eChai Ventures · Founder network and startup events across 25+ cities

yesterday's eChai Ventures Mumbai Startup Meet - September Edition turned into a crazy conversation with Zaiba Sarang, Uday Wagh and Shreyaan Daga.

Zaiba, co-founder of iThink Logistics that helps eCommerce brands ship their products smoothly and efficiently. Her story of being born into a lower middle class family and turning her life around while studying hard through scholarships, becoming a top ranking student and now running a company with 4 other co-founders that is on the way to do 150 crore ARR truly touched my heart.

Uday, founder of TwinSim AI that helps startup founders test markets before they enter the real one. He shared his story of building 3 UPI apps back when it was just the beginning. He shared how he paved his way through raising funds from outside of India and offering vendors as small as chat wala's a free sev puri to their customers if they downloaded their app. IKR! 🤷♂️ He got an exit and got back to building TwinSim AI.

Shreyaan, founder of oll.co who proudly dropped out and now teaching students robotics, ai, coding, entrepreneurship, financial literacy etc. the skills needed for a brighter future. He right away entered the B2B market and directly started tapping into schools. No B2C. No Meta Ads. Nothing! He's teaching about 50,000 students a day and his goal is to get to 1 billion students a day.

of course, there's always Q&A, I mean that's important right?!

this time we spent more time in the Q&A as it was a houseful. a lot of founders asked a lot of thoughtful questions and got real value from these veteran founders.

overall, it was a Saturday well spent.

always thankful to Jatin Chaudhary co-founder of eChai Ventures for consistently organising such meet-ups in Mumbai and such other cities across globe.

Every D2C consumer brand panel ends at the same question.

How do you start a D2C, how do you control Meta & Shipping spends, how do you build trust and retention.

Last night at GVFL, eChai Ventures ran the Ahmedabad edition of Building Consumer and D2C Brands. Riddhi Sharma, Mompreneur of BabyOrgano, Shweta Patel from @fashionfloorindia and me on the panel.

My answer has not changed in three years, Online makes you findable. But don't stop your business on one channel.

A D2C brand can buy its first 10,000 customers. Almost nobody buys their next 100,000 the same way. At some point the CAC stops making sense and you need to deep-dive what channels work, who is you real customer, why are they buying and what's their feedback on your product.

Riddhi spoke about building trust which took her 5 years, Shweta spoke about building an initial group of power user/community to kick start the business, although Dermatouch did all of that with our product efficacy, results and without having to do what both of them did, key takeaway here is that not all business models are similar.

Find the one which suits your customers the most, and double down.

What I keep noticing about folks in echai Ahmedabad rooms is that nobody has a mask. People ask what they actually want to know.

Thanks Jatin Chaudhary for putting founders in a room and getting out of the way. -:)

🎬 And finally… OUR STORY is out there!

Parenting was never meant to be a one-person job. ❤️

It takes two to raise a child, two perspectives, countless little moments, and a whole lot of love.

Our new brand film celebrates the beautiful, messy, real journey of co-parenting, where both parents show up, learn, grow, and raise a little human together.

Because when parents grow together, children grow better.
Watch our brand film and tell us what does co-parenting mean to you?

For generations, the default point of contact in an Indian household for anything child-related has always been the mother.

Even as women stepped into leadership roles and returned to full-time careers, the mental load of caregiving rarely shifted. "Didi" or "Mummy" remained the primary answer to every daily question.

At BabyOrgano, we wanted to capture a quiet shift happening across modern Indian homes.

Parenting today isn't about grand gestures or flawless routines. It's about two individuals figuring it out together, one bath, one missed call, and one warm bottle at a time.

Our new brand film explores this honest, gentle reality. Because in this new era of parenting, care isn't just a mother's job. It's a shared promise.
We are proud to stand alongside modern parents as their trusted partner in Ayurvedic baby care.

Watch the full film below and let us know your thoughts.

Have I ever been to a startup event?
Nope, this was my first. 😅

And what started as “let’s see what this is about” turned into full of interesting ideas, great conversations, and a lot of new connections. 🚀

I attended the eChai Ventures Startup Open House in Hyderabad, hosted at DraperU India (formerly Draper Startup House Hyderabad), and it was honestly a great experience.

Being in a room full of founders, builders, and people working on different ideas gave me a completely different perspective on the startup ecosystem.

There were some really interesting startup pitches, and I loved hearing people talk about what they’re building, the problems they’re trying to solve, and their vision for the future.

One of the highlights was having four teams representing Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Vizag, discussing their communities, what they bring to the table, and how they can help founders and the ecosystem grow.

And of course… things got a little competitive towards the end. 😂
Each team started defending why they were better than the others! 😅

But beyond the pitches and discussions, what I enjoyed the most was the people. I got to meet and connect with founders and individuals I probably wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise. 🤝

For a first startup event, I’d say it was a pretty good one to start with!

New ideas. New conversations. New connections. And definitely a lot to learn. 🚀

Looking forward to more such events and conversations! 🙌

Thanks to eChai Ventures and DraperU India (formerly Draper Startup House Hyderabad) for bringing everyone together!

Last Saturday, I attended an eChai Ventures session on GTM & Distribution for Startups, and I genuinely enjoyed this one.

What I liked most was that the session didn’t start with someone coming in and simply giving us their insights.

It started with us.
What are you building?
Where are you stuck?
What problem are you currently facing?

And then the conversation went from there.

The speakers shared what worked for them, what didn’t, mistakes they had made, and how they would approach some of the problems people in the room were facing.

And I think there’s a huge advantage in that.

Sometimes you can avoid a few mistakes simply because someone else was open enough to talk about theirs.

Manoj Adwani, who was hosting the session, kept adding his own experiences throughout the conversation. Even people in the room were sharing what they had tried and what they had learned.

So it never really felt like a one-way session. It felt more like a room full of people comparing notes on building businesses.

For me, especially at a stage where I’m building, experimenting and trying to understand as much as I can about business and the market, these are exactly the kind of rooms I want to be in more often.

You come with your own problems, hear how someone else dealt with theirs, question a few things you’re doing, and leave knowing a little more than you did before.

Definitely a Saturday well spent😁✨

Something happened at the DraperU India (formerly Draper Startup House Hyderabad) GTM session by eChai Ventures recently.

While discussing GTM alongside Sandeep, Farhan and Akshay, answering questions from founders in the room, I realised something..

I miss doing this.

Not talking about GTM.

Actually sitting with a business, understanding the product, questioning the positioning, figuring out who really needs it, finding the entry point and building the route to market.

It’s been a while since I worked on someone else’s GTM full-fledged.

The last few years have understandably been consumed by building Incubez.

But thanks to my co-founder and an incredible core team taking greater ownership of what we are building, I now have a little bandwidth to challenge myself again and I want to use some of it to stay connected to my roots.

So, I am opening myself up to personally work on a few GTM mandates with startups/brands.

And I come back to GTM with a very different arsenal today.

Building Incubez has given us exposure to 250+ startup & brand stories, a strong media Discovery engine and collaborations with 30+ ecosystem hubs.

So my GTM today doesn't necessarily end with strategy on a deck.

Where there is a fit, we could potentially activate media, distribution, ecosystem access, partnerships and market connections to help the strategy actually take off.

This isn't me starting another consulting business. :)

It’s me wanting to keep my GTM muscle alive, challenge myself with businesses outside my own, and hopefully create a few interesting outcomes along the way.

If your startup/brand is currently at a GTM inflection point, DM me.

I’m picking only a few to work on personally.

Spoke about GTM at eChai Ventures surat event today.

It was worth discussing, as even after a decade of GTM, it's still evolving, and one of the most fascinating things shared was IVP.

Thanks Akash Radadiya and Manoj Adwani for giving me the chance to share my learnings in GTM. It was a pleasure sharing my experience with the community.

Here's what we discussed:
🔹IVP (Initial Viewable Persona). In content marketing, don't create content just for your ICP. Create it for the IVP, the audience that sits in the same groups as your ICP. They are the ones who share your content with your ICP.
🔹Founders and executives should keep talking to users as a priority. What users tell you, no advisor can.
🔹When starting, go with a low-cost channel like outbound and DMs, rather than jumping straight into paid ads.
🔹Figure out the right messaging first, then scale the channel.
🔹Keep experimenting with different ICPs and user groups at the same time. You'll be surprised how well it can go.
🔹It's okay to give value to channel partners when they're bringing you the business. It can grow into a good channel over time.

Being omnipresent is a good thing. You should be found everywhere your customer is. Spend your money and effort there once you've found PMF. Pre-PMF, focus on one or two channels.

Glad to hear Sharib S., as he shared his experience and learnings. Nice meeting Sanket Kumar, Ravi Gandhi, and many others.

What do you think about GTM?

How do you pick the right consultant for your company?

Is it someone who speaks at your level? Someone who doesn’t hide behind jargon to impress, but takes the time to understand your business, your processes and, most importantly, your people?

In my 22+ years of entrepreneurship, I’ve worked with several coaches and consultants. Many brought expertise, but few were able to connect with my team or truly understand the ground realities of our business.

For me, a great consultant is not someone who sits on a pedestal and hands down ideas. It is someone who becomes a partner in the journey, who listens, participates, challenges, mentors and helps the team move forward.

Our team has been with us for over two decades. They are loyal, hardworking, grassroots employees who have built this business with us. The answer, therefore, isn’t to replace them. It is to equip them with the right technology, digital capabilities and confidence to evolve.

If we want to compete with the best, digitisation is no longer optional. We need to bring technology into our processes and use analytics to turn data into sharper business and market strategies.

When we discussed this with Shrijay Sheth and introduced him to our team, he immediately connected with them. He interacted as though he had known them for years. There was no jargon, just genuine curiosity, participation and an instinctive understanding of how to work with people.

We knew then that this was the kind of consultant we wanted alongside us: an expert who would partner us through our digital transformation, not simply advise us from the sidelines.

My mandate to Shrijay was simple:

“I have a team of Lagaan under Bhuven. Make them Team India under Dhoni.”

He picked up the challenge with a smile.

And today, Hire4Higher Consulting is an integral part of our think tank as we embark on this transformation journey.

The hardest part of GTM isn’t finding a channel.
It’s figuring out why someone should choose you in the first place.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak at eChai Ventures “GTM & Distribution for Startups” conversation in Bengaluru, alongside Vinamra Agrawal, with Penchala Tharun moderating.

What stayed with me wasn’t the stage, but the conversations that happened around it.

Being in a room full of founders brought up some of the most real questions around building and scaling a startup:

→ How do you find your first 10 customers?
→ When should you focus on distribution vs. building more product?
→ How do you know if your positioning is actually working?
→ Which channels are worth doubling down on?
→ How do you turn customer conversations into a repeatable GTM engine?

These are questions I find myself thinking about every day through my work at Immigram, where we help founders and businesses simplify international expansion, immigration and relocation.

And working with businesses looking to expand across markets has reinforced something for me:

Going global isn’t just about entering a new market. It’s about getting your positioning, audience and distribution right for that market.

Because ultimately,
A great product doesn’t automatically create distribution.

You need to understand who it is for, why they should care, where they are, and how you can consistently reach them.

That’s where GTM gets interesting.

A special thank you to Jatin Chaudhary for giving me this opportunity and creating a platform for such meaningful conversations. I’m genuinely grateful to be part of it. 🙌

Thank you, Tharun and Vinamra Agrawal for making the conversation so insightful and engaging.

And to everyone who showed up, asked questions, challenged ideas and stayed back for conversations - thank you. Those interactions were truly the highlight of the day.

Leaving with new perspectives, new connections, and even more excitement about GTM, Product Marketing and Growth.

A few moments from the day ↓

Why do successful people secretly fear losing?
I asked Phani Sama, Founder of RedBus, this question on my podcast and his answer has stayed with me all week.

Growing up in Telangana, moving to Hyderabad, stacking win after academic win, Phani built what he calls a "virtue cycle of winning." Every success fed his confidence, which fed the next success. It's the same cycle that eventually took him to BITS Pilani, into a bus-ticketing idea born out of pure frustration, and to a company that sold for 600+ crores.

But here's the part founders don't usually admit out loud:
"I realized that virtuous cycle of winning, that habit of winning, is a shackle. You don't want to get out of it. You fear losing. Even in an argument, right if you and I are talking, I don't want to lose."

The same habit that builds you becomes the habit that cages you. You stop admitting you're wrong. You stop changing your mind. You start protecting the streak instead of chasing the truth.

RedBus itself was born from exactly the kind of humility that habit tries to kill — Phani missed a bus on Diwali 2005, realized the "no seats" problem was really a "no visibility" problem, and instead of forcing bus operators to adopt his software, he simply asked them what they wanted. They said: sell more seats. So that's what RedBus did — two seats at a time, until they were managing half a bus.

Post-exit, he's built a very different kind of scoreboard: Kakati Sandbox, a nonprofit that's skilled rural youth to a 90%+ job placement rate on a 5-acre campus. And he's had to relearn, deliberately, how to lose, journaling his conversations, consciously letting arguments go, catching himself before he defends a position just to stay undefeated.

What made him is also what could have stopped him. That's the whole episode, in one sentence.

We go deep on the RedBus origin story, the pivot that actually built the company, his 3-phase framework for entrepreneurship (0→1, 1→10, 10→∞), and why he thinks Elon Musk and Mukesh Ambani have something rare that most successful people lose along the way.

What's a "winning habit" you've had to unlearn?

Can I ask for a better Saturday? ✨

Today was one of those days that reminded me why I genuinely love meeting new people, networking, and having conversations that go beyond the usual “What do you do?” 😄

The best part of today’s event was definitely the people I got to meet hearing their stories, understanding their journeys, exchanging ideas, and getting to know the person behind the profession.

And honestly, all I got to hear at the event was:

“Yeh toh puri Gen Z hai!” 😂

Well… I’ll happily take that! 😌✨

But the absolute highlight of the day was meeting Dr. Snehi S. Chopra someone whose presence truly stood out. Her beautiful smile, personality, communication skills, multi-talented nature, and, most importantly, her incredible art of understanding people genuinely amazed me.well,looking forward to many more meetins with you!

There are some people you meet for the first time, but the conversation feels so effortless that it feels like you’ve known them for much longer. This was definitely one of those meetings. ❤️

As someone who loves connecting with people, I believe the real value of events isn’t only in what happens on stage. It’s in the conversations happening around you — the stories you hear, the perspectives you discover, and the connections you make along the way.

And today gave me plenty of all three. ✨

And honestly, what made me even happier was seeing so many women confidently sharing their journeys, building their own lives, chasing their dreams, and creating their own stories. ✨❤️

It was genuinely inspiring to witness! 🫶🏻

A big thank you to eChai Ventures for hosting such a wonderful event and creating a space where people can come together, connect, share their stories, and build meaningful relationships.

Walking back with new connections, inspiring conversations, and definitely a few memories to smile about. 🫶🏻

Looking forward to more such meetings, more conversations, and more beautiful connections! 💫

Affirm CEO Max Levchin on the 2.5 second limit that has shaped card payments for 60 years, and how Apple and Google Pay worked around it:

"One of the things that's really amazing and subtle about Apple Pay and Google Pay and its interaction with the Visa and Mastercard networks is... Visa and Mastercard have a hard 2.5 second limit on interaction between the network, the issuing bank, and the merchant and the acquiring bank."

"And so the whole thing has to happen in 2.5 seconds, or the transaction gets retried or maybe just cancelled out, and really leaves very little room for any kind of clever innovation."

"Online you can play games. If you're doing e-commerce, you're like, well yes, we're gonna submit your card to Visa, but first we're gonna run some anti-fraud checks, and we're gonna do some other things to reduce liability. But offline, once your card is presented, 2.5 seconds, that's all you got."

"Google and Apple Pay have singularly time-shifted the whole thing by creating secure enclaves inside their chips and saying, 'I already know your card, I can do all kinds of things before I actually have to talk to Visa and Mastercard.'"

"And maybe the shocking thing is that Visa and Mastercard have not yet introduced some new standard saying, actually, it doesn't have to be 2.5 seconds at all. It could be 15 seconds while we go and get a bunch of issuers to bid on better credit quality terms for you, or any other type of innovation."

"But the sort of hard written rules of the Dee Hock era are more or less intact, and that's not 30 years, that's like more, you know, 60 years. And so I think that's probably a critical or more criticizing take on what happened."

@mlevchin

Privacy in India is moving from policy to infrastructure.

For years, businesses could treat privacy largely as documentation.

Write a policy. Maintain records. Review them periodically.

That is no longer enough.

Personal data now moves through CRMs, products, analytics tools, support systems, internal teams, and third-party vendors.

The harder questions are becoming operational:

What data do we hold? Why do we hold it? Where does it travel? Who can access it? And what actually happens across systems when someone withdraws consent or changes a preference?

That is the problem we are building Obedien to address.

Our thesis is simple:
"Privacy should become an operating layer of the business, not another compliance dashboard."

We are designing Obedien across two levels.

▫️For smaller businesses, privacy infrastructure should be accessible without enterprise complexity.
▫️For larger organisations, it needs deeper integrations, connectors, controls, workflows, and governance.

The principles remain the same. The infrastructure adapts to the complexity of the organisation.

I will focus on the regulatory architecture, business thesis, product thinking, and translating privacy requirements into real workflows.

My co-founder, Amish Trivedi, will lead the technology and engineering architecture.

My previous attempt at building a product taught me something I am carrying into this one:
You either succeed, or you learn.

The thinking behind Obedien became much sharper through conversations with Amish Trivedi and UV (Utpal Vaishnav). UV saw the opportunity early, challenged the thesis, and helped move it from an observation toward something buildable.

We know the difficult work is ahead.

We are not trying to build another compliance software company.

We want to help build the privacy infrastructure businesses will need for the next decade.

Starting from India.

The next era of privacy will be defined by systems, not paperwork.

That is where Obedien begins.

when life throws Clay at you, make it a club & turn it into a clay [club] surat.

to the GTMers of surat, a huge thanks for embraching this community. 🫶

this is thankspamming post, so bear(or bull!) with me.

first of all the reason of kickstart - Gaurav & Veeral. they acted as silent supporters, kinda batmen. the initial push that gave the initiative the nitro booster.

Super host Piyush for joining hands from day one even without meeting ever before. Nency for bringing all her youth energy & wisdom. Smit for being that calm vro!

our abvove & beyond volunteer (assistanto manager) Vijesh & Vraj Chaubal. super thanks to Unaish for helping us run the smoother operations in the first event.

to all the Surati participants who attended the events & making this place worth coming back to. to all the participants who traveled to surat to learn & share. 👾

to all the speakers Snehal, Mehul, Nishant, Varun, Neel & Sahil for sparing time for this infant community.

a HUGE thanks to everyone from clay education/community team because of whose direct/indirect support, we were able to keep doing this: Izzy, Siya, Yash, Munnawar, Owen & Shriya Nevatia.

'shat shat koti pranam' to all the venues who opened their space for us - Aureate Labs, Yanolja Cloud Solution, Wizcoder AI Labs & WebContrive | Shopify Plus Partner Agency

to local communities that gave us their unwavering support: Manoj - eChai Ventures & Gopal - Surat IT BDM Community

and, to all the clay communities across the world doing awesome things which we're not even remotely close to.

and sincere apologies at any given point of time, we were unable to meet your expectations. we'll keep getting better!

onwards & upwards! 🫡

p.s.: if i've missed on tagging you by any chance, feel free to self-tag in comments. 😜

Why did we name a two-year-old AI-native company, building the bridge between model reasoning and the reality of the web, @Tiny_Fish, a name more fitting for a sushi restaurant?

The web is an ocean, and it has whales. Large digital properties going headless, standing up MCP servers, engineering their way into every place an agent might look for them. They'll be fine, because money always finds a way.

But what about the tour guide in Florence who gives the best walking tour in the city and has never once thought about how her site is structured for a machine to read? Or the restaurant with the best bao in the neighborhood, still running a menu photo from three years ago? They're not behind because the work is worse. They may fall behind because nobody built the web with them in mind.

We've started to notice that the words scraping and crawling actually describe taking something from a place that didn't invite you in. Model builders have taken crawling to a level unimaginable a few years ago. But we also need a web that's open, one that lets everyone thrive. An industry that talks this way has already decided the web is adversarial by default with one side extracting, the other side losing. I don't think we don't HAVE to build inside that assumption. AI gives us the opportunity to build past it.

If we just use this moment to sell more data to model builders, that's good money. Yay capitalism, nothing wrong with it. But AI also gives us the opportunity to do something massively useful for humanity while still building a real company with real revenue and a purpose behind it.

The web we want is one where showing up for AI isn't something you have to be big enough to afford, where the tour guide and the enterprise get the same shot at being seen by the agents about to do a growing share of the world's browsing, booking, and buying.

Everyone loves watching the whales, a lot more than watching the anchovies. But pull the anchovies out of the ocean and the whole chain comes down with them. Maybe they were never the small part of the story.

That's the fish we named the company after. Not the one everyone already sees, but the one the entire ocean quietly depends on to live.

Sometimes, the best ideas don’t begin with a problem statement. They begin with an observation.

Today, at our usual eChai Ventures meet-up, a small group of founders and operators got together to do what we usually do - talk, brainstorm, question, and share what we are working on.

The table was full of interesting experiments.
Someone was building and launching a new website.
Someone was building their own AI Chief of Staff.
Someone was figuring out how to make better use of their LinkedIn network and extract meaningful connections from it.
Someone was building a product for internal use.

And then something happened that stayed with me. I was discussing performance marketing with Viraj Rajani from Digipple and Amish Trivedi from Upsquare - something I had been curious about and wanted to understand better. We were exchanging perspectives, challenging assumptions, and brainstorming.

And Jatin, who was observing the conversation, picked up something completely different. He saw a pattern.

He thought: if people in this community are constantly working on specific problems and looking for people who have already solved them, are solving them, or can help solve them, why not create a platform for the community around these very conversations?

And just like that, an observation started becoming an idea which, by the way, also went live before we wrapped up our conversation for the day :

#eChai_Founders_Date : A platform within the community where founders can connect around something they are actually working on - exchange context, find the right person, and create value for each other. Check it out here: https://echai.ventures/dates

That was perhaps my biggest takeaway from today. Innovation doesn't always mean inventing something nobody has thought of before. Sometimes, it is simply:

Observe → Connect the dots → Reframe the problem → Build a solution.

And this ability to look at an ordinary conversation and see a scalable opportunity is perhaps one of the most underrated traits of an #entrepreneurial_mindset. Keep observing. You never know which conversation might contain your next big thing.

Dwarkesh Patel's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.

Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.

“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.

“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)

“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.

Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.

Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.

For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_ai_isn_t_going_to_become_conscious.

For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/.

And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/conscious-artificial-intelligence-and-biological-naturalism/C9912A5BE9D806012E3C8B3AF612E39A. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)

Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.

One year ago, I walked into eChai Ventures as an audience member.

Today, I hosted one.

And the story in between is something I probably wouldn’t have planned myself.

About a year ago, my friend Lay Mankad introduced me to eChai Ventures.

We were going to our first-ever eChai Ventures event at GUSEC. Ironically, we were travelling in different vehicles that day — and on the way, he got into an accident.

Thankfully, nothing major happened.

We made it to the event. I experienced eChai as an audience member, met people, listened to conversations…

…and then completely forgot about it. 😭😂

Until a few days ago.

I posted that I was going to host my first-ever eChai event.

Lay Mankad replied:

“Remember this?”

And suddenly, I did.

Because one year later, at 20, I was standing on the other side of the room — hosting an eChai Ventures event myself.

Women Founders × AI — Ahmedabad.

For some, hosting a small community event might not sound like a big deal.

For me, it is.

I genuinely love being on stage. I love talking to people, asking questions, learning from different journeys and bringing people into a conversation.

And eChai Ventures is exactly the kind of place where I get to do that.

What I love about eChai Ventures is that it gives young founders like me something incredibly valuable:

a chance to participate before you feel “established enough” to participate.

You don’t need to have figured everything out.

You just need to show up, contribute, learn and keep building.

As someone building YuktiCare, this means a lot to me.

And getting to host this at GVFL made the first even more special.

Thank you, Jatin Chaudhary bhai, for building eChai Ventures into the community it is today — and for creating opportunities for young people like me to step up.

Thank you to GVFL for giving us the space for these conversations.

And thank you to everyone who showed up and made the room what it was. ❤️

One year ago, I walked into eChai Ventures as an audience member.

Today, I hosted one.

I wonder what the next year will look like. 🚀