The Founder’s Journey: Arhan Chhabra on Building Startups, Scaling Success, and Revolutionizing Loyalty

Recently, Matthew Andrews ’25, MCS PAF for Business & Entrepreneurship, had the opportunity to conduct a series of interviews with Harvard entrepreneurs. Below is what he learned from Arhan Chhabra, founder of Rove.

Arhan Chhabra, originally class of ‘26, is currently on a leave of absence pursuing his startup, Rove, a company that aims to build a universal loyalty currency and algorithm to address the challenges of using airline loyalty miles (the fifth largest currency in the world with no liquidity or foreign exchange market). This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MCS: Arhan, it’s lovely to meet you. Could you give us your Harvard intro?
Arhan: My name is Arhan, I was born and raised in Hong Kong, went to boarding school briefly in Connecticut, and then joined Harvard. I was in Quincy House before going on a leave of absence, did computer science and economics as a double concentrator, and built a recruiting company during my freshman and sophomore year, and then started Rove the summer after freshman year, which is my main focus right now.

MCS: Can you tell us a little bit more about the recruiting startup you worked on over your freshman year?
Arhan: Freshman year, a friend from Berkeley and I started a recruiting company. Essentially, our goal was to help students land internships specifically at VC-backed startups. We initially focused on high schoolers but then expanded to college students as well. Startups are often not as well-known and not large enough to HR teams or run LinkedIn ads to recruit high schoolers, college students, or just interns in general. So we wanted to create a bulk matchmaking platform that analyzes students based on their academic, professional interests, and backgrounds and place them into the right internship and research opportunities. Honestly, this was more of a business than a startup – we didn’t really fundraise at all and bootstrapped from the ground up. We scaled it pretty quickly to seven figures in ARR (annual recurring revenue) at a solid profit margin with mostly autopilot operations.

MCS: What got you started in entrepreneurship? Did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? 

Arhan: I always knew I was interested in entrepreneurship, but I wasn’t sure if this would be what I actually did for a living. I was still exploring recruiting and more traditional career opportunities freshman year, but even in high school, I had a pretty strong interest in building companies. I did my first startup when I was 15.  I sold the code I had developed for that startup for a very small amount but at the time, it felt like I had sold it for billions! Later during high school, I patented a technology I invented that used AI software and hardware in the construction industry back home in Hong Kong. This led to me working with the Hong Kong government to implement the solution at real construction sites. We won several awards, secured funding, and completed the project successfully. 

MCS: You mentioned that Rove is your main focus now, could you give us the elevator pitch for what Rove does?
Arhan: Rove was inspired by the fact that both my co-founder, who used to attend Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, and I have been massive travel hackers. We used the right credit cards, points, and miles—and even wrote code to beat airlines’ pricing algorithms—to secure flights as cheaply as possible, often for business and first class. In high school, we traveled to dozens of countries for free, flying in premium cabins without paying a penny out of pocket. All of our friends would ask us how we did this, wanting to do the same. I very quickly realized most people weren’t able to qualify for the very limited subset of travel cards available on the market due to an outdated underwriting algorithm called FICO. Even those who did qualify rarely wanted to spend $700–800 per year per card. And even those who got past both those barriers didn’t know how to use their points because it’s such an outdated system built on software older than I am.

What’s fascinating is that airline loyalty miles/currency overall is cumulatively the fifth-biggest currency in the world. There’s no liquidity, no foreign exchange market, and no real authority for this unregulated currency. Our goal is to build the universal travel loyalty currency. That looks like two things: one, our own credit card—a consumer card targeted toward Gen Zs, college students, and recent grads who are creditworthy but currently have no choice but to get a card which would only give you 1% cashback and almost no travel benefits. The second thing we’re doing is going B2B – working with other credit card companies, including startups, larger credit card issuers, banks, and fintechs, to provide our loyalty currency and software to them on a *B2B2C basis.

*B2B2C or Business to Business to Consumer is where a company sells its products or services to another business, which then delivers those products or services to the end consumer.

MCS: Could you give us an idea of the size or scale of Rove? Are there recent milestones you;d like to highlight?
Arhan: In terms of the timeline, I met my co-founder over Slack, on the * Ivy League Entrepreneurship Slack channel in June of 2023, just after my freshman year ended. We started building the idea out over the summer, secured a partnership with a large credit card network later that year, and have been working on the two core products ever since. We have a few deals in the seven-figure ARR size that we’re currently working on fulfilling, and we did some fundraising as well. As we entered Y Combinator, we did a small pre-seed round—$1.5 million—and that was an uncapped *MFN (Most Favored Nation) note, which is essentially the best valuation you can get from a founder’s perspective.

That funding came from a couple of larger VCs like General Catalyst, Soma Capital, Pear VC, UNTITLED Capital, and Formus Capital. We also had some really interesting angel investors, like the founder of SoFi, the founder of HyperCard, the founder of Point Town, and a few other travel and fintech companies. We’ve been working on building our software and fulfilling those deals. This summer, we moved to New York, opened up an office at the World Trade Center, and have been expanding our team ever since.

*Note only current students or alumni of an Ivy League school can join the Ivy League Entrepreneurship Slack with their university email.
*MFN is an agreement that gives a party the right to the same or better terms than other parties in a similar contract which essentially allows early investors to receive the same terms as later investors

MCS: That’s incredible! What have been some of the most helpful resources or people, both on campus and in general?
Arhan: Contrary to popular belief, I think it’s much easier to launch a company if you’re a student. If I had to start this whole thing again I’d rather spend the first year as a founder at Harvard than on leave. The value of being on leave only comes when you have to really expand your team and be there in person with them. But there are so many resources at Harvard—everything from Paul Bottino’s ES95 class, where I met really talented founders on campus who I genuinely go to daily for advice (many of whom are now my best friends), to organizations like Harvard Ventures, where I now serve as one of the directors, and Prod, which is one of the accelerators that recruits pretty heavily from Harvard.

These organizations have been game-changing. They’ve helped us fundraise over a million dollars, put us in rooms with people who are now our customers, and taught us the terminology, legal side, and everything else you need to know to start a company. 

MCS: Outside of class and Harvard, have there been people who’ve taken you under their wing?
Arhan: A lot of really interesting ventures. One of them, of course, is our YC partner, who founded Monzo in the UK—a fintech company used by a fifth of the UK. It’s a very large, multi-billion-dollar fintech company, so we’ve learnt a lot from them. Many of our investors, like the founder of SoFi and a few others, have given us great advice. We also have a strong network of people in New York. New York really is a fintech hub, so there’s a lot of expertise in our specific industry. I’ve also been fortunate to be in touch with a wide variety of people—from those whose names you’ve probably never heard of, but know every detail about their business, to people like Sam Altman, whose advice, as brief as it may have been, was very cool to hear.

MCS: Arhan, I’m sure you’ve had some huge learnings across these different startups. What are things you wish you knew early on?
Arhan: I think it’s way less risky to be an entrepreneur than most people think, even from a career perspective. There’s no risk in taking a leave of absence because you can always go back. There’s no risk in failing from a reputation standpoint. Unlike in most countries—or even in the U.S. 20 years ago—there’s no stigma against having a company that doesn’t exit, IPO, or get acquired. VCs would rather fund failed repeat entrepreneurs than first-time entrepreneurs.

Even if your startup fails entirely, and you’ve raised a bunch of money and blown it trying to make the company work, those same investors are statistically more likely to reinvest in you than avoid doing business with you again. From a career perspective, being a founder can even help with recruiting. Many of my Harvard friends whose startups didn’t work out still landed better jobs than they would have had they not done a startup. They have more interesting stories to tell, stronger networks, and so on. The Harvard name also goes such a long way in helping with fundraising and networking. It’s not a crazy, risky thing that requires you to sacrifice everything and have no backup plan.

MCS: If someone is thinking about starting a venture, what steps do you think they should take to not only get more interested, but also get it off the ground?
Arhan: I remember discussing with friends how many people at Harvard who wanted to start a business but didn’t have a specific idea often approached it by doing hackathon-style sprints. They’d quickly build something and put it online to see if it took off. They might make an e-commerce site one weekend, then an AI project the next. While it’s a strategy, I don’t think it’s optimal because you spend all your time building and not enough time observing and learning what works.

Instead, I think the better strategy is to try selling things that don’t exist and see if you can sell them. If you get orders, you know there’s demand. You can tell your customers there’s a waitlist or it’s out of stock while you build the product. This way, you test market gaps before committing. Many things seem like gaps but aren’t, and many things that don’t seem viable actually work. Create a landing page, market a product, and see if people sign up before you start building.

MCS: How important are coding skills, and what skills were most helpful to you?
Arhan: Being technical definitely helps, depending on the product you’re building. But it’s not always necessary, especially if you have a technical co-founder or are building a non-technical product. I think the most important skill for a founder is sales. If you can’t sell, it’s going to be tricky.

Whether you’re a B2B company hopping on sales calls all day or a consumer company building a brand that earns trust, sales is critical. It also extends beyond product sales. You need to sell your vision to employees to attract top talent, even if you can’t pay as much as big companies. You need to sell partnerships to work with other businesses. Sales is the most important part of running a business.

MCS: Arhan, thank you so much for your time and can’t wait to see Rove soar to even greater heights! Arhan: Thank you!

By Mignone Center for Career Success
Mignone Center for Career Success