The eChai × VideoSDK Diwali party in Surat brought together a room full of founders who’ve spent years building through uncertainty. What began as a light evening, stories, laughter, and the usual updates, slowly turned into something else. People started talking about the moments that shaped them, not the ones they post about.

It felt like an oral history of the startup ecosystem in Surat. Founders from different stages and backgrounds, connected by the same vibe of losing, learning, and starting again.

When Chetan Kanani, co-founder of Alpino, began speaking, the room settled. He talked about the night Alpino’s warehouse caught fire in Surat. The speed of it, the shock, and how by morning, everything they had built was gone.

He said the hardest moment wasn’t the fire itself, but the silence after. Walking into the burnt space with his team and realizing there was no plan, no instruction manual for what came next. They just started again, cleaning the site, calling vendors, building piece by piece.

At one point, Chetan said, “It shouldn’t happen to anyone… but sometimes I feel like it should. Kabhi-kabhi aag lagni chahiye.”

The room went still. Nobody took it as a punchline. What he meant was clear, that sometimes, the only way to see what truly matters is when everything unnecessary burns away. The fire stripped Alpino down to its foundation. What survived wasn’t luck; it was intent.

For founders, those moments of collapse become quiet turning points. They don’t show up in headlines, but they change everything, how you hire, how you decide, how you think about growth. The comeback isn’t about proving resilience; it’s about rebuilding with a sharper sense of what’s worth keeping.

As the night went on, the lights reflected off the burnt-orange walls of the old Surat building. Conversations drifted back to product launches and ideas. But that one line stayed with everyone. Aag lagni chahiye. Said softly, meant deeply, a reminder that sometimes, what breaks you is the same thing that clears the way for what’s next.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C396-72omLb/?igsh=aWZ3NmxvdXFqczNp

Over the years, eChai has grown from a small group of founders in Ahmedabad to a global network connecting entrepreneurs across cities and time zones. We have active chapters in India, growing ones in Dubai and Singapore, and a thriving community in the Bay Area. Each city carries its own setup, but what makes eChai special everywhere is the same: founders helping founders, without pretense.

San Francisco wasn’t always one of our most active chapters. We had done a few meetups when someone from eChai was visiting from India, but the consistency wasn’t there yet. That changed when Khyati Brahmbhatt decided to take the lead.

In February 2025, when Khyati was visiting India, I invited her to one of our eChai meetups in Ahmedabad. It was a typical founder evening, lively, curious, full of conversations that carried on late into the night. During that chat, she asked, “Let me know if you plan to do anything in San Francisco.” I said, “We already do, but not as frequently as in other cities.” She smiled and said, “I can help you with anything that you need.” That simple offer was the start of everything that followed.

Living in the United States, Khyati understood the founder diaspora, people who had moved for opportunity but missed the sense of belonging that eChai represents. She started small. A few mixers. A dinner. A food-truck social. Then partnerships with Zoom HQ, San José State University, and Playground Studios. She also brought key restaurants like Rooh, Fitoor, and Ettan into the mix for founder dinners. Each gathering felt intentional. She treated every event like a product, observe what works, improve what doesn’t, and make sure people leave feeling connected.

That steady approach transformed eChai San Francisco into what it is today: a familiar home for founders traveling from India and a local community for those building in the Bay Area. It carries the same openness as our Indian chapters, but adapted to a global context. And now, Khyati is extending that blueprint across North America.

She builds communities the way great product and growth leaders build teams: with empathy, clarity, and the confidence that small iterations compound faster than grand gestures. You can see that thinking in everything she does, in how she listens to feedback after every event, how she notices what keeps founders coming back, and how she quietly improves the experience without making it look like a strategy. It’s about designing trust, one experience at a time, until people start to feel like they belong without being told they do.

As Khyati now lays out her plans for eChai North America, I’m excited to see what’s next, for her, for the founders she connects, and for this journey we’ve started together. If the past eight months are any indication, the best chapters of this story are still to come.

(Screenshot from Google Deepmind Youtube Channel)

In cities, power rarely announces itself. You can feel it in the way traffic lights favor certain routes, in how park benches are missing in some neighborhoods, or how some areas stay forever under construction while others get beautified every election cycle.

For years, I’ve thought of this as the invisible hand of urban planning, quiet, consistent, shaping lives without debate.

Now, that same invisible hand is moving into the digital space. Algorithms have become our new city planners. They decide who gets seen, who gets heard, and who gets forgotten. The question I keep asking is simple: who plans the algorithm, and who lives in its blind spots?

In the episode “The Ethics of AI Assistants” from Google DeepMind: The Podcast, Iason Gabriel, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, spoke about a future where “millions or billions of agents” could act on our behalf. He called it “a world quite different from the one we live in now.” When AI systems begin to make choices for us, much like city bureaucracies do, the consequences compound invisibly.

Gabriel also noted that these assistants will be “plugged into different kinds of tools that will allow them to take action in the world.” That is the moment when algorithms stop being reflections and start becoming actors, when a line of code can move resources, shape opportunity, or quietly deny it.

If algorithms are the new governance, then ethics must become the new activism.

Just as citizens once demanded transparency from municipalities, we now need to demand it from models.
Cities and systems both need public scrutiny; otherwise, progress becomes a gated colony.

https://youtu.be/aaZc-as-soA?si=ybTWv_mwdLluuppf

Arjun Kava has been building in video for nearly a decade, yet it has never really been about video itself. It has always been about presence, about the feeling of being seen and heard across distance. Each time the form evolved, the question stayed the same: how do you make digital connection feel alive?

Before founding VideoSDK, where he now serves as CEO, Arjun spent years inside the architecture of communication. As CTO at Zujo.co, he worked on social-video systems that let people interact through shared moments instead of static posts. Earlier, at Coruscate Solutions, he explored how performance, latency, and design could change how people experience one another online. Each chapter looked different, but the thread ran through all of them. What began as curiosity became continuity. The code changed. The intent never did.

Founders do not build companies; they build continuity. The ones who stay close to their question learn to see it from every angle. Doing your life’s work is not about chasing novelty. It is about refining one idea until it becomes part of who you are.

That kind of persistence rarely looks dramatic. It takes shape quietly, through small refinements and long attention. Over time, curiosity deepens into craft. The goal shifts from proving something to revealing something. The more you build, the more clearly you see what has been guiding you from the start.

Arjun’s journey shows what that looks like in practice. VideoSDK is not a new beginning but a continuation of a decade-long pursuit: turning moving images into shared experience. What once looked like a social app now powers classrooms, collaborations, and consultations where presence matters more than polish. Each layer of his work has made technology feel a little less mechanical and a little more human.

Doing your life’s work demands patience and conviction. It asks you to stay with one problem long enough to see its hidden dimensions. The tools evolve. The syntax changes. Yet the sentence remains the same. You grow with the idea until it starts to grow with you.

The reward of that persistence is quiet clarity, the moment you realize you have not been starting over at all. You have been writing one story in different dialects, learning to say the same thing more honestly each time. That is what it means to do your life’s work.

(Screenshot from Nikhil Kamath Youtube Channel)

Momentum is one of the most deceptive feelings in startup life. When it’s there, it convinces you that things are finally falling into place. The energy in the team, the attention from the outside world, the sense that progress is now inevitable. You start to believe that this is what success feels like. It isn’t. It’s just the high before the next adjustment.

Momentum doesn’t stay. It depends on too many things you can’t hold steady. Timing, team energy, customer mood, and market noise all shift. The smallest change can slow everything down. A person leaves, a launch misses its moment, or the excitement around your story wears off. The machine still runs, but the hum changes.

In WTF Is, the podcast hosted by Nikhil Kamath, a conversation with Nas Daily, Tanmay Bhat, Prajakta Koli, and Ranveer Allahbadia touched on this same idea. They were talking about creators, not startups, but the truth carried over easily. Nas said that no matter how good you are, there comes a point when you have reached everyone who could possibly like you. Tanmay added that even if the platform stays the same, the audience moves on. Every wave of attention eventually finds its level.

That is the quiet fragility of momentum. You don’t lose it all at once. It fades across ordinary weeks. Fewer replies, fewer sparks, fewer surprises. You try to bring it back by working harder, by making noise, by chasing motion. But momentum does not return by force. It comes back when the work, the story, and the people begin to align again.

The slower stretches show what the fast ones hide. They reveal which parts of your company truly hold together, who keeps believing when things get quieter, and what work still feels meaningful when no one is watching. These are the moments when founders learn to build from steadiness, not speed.

Momentum is never permanent. But the pause that follows is not failure. It is the space where clarity grows. You see what matters, what can be rebuilt, and what deserves your energy next. That is how motion begins again, slower but steadier, and often with more purpose than before.

https://youtu.be/JjDjDvNgkFo?si=ryBk49IZkCwE38rW