He turned down a Meta job offer worth way more than $1 million. Here’s why

Indian techie Rishabh Agarwal is a known name in the AI space, as the IIT Bombay graduate has been building Periodic Labs, an AI startup. Last year, around August, Agarwal announced his “tough decision” to exit Meta and take a different kind of risk by making something of his own.

As Agarwal’s impressive CV started going viral again, he addressed the claim that he left a $1 million offer from Meta and clarified that the offer “was an order of magnitude higher than $1 million,” suggesting that he let far more than just $1 million go to build his own company.

A viral post that circulated online described him this way: “Meet Rishabh Agrawal, who got AIR 33 in JEE and completed his B. Tech, Computer Science from IIT Bombay. He worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, Waymo, and when Mark Zuckerberg personally gave him a $1 million job offer, he denied it. And do you know what he’s doing today? Building the next-generation AI company called Periodic Labs.”

The post added: “Many of us might not know him well, but in the AI world, he is a big deal. The reason is that he has worked at some of the most elite AI labs on the planet: Google Brain, DeepMind, Waymo, and Meta Superintelligence Labs. In spite of that, when he was offered a ₹9.5 crore per annum job, after five months at Meta, he denied it, quit, and joined Periodic Labs as a co-founder,” framing his choice as opting to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond.