USC computer science student and 2o18 KPCB Fellow Rachit Kataria has previously interned at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus (pictured here) and Apple in Cupertino. Photo/Joy Ofodu.
Rachit Kataria, a USC computer science student, has been selected for a prestigious fellowship by one of the top venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Kataria is among 52 students selected from nearly 2,500 applicants to participate in the Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers (KPCB) Fellows Program 2018.
As one of the top technology investment firms in the Bay Area, KPCB has helped build and accelerate growth at pioneering companies such as Amazon, Google, Nest, Twitter and Uber. The three-month summer internship program offers top U.S. college students experience at prominent Silicon Valley startups and access to a long list of exclusive events, as well as networking opportunities with tech leaders across the Bay Area.
Kataria, a third-year student in USC Viterbi’s progressive degree program, has previous internships at Apple and Facebook on his resume, as well as experience as a USC course producer and a research fellow with the Melady Lab Research Group.
“Having the opportunity to learn from CEOs at leading startups is absolutely priceless.”Rachit Kataria
As a KPCB fellow this summer, he will be working with Shape Security, a leading cybersecurity firm based in Mountain View, California, where he expects to focus on integrating security modules for the company’s clients, which include leading financial and retail organizations.
For Kataria, participating in KCPB’s Fellows Program isn’t only a way to gain top-notch computer science work experience, it is also an opportunity to get his feet wet in the startup world and learn directly from world-leading tech industry luminaries.
“Shape Security employs about 200 people, but they have saved more than a billion dollars in fraud,” said Kataria. “Not only that but having the opportunity to learn from CEOs at leading startups is absolutely priceless.”
As for the program’s highly competitive selection process, it all begins with a resume submission and optional coding challenge, followed by a more technical phone screen, said Kataria. From there, cuts and callbacks are made to advance to subsequent interview rounds.
Successful finalists can choose from six KPCB portfolio companies they are interested in working for. After undergoing the internship process with these companies, only students receiving an offer are accepted as members of the Fellows Program.
Making ideas happen
Despite having been born to engineer parents in the tech hub of San Jose, California, entrepreneurship and computer science were not part of Kataria’s original career plan.
In fact, before joining USC, Kataria dreamed of becoming a doctor and he was initially accepted to USC’s biomedical engineering program as a pre-med student. But he made the switch to computer science before classes started, initially to try it out for a semester—and he hasn’t looked back.
In 2015, at Kataria’s first hackathon, USC’s HackSC, he and his team won the top iOS app award by developing an Apple TV app for real-time image and video manipulation using the coding language Swift. (The prize: an Apple watch he still wears every day.)
The experience also put Kataria in touch with Apple recruiters, which would eventually lead to an internship as a software engineer at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino in 2016.
“I realized everyone has an entrepreneurial idea at the back of their mind and started thinking about how I could be the one making ideas happen.”Rachit Kataria
Then, in 2017, his team placed in the top 3 at the ACM TrojanHacks 2.0 with a chatbot that uses the Facebook Messenger platform to provide resources for homeless youth.
“I realized everyone has an entrepreneurial idea at the back of their mind and started thinking about how I could be the one making ideas happen,” said Kataria, a National Merit Scholar and Viterbi Undergraduate Merit Research Fellow. “As they say, don’t be a cog in the clock—engineer the clock.”
Indeed, Kataria has served as the former director and head of logistics for HackSC and held various leadership roles with USC student-led entrepreneurship initiative Spark SC while maintaining a 3.95 grade-point-average. After he completes the KPCB Fellows Program, he’s off to Facebook’s New York office for his second internship at the company.
Kataria believes the KPCB Fellows Program is an investment in his future and hopes his experience will encourage more USC students to pursue these opportunities.
“As a KPCB Fellow, it’s not just an internship experience—you are part of a cohort of students where everyone is as excited as you to be part of that experience,” said Kataria.
“I’m really proud and honored to be part of the program, and I’m really excited to meet and learn from the amazing people that are part of this group. At the end of the day, if I want to launch a startup company down the line, these will be the 51 people I reach out to.”
Published on March 30th, 2018
Last updated on May 16th, 2023
