Dear Founder Self,

Keep the passion and the conviction when you start something of your own. That is the real differentiator - never feel like this needs validation, and is of lesser importance.

I had four founder calls this week, and by the end of them, I found myself struggling to remember which founder had said what. Different sectors, different cities, different products. Yet the conversations had a strangely familiar rhythm. The deck they presented was smooth, polished and complete. TAM looked very large - and surprisingly all decks had the same color coding and font.

A year ago, this would probably have impressed me. This week, it made me pause.

So I did something simple. I asked each founder the same question three different ways, partly out of curiosity and partly to test my own instinct. Two founders got better with every answer. The responses became more refined, more coherent and more polished each time.

The other two became slightly less polished. There were pauses. A few contradictions. One founder even changed her mind halfway through an answer and admitted that she was still figuring it out.

Oddly enough, I found myself trusting the latter more.

I have been thinking about those conversations ever since, because I suspect they capture something much larger about the moment we are living through.

When I started building LetsVenture in 2015, the very act of building a company meant something entirely different. We wrote product specs, hired engineers, waited through development cycles and spent months creating something that customers could finally engage with. We raised capital not merely to grow, but to buy ourselves time, because time was the one resource we never seemed to have enough of.

Founders beginning their journeys today inhabit a very different world. What took us months can now happen in weeks. Prototypes can be built over weekends. Customer feedback can be incorporated almost instantly. The barriers to experimentation have fallen in ways that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.

I do not say this with nostalgia. If these tools had existed when we started, I would have embraced them wholeheartedly. Most founders I know would have done exactly the same.

But as I watch this shift unfold, I find myself wondering whether we are beginning to confuse speed with conviction.

A few weeks back, Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel India had written something similar. He spoke about founders using AI to create beautifully polished pitch decks before they had fully worked through what they themselves believed. The phrase he used was “vibe-generating,” and it immediately resonated with me because it gave language to something I had already been observing.

The challenge is not that founders are using AI. The challenge arises when AI begins to write the story before the founder has lived enough of the journey to own that story.

After all, AI knows what a successful pitch generally looks like. It understands patterns. It can identify the language, the structure and the narratives that have worked before.

That answer still has to come from you.

Over the last year, I have written about the 5 Core C’s framework that shapes how I evaluate founders and companies. The complete framework is available on my Substack at The PitchRoom, but two of those dimensions feel especially relevant in an AI-first world: Clarity and Capability.

Clarity is not about eloquence. It is about understanding a problem so deeply that you can explain it simply and respond to difficult questions without hiding behind jargon or prepared narratives.

Capability is not about ambition alone. It is about demonstrating, through action, that you are already building, already learning and already earning the right to solve that problem.

Technology can help you communicate both of these more effectively. It cannot create them for you.

I often think about the months before LetsVenture became a company. For nearly nine months, there was nothing tangible to build. There were only conversations. Conversations with founders who struggled to access investors, and conversations with investors who struggled to discover opportunities they trusted.

Somewhere during those months, a single sentence became clear to me.

This was not a capital problem. It was an access problem.

Everything else followed from that conviction. The platform, the technology, the fundraising and the team all came later.

No tool could have compressed that journey because the work itself was deeply human. It required listening, observing and arriving at a belief that felt true enough to build an entire company around.

I increasingly see two kinds of founders in today’s world.

The Builder founder: There are developer-founders who possess both domain understanding and technical capability. For them, AI has changed the economics of building in extraordinary ways. They can move faster, experiment more freely and reach customers with remarkable efficiency.

The Domain Founder: Then there are domain experts who understand their customers intimately but still need teams to translate that understanding into products. AI helps them too, but not in the transformative way that headlines often suggest.

Neither approach is superior. They are simply different journeys.

Yet much of the current conversation around AI assumes that every founder is a developer armed with a laptop and a weekend project. Most founders I meet are not, and perhaps that is perfectly fine.

The deeper truth, at least from where I sit, is that the moat has always been people.

The founders I continue to believe in are rarely the ones with the most polished presentations or the most sophisticated technical stacks. They are the people who understand their customers with unusual depth, who adapt as technology changes around them, and who can explain with conviction why they are uniquely positioned to solve a particular problem.

Trust remains a human endeavour. Relationships remain a human endeavour.

The instinct that tells you something is not quite right in a room, long before the data confirms it, remains deeply human.

It cannot give you the conviction that customers will pay for what you are building. It cannot create the relationships that sustain a company over decades. It cannot write the one sentence that explains why your company deserves to exist.

That sentence still belongs entirely to you.

And so I find myself returning to those four founder calls.

The people I trusted most were not necessarily the ones with the perfect answers. They were the ones who paused, reflected and occasionally admitted that they were still learning. Perhaps that is what conviction looks like in practice. Not certainty, but ownership. Not polish, but depth.

The tools available to founders have changed dramatically.

So — what do you actually hand to AI?

I’ve been asking myself this all week, mostly because I keep meeting founders who are either afraid of AI or far too relaxed around it, and both postures miss the point. The question was never whether. It’s which parts. Here’s the honest breakdown, over coffee, if a founder asked me directly.

You can outsource:

• The first high-level research around your idea

• A quick prototype, built with the UI you actually want, fast enough to put in front of real users

• Getting that early user feedback

• Testing and optimizing, once you know what you’re testing for

You cannot outsource:

• Your own drive — why you, specifically, want to build this

• The conviction that your customer will actually pay you for this, and why

• The belief that this is the biggest problem worth solving, stated in your own words

• Interpersonal skills — the actual relationship with the people who need to trust you

• The instinct for knowing something is wrong in the room, before AI or any dashboard catches up to it

Or maybe I’m wrong about all of it. Social networking felt strange too, once. I remember people joining Snapchat mostly to test it out, half-amused that there was suddenly a place to talk to a dozen friends at the same time — nobody predicted what that would become. AI might open up behaviors in people that none of us have a name for yet. Time will tell.

More soon,

Shanti

I was at the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women event last week. There were 350 women entrepreneurs who had gone through a rigorous three-month programme from IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Lucknow. These are among the top educational institutions anyone could want an initiation into startups. It is almost like being baptised by fire.

The entire event had amazing energy. Women building across different sectors, at different stages of their startup journey, all brought together by a common desire to create something meaningful.

The event, in some way, shifted something for me. I realised how overrated funding conversations have become.

Is capital the enabler or the goal?

Capital is important. It plays a critical role in helping businesses stay competitive, scale when the market is ready, and experiment to find the right fit. Do not get me wrong. I understand that well, and I have seen the impact of what we have built at LetsVenture.

What is probably misplaced is how overrated it has become.

I have always maintained that capital is an enabler to the goal and not the goal itself. It is true about money too. If money becomes an enabler and helps create wider impact, it can become one of the most powerful instruments available to us.

Sadly, the narrative we have all created is around who has raised, from whom they have raised and how much. It has become a barometer of success.

Sitting in that room, I also knew one truth. Many founders struggle when fundraising becomes the goal itself. What if we acknowledged that building a good business is more valuable than fundraising? What if customer love mattered more than investor interest? What if we spent as much time celebrating sustainable businesses as we did for funding announcements?

Having been in the space, I know that fundraising comes with its own nuanced challenges. Sometimes, after raising capital, founders find themselves building for investors rather than building for the market.

Giving space for Founder conversations

One thing I have learnt as both a founder and investor, is that the best gift you can give founders is respect and attention when they present their pitch. I have always maintained with my team, and in my conversations, that founders deserve support because they are the ones facing the challenges of building every day.

It is easy to give advice. It is easy to offer perspectives without understanding the nuance of building. That is also why operators often make better investors. They are able to empathise with the journey because they have lived it themselves.

My own journey at LetsVenture

When I founded LetsVenture, I had a meeting with the CEO of a large bank in Mumbai, who was part of an angel network. The meeting lasted twenty minutes. Fifteen of those minutes were spent with him explaining to me why building an online marketplace for fundraising was a bad idea. The discussion was patronising all along the way, with complete disregard to my past experience and my own homework done before I launched the platform.

I was amused more than anything else. Perhaps because I grew up learning that being kind is sometimes more important than being right. That respecting ambition matters. That each one of us is on our own journey in life.

That does not mean I do not give feedback to founders. I do. But I try to do it respectfully, while letting them know that I am available if they need a sounding board.

That meeting has stayed with me as a reminder not to judge outcomes of things we may not fully understand.

I need validation. Is that really important?

The other reflection I had at the event was around validation.

As women founders, we often speak openly about self-doubt, about wondering whether we belong in certain rooms, about constantly proving ourselves and seeking validation.

Yet after one event, a male founder came up to me and said something interesting.

“Everything you say women founders face, I face too.”

And perhaps he was right. Maybe validation is not a women founder challenge. Maybe it is a founder challenge.

Some founders seek it through fundraising. Some through visibility. Some through networking. Some through being constantly busy.

The forms may differ, but the need is often the same.

Am I doing enough? Am I succeeding? Am I falling behind?

I have been fortunate to have an inner circle that is kind, generous and genuinely supportive of the work I do. Over the years, I have learnt to rely more on that than on external validation.

You will realise soon that no one has all the answers. Looking for constant validation often feels like giving away control to someone who is not you.

An important reminder here is that this journey is about resilience. Real resilience is becoming self-aware enough to stop measuring your worth every few weeks against someone else’s journey. It is learning to stay anchored while the world rewards noise.

Perhaps that is also why I no longer romanticise networking the way the startup ecosystem often does. I genuinely do not believe every room is important. I do not believe every dinner matters. I do not think relationships built entirely around utility sustain for very long.

Relationships that endure are built on meaningful conversations, generosity and trust, not on building a rolodex. That is my personal point of view. This may not represent others, but do I need validation again? :)

As I sat in that room with 350 founders, I found myself thinking about something very simple. Ten years from now, very few people will remember who raised what round. Very few people will remember the valuation. What they will remember are the businesses that solved real problems, created value and stayed the course.

I really wish we talked about that more often.

I wish we talked more about the beauty of entrepreneurship itself. About learning, fighting, adapting and staying in the game. And if things do not work out, that is okay too.

Because in the end, it is truly about the journey. Always.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Shanti

If there is one decision that will shape your journey more than almost anything else, it is this one—who you choose to build with.

Over time, I have come to realise that many startups do not fail because the market was not large enough or because capital was unavailable. A significant number of them struggle because of co-founder conflict. Not necessarily because something dramatic went wrong, but because alignment slowly breaks down. And when that happens, it is very difficult to recover.

When I started building, I knew one thing quite early. I did not want to do it alone. Not because I could not, but because I understood that I needed someone to think with, to challenge me, and to share the journey with. Building a company can get lonely, and having someone at the same level changes how you navigate that.

What I did not have was a clear plan for how to find that person.

Finding a co-founder without a plan

At that time, I was still validating the idea and meeting a wide range of people—investors, operators, anyone who was willing to spend time understanding what I was trying to build. Most of these conversations would end in a similar way, with someone asking how they could help. And almost every time, my answer was the same: I am looking for a co-founder.

I must have repeated this across dozens of conversations over several months. It was not a strategy as much as it was clarity. I knew what I needed, and I said it out loud consistently. That is eventually how I was introduced to my co-founder.

There is no perfect starting point

A lot of founders prefer to start with someone they already know well—a friend, a colleague, someone they are comfortable with. And that works in many cases. But I have also seen conflicts play out across all these patterns. Friends fall out, colleagues misalign, and even strong professional partnerships can struggle when the pressure of building sets in.

In many ways, a co-founder relationship is closer to a long-term partnership than a purely professional arrangement. Over time, both people evolve. Sometimes you grow in the same direction, and sometimes you do not. Those differences are not always visible in the beginning.

So what should you really look for?

The first thing is simple, but often underestimated. You should genuinely like the person. You will end up spending more time with your co-founder than with almost anyone else during the early years. If the relationship is purely functional, it becomes difficult to sustain over time.

During one of my conversations with Sanjiv Bhikchandani, Founder of Infoedge, he told me something that has stayed forever. This was around hiring and managing teams - व्यवहार पहले, व्यापार बाद में।

Attitude comes first. Then comes skill and business acumen.

Respect and complementarity

The second is respect. You have to believe that the other person brings something meaningful to the table—something you do not have. This is where complementarity becomes important. Good co-founders are not identical. They bring different strengths, think differently, and often approach problems from different angles. When that difference is understood and valued, it becomes a strength. When it is not, it becomes friction.

Alignment over time

Beyond this, there is a deeper layer that is harder to evaluate but equally important. Do both of you see the journey in a similar way? Are you aligned on what you are trying to build and how long you are willing to stay with it? Because over time, roles will evolve. One of you may take on the CEO role, which comes with more visibility. If there is underlying competitiveness or lack of clarity, it tends to surface at that stage.

The outcome may look similar from the outside. The experience of getting there is very different.

From the outside vs from within

When I look at this from an investor lens, the pattern is very clear. Over time, you begin to see how often outcomes are shaped not just by the idea, but by the people building it and how they work with each other. I wrote about this in detail in my earlier post, from an investor lens. Certainly worth revisiting.

But when you look at it from the founder’s side, it does not feel like a pattern. It feels personal. It is about conversations that do not happen, expectations that are not articulated, and small misalignments that grow over time.

In my own journey, I have been fortunate. Sanjay and I have stayed the course. But that has not happened by default. It has required effort, communication, and a willingness to work through differences when they arise.

If you are at this stage, it is worth taking the time to be deliberate about this decision. Be clear about what you need, say it out loud, and keep looking. And when you do find someone, spend time understanding not just how they think when things are going well, but how they respond when things are uncertain.

Because that is where the real test lies.

More soon,
Shanti

Resharing the Earlier post summary here

Finding the right startup idea is rarely a straight path. Most founders do not start with clarity—they arrive at it over time.

When I look back at how I started, it is quite different from the neat stories we tend to tell about companies. When I returned to India, I had no plans of starting up. I had already founded a startup, had worked at a large corporate and I was quite clear I wanted to work in the impact space. I wanted to do something meaningful, and that felt like the most direct path at the time.

But as often happens, what you set out to do and what you end up doing are not always the same thing. Destiny, luck and serendipity are real!

The first signal: a broken system

As I began spending time with nonprofits and trying to help them raise funds, I started noticing something that felt off. The process of fundraising itself felt broken. Not in a dramatic way, but in a very operational, everyday sense. It was inefficient, repetitive, and heavily dependent on individual conversations.

I found myself saying the same thing again and again to different people. The same story, the same context, the same explanation—just repeated across meetings. And I remember thinking: there has to be a better way to do this.

At that point, I was still thinking about this purely from the lens of nonprofits. I started reading more about fundraising models, and that is when I came across crowdfunding. It was still early in India, but globally there were some interesting developments.

During this time, I found Dan Marom, who had written extensively on crowdfunding and had just moved to Tel Aviv. I had cold reached out to him on LinkedIn, not expecting much. Dan had written two books on crowdfunding and the connect was fascinating.

But he responded.

We started speaking, initially out of mutual curiosity. He wanted to understand how crowdfunding might evolve in India, and I was trying to learn as much as I could from someone who had studied the space deeply.

Those conversations became important for another reason.

I realised something about myself early on—I did not have the discipline to sit alone with an idea and work on it in isolation for long periods of time. I needed conversation. I needed a sounding board. I needed some form of accountability.

So I did something quite simple.

I set up a weekly call with him.

It was a 30-minute call, once a week. Nothing elaborate. But I made a commitment that every week, I would show up with something to share—what I had read, who I had spoken to, what I had understood better.

In hindsight, that small structure made a big difference.

It is similar to what people say when you are trying to build any habit—whether it is getting fit or learning something new. You either find a partner, or you commit publicly, because it creates a certain discipline. You show up differently when you know you have to report progress to someone.

This was my version of that. Applied to startups.

Because of those calls, I started becoming more intentional about how I spent my time. I began putting together a loose plan. I started reaching out to people in the nonprofit ecosystem—organisations, donors, corporate CSR teams—trying to understand how fundraising actually worked from different sides.

And then, somewhere along the way, there was a small but important shift.

The shift from nonprofits to startups

A friend suggested, almost casually, “Why are you only looking at nonprofits? Why not look at startups as well?” It was a simple suggestion, but it stayed with me.

I had been a founder before. I understood that world more intuitively. So I decided to explore it.

Discovering the “real” problem

I started reaching out to founders. Not in a structured, highly planned way, but simply to have conversations. I must have spoken to around twenty founders in those early weeks. I would meet them, ask them questions, try to understand what was most difficult for them.

And almost everyone said the same thing : Capital.

If they had access to capital, they felt they could solve most of their other problems.

And more importantly, it was a gap I found myself wanting to understand better.

This entire process took time. It was not immediate clarity. It took me close to nine months of conversations, reading, and thinking before I felt confident that this was something I wanted to work on seriously. I was not in a hurry to startup.

But there was one signal that, in retrospect, mattered more than anything else.

It reminded me of something I have often heard people say—that they started a travel company because they loved to travel.

It is worth thinking about that early. But there is a nuance there.

What you enjoy at a small scale is not always what you will enjoy when it becomes work. When it involves process, repetition, and responsibility, the experience changes. Not everyone enjoys that version.

Because liking something occasionally is very different from committing to it fully. In my case, I was fortunate that the interest stayed.

And that is how it began. Not with a clear idea or a defined plan, but with a series of small observations, conversations, and shifts in direction.

So if you are expecting clarity at the beginning, you may be disappointed.

Most of the time, it looks like this instead—
a starting point,
a question that bothers you,
and a willingness to follow it a little longer than most people would.

More soon,
Shanti

Dear Founder Self,

Starting a startup looks easier today than it ever has. But building something that actually works is still hard.

In this note, I am sharing what I wish I had understood before becoming a founder—drawn from years of conversations with founders at different stages.

What has always struck me is that while there is no shortage of information available today, very little of it tells you what the journey actually feels like when you are in it. Most of it is either too polished or too prescriptive.

So I thought I would write a few things I wish I had known earlier—not as advice, but as a way to make sense of the journey from the inside.

I remember this phase very clearly.

Many people seek meaning through work, not just income, as explored in Man's Search for Meaning. This is one of my all time favorites.

Once wealth is created, we all at the core. crave for the meaning we can create. It usually begins with a certain restlessness. On paper, everything looks fine—your job, your team, the direction you are headed in. And yet, there is a part of you that keeps asking if you should be doing something of your own.

That question stays with you.

What has changed over time is the environment around that question.

Why more people are starting up today

Today, starting up feels far more accessible than it did earlier. You see people building everywhere. A friend has raised a round. Someone you follow has built a meaningful business with a very small team. Technology has reduced the friction to start, and in many ways, that is a good thing.

But it also creates a certain pressure. A feeling that you should be doing this too. That is not always a good enough reason.

The difference between starting and building

Because while it has become easier to start something, it has not become easier to build something that matters. The gap between a project and a company is still very real, even if it is less visible at the beginning.

Start with the problem, not the idea

So before you take that step, it is worth pausing for a bit longer than feels natural.

Not to overthink, but to understand what is actually pulling you towards this.

The first thing I would ask you to reflect on is the problem you want to work on.

Not the idea you have in mind, but the problem itself.

Understanding the problem: What is the person you are building for doing today, without your product? How are they solving it right now? And why has that solution continued to exist?

Most problems are not unsolved. They are simply being managed in ways that are “good enough.” That is what you are competing with.

If your product were to exist, would it change that behaviour meaningfully? Would it make something easier, faster, or more reliable in a way that they would notice—and come back to without being reminded? Would someone pay for it, without having to debate the benefits?

If that is not clear yet, it is possible that you are still at the stage of having an idea, not a problem. That distinction matters more than it seems.

Your personal connection to the problem

The second thing is more personal, and therefore a little harder to sit with.

Why do you want to work on this?

Not in a broad sense, but specifically—what is your connection to this problem? Have you experienced it, or spent enough time close to it to understand its nuances?

The founders who stay with a problem long enough to build something meaningful, usually have a certain closeness to it. It shows up in how they describe it, in the questions they ask, and in the patience they have when things do not work immediately.

If your answer is primarily that it is a large or growing market, it is worth pausing here.

Markets create opportunity, but they do not sustain effort.

Something more personal usually has to do that.

Will you still care in the long run?

The third thing is a question you can only partially answer now, but it is still worth attempting.

Will you still care about this nine months, nine years from today?

Because the experience of building will change. The initial excitement will settle. The conversations will reduce. There will be long stretches where progress feels slow, and moments where things you were certain about begin to feel less clear.

There will be a period where nothing seems to move. That part is rarely spoken about, but it is real.

And in that moment, what keeps you going is not excitement. It is a quieter kind of commitment to the problem itself.

If you feel that you will stay with it even then—not because it is working, but because it still feels worth solving—you are closer to being ready than most.

There is also something else that does not get discussed enough.

As a founder, you spend a lot of time in ambiguity. There will be phases where the data is incomplete, advice does not align, and the right answer is not obvious. Some people grow into this over time. Others find it draining.

It helps to know which one you are.

None of this is meant to make the decision harder. In some ways, starting has never been easier. The ecosystem is more supportive, the tools are better, and access to knowledge is far greater than before.

But staying with it is where the real work lies.

It will ask more of you than you expect—not just in effort, but in patience, resilience, and sometimes your sense of self. So the reason to begin has to be strong enough to carry you through that.

In the end, most founders do not start because the timing is perfect or the tools are available. They start because there is a problem they have come across that they cannot ignore anymore.

And they stay with it longer than most people would. That is usually enough.

More soon,
Shanti