Ritesh Gupta didn’t grow up thinking he wanted to become a designer. Design, for him, was a hobby, he thought. It’s not something you choose to do as a career.

“It isn’t necessarily revered in the Indian community,” he explained. “So I didn’t discover my interest or know design was something I could pursue until I did an advertising campaign for an organization that I was a part of at UCLA. I found that I just had a natural knack for it.”

Still, he was under the assumption that design was something for fun, not for work—until he started his job out of college at agency Wieden+Kennedy where he ran social and search campaigns. There he met Serif Ozcan, the Head of Design at the time, and the two became good friends. Through Serif, Ritesh began to realize that he could actually work in design. He could love what he did, and he could make money doing it.