A Builder’s Pilgrimage
Gates, gravel, and grace on India’s startup road
I didn’t come to India for a tour.
I came for a build.
A founder I trust asked me to help plant a company here – a product with a simple, human promise: make people safer and their workdays quieter. I packed a notebook, booked a noisy red-eye, and told myself this was a business trip.
It wasn’t. It became a pilgrimage.
Pilgrimages don’t move in straight lines. They wind through temples and tea stalls, back alleys and big declarations. This one wound through co-working floors that smelled of coffee and ambition, incubator corridors that ran on “five minutes, sir,” and government offices where progress felt like a polite rumor. I kept walking, listening, and collecting little relics of truth.
The First Shrine: A Corridor of Waiting
My first meeting began in a hallway – outside an incubator director’s office with frosted glass and a calendar full of important. I stood, then sat, then paced. Phones lit up. Doors opened, closed, reopened. At minute forty, a young program manager slipped me a paper cup of chai and whispered, “Don’t give up, sir.” It was more benediction than advice.
When I finally walked in, the conversation split in two. For one, grace: thoughtful questions, real curiosity about the user we wanted to serve. On the other hand, theater: questions designed to prove we belonged, not to test whether the product did. The same venue held both postures.
Pilgrimage note #1: India has rooms that will lift you and rooms that will size you up. Learn which is which – quickly.
The River of Paper
Everyone told me the same thing with different sighs: there is money on the table, but the table is covered in paper. Grants, schemes, credits – good intentions wrapped in portals, affidavits, and “please prove you didn’t break a law we can’t quite name.” Company formation felt like a scavenger hunt: one wet signature, one digital signature, two offices, three declarations, four weeks, five follow-ups. And a varying list of documents we will need – including several that you will have a tough time acquiring.
It isn’t that rules are bad. It’s that the made-up friction taxes the builder’s soul. Each afternoon spent decoding a notice is an afternoon not spent with a user.
Pilgrimage note #2: The maze is real; pack patience. But also pack a map – people who’ve walked it before and are generous with directions.
The Pitch Bazaar
Every night there is a stage: pitches, selection panels, demo hours with lights bright enough to make you squirm. Competition is healthy. Shallow evaluation isn’t. I watched founders try to explain hard, lived problems to rooms skilled at valuation arithmetic but unsure how to assess: Who hurts? What changes if this works? What stays fixed when the market shakes?
Two private universities taught me a quiet lesson. One didn’t return calls. The other required a referral, promised a meeting, then ghosted. I don’t hold it against the people. I do question a system that rewards appearances over outcomes. A country of builders can’t keep auditioning for judges who’ve never built a thing or shipped a solution.
Pilgrimage note #3: Applause is not user impact or adoption. Choose to be in rooms that measure the right thing.
The Classroom That Trains for the Wrong Game
India is full of brilliance. I met designers who could make a banking app feel like kindness and data folks who could smell signal from a mile away. But too many classrooms still train for competition instead of creation. Educators and administrators strut around saying “Survival of the fittest” - our process finds the best. Students learn to win marks, win contests, win internships. Few are taught how to sit with a messy human problem and build until it stops hurting.
So talent arrives in the market with a reflex: “How much will you pay me? How fast can I leave?” That’s not greed; that’s survival in a system where switching velocity pays more than learning velocity. The result is predictable: teams and individuals optimize for resume building, not user value.
Pilgrimage note #4: If you want builders, reward ownership – not attendance, not perfect posture, not prize-winning pitches. Ownership.
Power Plays and Small Kindnesses
For every door that kept me waiting, a kind stranger cracked open a window. A security guard walked me across a sprawling campus so I wouldn’t miss a meeting. A department dean who had nothing to gain drew the entire regional and national ecosystem on a whiteboard – names, strengths, blind spots – and said, “Tell me who to introduce first.”
The power games were real: delayed responses, performative busyness, follow-up emails that went nowhere. But the acts of grace were real, too – fewer – and often more valuable. Grace is quieter than ego, but its impact is profound.
Pilgrimage note #5: Collect your helpers. Write their names down. Thank them twice.
What Builders Told Me (When the Room Emptied)
The honest conversations happened after the crowd left and the lights dimmed. Founders shared horror stories of compliance letters that assumed guilt first. Incubator teams confessed they were trapped between checklists and outcomes. Engineers admitted they were tired of switching jobs to grow, but couldn’t see another path.
And then someone would say the sentence I came here to hear: “We just want to build something that works and makes someone’s life a bit easier.” That’s the temple bell. That’s where pilgrimage becomes purpose.
What I Brought, What I Learned
I arrived with a framework and a bias for action. I left with a simpler creed:
Start with a name, not a persona. Sit with Meera at the reconciliation desk, not “Ops Manager Type A.” Build for her this week.
Ship the solution before the code. If they won’t let you do it manually, they won’t pay you to automate it.
One promise, one number. “Hours to resolve credit mismatch – down 60%.” If it isn’t impactful, your story isn’t either.
Make disagreement safe. Real talent is inconvenient. It asks “why” three times and saves you from yourself.
Play long-term games with long-term people. (Naval was right.) Rent-seekers sprint – often all the way out of your startup; builders endure.
I also learned this: The modern enterprise is a tech company - if not, it’s outsourced its future. Software is how you sense, decide, and deliver. Data is how you remember. Design is how you are understood. Security is how you keep promises. If you treat technology as support, you will keep renting conviction from consultants. Treat it as a core muscle, and your company will learn to carry its own weight.
A Gentle Word to the Gatekeepers
If you run an incubator, treat founders as the scarce resource. Respect their time the way you respect your own. Publish a rubric that rewards shipping, learning, and user love above theater – and live by it.
If you write policy, know that money helps, but lubrication transforms. One portal, one checklist, standard SLAs - stop asking builders to prove where they live to approve them for the next step in a 12-step company setup approval. Builders aren’t asking you to remove guardrails – just the gravel.
If you teach, teach the craft. Less “how to pitch,” more “how to interview, design, test, and iterate.” Let students earn trust by improving one person’s weekday. That’s how they’ll learn to improve a million.
Why I’m Still Optimistic
Because I watched the numbers bend when we listened.
Because I saw a small team in a tier-2 city (yeah, that’s what some of these amazing centers of energy are called) outrun a big brand with working code.
Because a tired operations lead smiled at a clunky prototype and said, “This… this saves me hours.”
Because curiosity still opens more doors than credentials when you show up humbly and follow through.
Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” On this pilgrimage, the why met its test: a what that worked, for someone specific, on a day that mattered.
So yes – there are gates, games, and gravel. And there are guides, givers, and good work worth doing. A pilgrimage doesn’t pretend the mountain is smaller. It shows you where to place your feet.
If you’re walking the same road, I’ll see you at the next tea stall – comparing notes, trading names, and measuring our progress every day of the week.
Enjoy your loved ones and the rest of your Sunday!
And thank you for spending some of it with me.
Warm regards,
Adi