Girish Gupta

Girish Gupta went to Cambridge University before learning drill and discipline in the Officers' Training Corps and went backpacking around South America. Upon his graduation, he took a one-way flight to become a foreign correspondent. He was primarily based in Venezuela for about a decade, where he produced groundbreaking investigations, covered daily clashes and reported on a humanitarian crisis. In time, Gupta became a Senior Correspondent at Reuters covering Venezuela, going on to unveil multi-billion-dollar government oil corruption, military missile inventories, details of soldiers arrested for treason and rebellion, fabrication of electoral results and that the country’s Chief Justice was arrested on suspicion of murder. Wanting to understand the country's crisis from first principles, he wrote web, mobile and watch applications to provide live and historic data on Venezuela's dire economy.

His software was used by thousands of people including politicians, investors and journalists for everything from live black market exchange rate fluctuations to details of the brisk money-printing that fueled the world's highest inflation. He also wrote code to automate data acquisition, simple story-writing and other mind-numbing tasks that pull resources from reporting. Later on, Gupta left journalism and expanded the Venezuela Econ platform into a company, Data Drum, which offered automated, clean and elegant global macroeconomic data for half a dozen countries. The idea was to make public data accessible to the public. He then spent just over a year in Mumbai where I built a data science unit at a public policy non-profit. Over the years, he has created smaller-scale products of my own—GlobalOTP, Readwise2Roam, According To Documents and Math for Journalists. Then, as Chief Technology Officer at Stanford-conceived, Google-funded startup Deepnews, he helped build a machine learning algorithm to identify quality journalism at scale. In late 2021, I joined Subcity as a founding software engineer and in 2022, he co-founded co-founded Tellen.

ALWAYS GO (Memoir)

ALWAYS GO begins with Gupta’s mother, an immigrant who rescued her son from a violent household and instilled in him a fierce sense of justice. After earning a Master’s in Physics, Gupta turned away from stability in search of adventure and truth. With little more than determination, he bought a one-way ticket to Venezuela—where he covered everything from prison riots to multi-billion-dollar corruption as the country spiraled into hyperinflation and authoritarianism. His reporting later appeared in Reuters, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others.

As Gupta rose through the profession—earning a six-figure salary and breaking major stories—he uncovered a darker reality, filled with unpaid interns, exploited stringers, warzone safety ignored, fabricated stories, and an industry that too often valued awards over truth. Class barriers kept journalism’s upper ranks an exclusive club, and institutional betrayal eroded both public trust and the well-being of reporters on the ground, two issues that are particularly important and need to be discussed openly in today's age of misinformation.

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Agent: Zeynep Sen