I want to say something that will sound ungenerous, and isn't meant to be.
Most of the startups being celebrated in India this year will not exist in two years. Not because the founders are not capable — many are exceptional — but because the thing they are building was never designed to last. It was designed to be sold.
That is not a moral failure. It is the natural result of the incentives we have built around them.
Fundraising stopped being a means
Somewhere in the last few years raising money stopped being a step toward building something and became the achievement itself. The round is the announcement. The valuation is the headline. The deck gets more attention than the product, and a founder learns very quickly that the skill being rewarded is narrative, not delivery.
So we get companies optimised for the next round rather than the next decade. The target is an exit, and if the target is an exit then every decision downstream of it is about looking fundable rather than about being durable. It is a complete and internally consistent game. It just has very little to do with building a business.
Meanwhile, the people who should be starting aren't
Here is what I find genuinely painful, because I meet these people constantly.
There are engineers and researchers in this country with a working product and a real insight who will never start a company. Not because they lack conviction. Because they believe the entry price is lakhs of rupees and fifty people on day one.
They have watched the funding theatre and concluded, reasonably, that this is what starting looks like — and that they cannot afford the ticket. So the thing stays a side project, or a paper, or nothing.
That belief is wrong, and it is costing India more than any funding winter ever did.
And our best work dies in the building it was made in
The research is not missing. Walk into any serious university lab in this country and you will find work that is genuinely world-class — demonstrated, documented, sometimes patented.
And then it stops.
Not because it failed. Because the distance between a working result and a product someone can buy is enormous, and nothing in the system is designed to carry it across. The researcher is not supposed to be a manufacturer. Nobody is funded to do the unglamorous half. So it sits there, and the paper gets cited, and no one is employed by it.
Every part we need already exists
This is the part I keep coming back to, because it is the reason I am optimistic rather than bitter.
Look at what India already has, separately:
- Innovation, sitting in university laboratories, substantially complete.
- Angel investors with capital who genuinely want to back something solid, and who are tired of being pitched narratives.
- Operators who have scaled real businesses and know exactly where a company breaks at twenty people, and at two hundred.
- Advisors with decades of sector knowledge that cannot be acquired any faster than by living it.
- Problems — an effectively unlimited supply of real, expensive, unsolved operational problems in every sector you can name.
Each of those is strong. None of them is connected to the others.
We do not have a shortage of ingredients. We have a shortage of wiring.
The researcher never meets the operator. The angel never sees the lab. The advisor who knows exactly why that sector resists automation is never in the room when the product is being designed. And so each part stays individually excellent and collectively useless.
What business actually is
I think the confusion starts with a sentence everyone repeats: build a great product.
A great product is not the thing. I have seen beautiful products die, and ugly ones build durable companies, and the difference was never craft.
Business is about solving a problem that is worth solving — worth someone paying for, repeatedly, because the alternative costs them more. That is a much narrower set than the set of interesting problems, and identifying which is which is most of the work. A product is just the shape your answer happens to take.
And the second half, which I believe more strongly the longer I do this: business is collaboration for collective growth.
Not a slogan. A structural claim. In a sector that does not function yet, a second serious company is not your competitor — it is evidence to every customer and every bank that the category is real. The lab is not a vendor; it is a partner whose success has to be genuine or the collaboration dies. The angel is not an ATM. The advisor is not decoration.
The ecosystem I want to help build
One where a researcher with a working result can find an operator, an advisor and a first customer without needing fifty people and a crore to begin.
Where starting is cheap enough that the person with the genuine insight is not priced out before they try.
Where capital goes to problems worth solving rather than to decks, because the investors can finally see what they are buying.
Where the measure of a company is how long it lasts and how many people it carries, not what it sold for.
None of that requires inventing anything. It requires connecting things that already exist, and being willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of making those connections real.
That is the work. I would rather spend ten years on it than on a good exit.