Building Real

India is one of the biggest motorcycle markets on earth — so why is booking a Himalayan ride still done over Instagram DMs and "DM for price"? Karthik Srinivasan is a designer who rediscovered motorcycling later in life, tried to plan a ride to Ladakh, and ended up on 20 different websites because there was no common place to compare tours, schools or stays. So he and his co-founders built one: Ev...

What does it take to build a national team that beats the best in the world -- with no government funding, no salary, and players who have never seen a football? India had never fielded a blind football team that could trouble the world's powerhouses. Sunil Mathew built one anyway -- starting from a 20-minute demo game and turning it into teams now ranked in the global top five, on a fraction of t...

Startup education | social impact | founder incentives | Founders For Change | entrepreneurship beyond exits | next-gen founders Supriya Panchangam has spent a decade in rooms full of young people and arrived at one uncomfortable conclusion: the biggest problem with the next generation of founders isn't their ambition — it's what they've been taught to aim for. As co-founder of Founders For Change...

AI and creativity | children's books | illustration | human vs AI | creative career | author story | taste as competitive advantage Vinayak Varma is an author and illustrator who has spent years building a creative career in children's books — a category that is, on paper, one of the most replaceable by AI. His answer to whether AI can kill human creativity is more nuanced, and more useful, than e...

Non-toxic home | formaldehyde in textiles | sustainable home furnishings | The Yellow Dwelling | consumer health | India startup Nanda Kumar discovered that most home textiles — sheets, curtains, pillows — contain formaldehyde. The same chemical used to preserve dead bodies. It's legal, unregulated, and in products sitting in your bedroom right now. Instead of writing a blog post about it, he buil...

Mental health startup | Southeast Asia | social impact | tech career pivot | Chengal Centre | founder story Barry Ooi was an economist turned data analytics entrepreneur, comfortable in the corporate and tech world — until a loved one's struggle made the gaps in Southeast Asia's mental health infrastructure impossible to ignore. He walked away from a lucrative career to build Chengal Centre: not a...

Food business | Airbnb experience | Mad Onion Slicer | India startup | deportation | culinary entrepreneurship | founder comeback story Dhruv Shanker got deported from the United States. His startup had folded. His visa paperwork was a disaster. He came back to India with nothing obvious to build on — and turned a balcony, four aunties, and "boring Indian food" into the highest-rated culinary expe...

Deep tech | sewage treatment | infrastructure startup | India | EcoSTP | founder story What do you do when your apartment's sewage treatment plant overflows and you discover it's just a fake tank dumping raw waste into a lake? For Tharun Kumar — former engineer turned deep-tech founder — that moment became the starting point for EcoSTP, a bacteria-based sewage treatment company now operating acros...