turned out to be successful. He has also taught programming to over 2000 people and “that itself has a ripple effect of they being good at what they are trying to do”, he exclaimed. Some of his students are now tutors and teach programming to their students. “The power of teaching itself has a high volume of ripple effect. Today, working with Cuemath, we are trying to help students learn mathematics the right way”, Gupta opined.

Gupta believes in making an impact in other people’s lives. He doesn’t measure the impact through the product or services but through the lives that he changes. Connecting and interacting with people is something he cherishes.

On being asked about the challenges he has faced throughout his career, Gupta shared that one specific way of leadership does not fit every situation and leaders must adapt to different styles of leadership, mentoring, and expectations, as they grow. “When I started my career, I lost the nuance of their individual lives, backgrounds, capabilities, and force-fitting my expectations onto a graduate. That is something that I have changed. I am still evolving”, he explained.

Hobbies and Interests

Gupta loves to live in the moment. He enjoys being given problem statements. “If you throw me into a room with a problem statement, I just enjoy that. I enjoy brainstorming on the problems itself”, Gupta adds. In the moment of problem-solving, he explained that he is unable to declutter his mind and thus focuses on that particular problem, innovating it further. This makes him primarily focus on one problem at a time and not indulge in multiple problems at a time. This includes both his personal and professional problems. He thrives on problems, although he loves taking breaks. He further says “you’d find me focusing on a stupid TV show that is poorly rated but you’ll still find me enjoying that”. He considers himself a “binge watcher”. Cooking is also something that he has recently started being fond of. He dedicates himself to cooking different types of recipes at least twice a week.

Gupta considers learning as his main motto in life. He believes that learning patterns change throughout the course of a person’s life. “People are biased towards their own accolades and accomplishments. They feel that they are right. They feel entitled. For me, it’s more about learning. There’s so much to understand and learn around you. If you think about learning, absorbing, and using as three vectors in your life, the first half of your life is easily used up”, he shared.