I was speaking with Nadeem Jafri, the founder of Hearty Mart, about how businesses can shape communities, and he shared the story of Sathal, a small village near Dholka in Gujarat. For many years, most of Sathal’s youth would walk to Dholka GIDC, stand outside the factory gates, and hope to be picked for daily wage work. “Some would get a shift, others would return home with nothing. That uncertainty was a way of life,” Nadeem told me.

In 2016, Hearty Mart set up a spice factory in Dholka GIDC. Two of Nadeem’s partners were from Sathal, and when the time came to build the team, they looked first to their own village. “These were families we knew, people we had grown up with, and there was already a bond of trust,” he said.

That decision shaped the company in ways no one had imagined. “One boy who had worked at a printing unit became our production head. Another, who had some experience in accounts, joined finance. Slowly, as we created departments, we kept turning to Sathal, and the youth of the village stepped into those roles,” Nadeem recalled.

The link with Sathal, however, goes back even further. “Hearty Mart started in 2004, and our very first employee was from Sathal, along with my partners,” Nadeem said. Over two decades later, he sees the generational change. “Many of them studied in vernacular schools and left education halfway, but their children have studied in English medium schools. Some have gone on to B-Schools, some to Law schools in Ahmedabad, even pursuing their Masters now.”

The effect is visible both inside the factory and outside in the village. The same young men who once waited at the gates for daily wages are now running operations. Their children are aiming higher, stepping into careers and institutions their parents could not have imagined. “The village economy started improving, and with that came dignity,” Nadeem reflected.

He put it simply: “These young people were always capable. All they needed was a platform. We gave them an opportunity, but they are the ones who built something much bigger.”

In Sathal, a factory became more than work. It became stability, pride, and leadership. And it leaves us with a question worth asking everywhere: what happens when a factory stops being just work and starts becoming part of a village?

I still remember that phase of my career. At the time, I was working at Quess Corp Limited, handling everything in HR. My boss had encouraged me to attend events where I could sharpen my skills, so I began looking for sessions that would broaden my perspective. That is when I came across my first eChai event, a session on “How to Increase Sales by 10x” in Ahmedabad, with Pankaj Bhimani as the speaker.

That session gave me courage, but not enough to immediately start something of my own. I decided to spend more time in the corporate world, learning and expanding my role. While working in an executive search firm, I was managing critical mandates and CXO-level hiring. What changed for me was how I approached it. I started spending more time with founders, visiting their offices and production houses to see the environment firsthand. I wanted to understand how they were building their companies, what opportunities they were chasing, and why they needed senior leaders at that stage. It made me realize that CXO hiring was never just about filling a role, it was about connecting with a founder’s vision for growth.

Then COVID happened, and along with that, some personal instances slowed me down from taking the leap. I decided to continue my journey in corporates, spending time across Ahmedabad, Gurgaon, and Pune. Eventually, I returned to Ahmedabad and joined Cadila Pharmaceuticals, where I continued to strengthen my HR experience. Around the same time, I also began attending eChai events again. Listening to founders, hearing their journeys, and being part of those conversations gave me the final push to stop waiting for the perfect moment and to begin.

That is how I started my journey of building Hummingbird Consulting. The courage did not arrive all at once. It came slowly, one event, one conversation, one founder’s story at a time, until I was ready to take flight on my own.

(Screenshot from The Social Radars Youtube Channel)

In startups, pivots are not tweaks. They are the moments when everything built so far gets questioned, and the founder decides whether to keep going as is or to risk it all on a new path.

The Social Radars is a podcast hosted by Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator and author of Founders at Work, and Carolynn Levy, YC’s Chief Legal Officer,. In their Founder Mode series, they explore the choices that define a founder’s path.

On one of those episodes, Jake Heller, co-founder of Casetext, spoke about the weekend that changed everything for his company. After almost ten years of building AI tools for lawyers, he and his co-founder were given early access to a pre-release version of GPT-4. They stayed up the whole weekend testing it. “We had to pivot the business,” Jake said on The Social Radars, “change everything we were doing for the last nine and a half years.”

The conversation shows why that call mattered, how earlier models had failed lawyers with “plausible nonsense,” why GPT-4 felt like the missing piece, and how conviction turned into momentum. Within months, Casetext doubled nine years of revenue and was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million.

Jake also shared stories from much earlier: growing up in Sunnyvale, learning to code in the garage with his dad, watching him build one of the first internet companies in the ’90s. He spoke about trying to code software inside a big law firm only to be told the firm owned it, the push that forced him to leave and start Casetext. He remembered Sam Altman’s blunt YC feedback, “that’s not fast enough”, and why it was exactly what he needed to hear. He talked about testing GPT-3 and GPT-3.5, dismissing them as unusable, then seeing GPT-4 score in the 90th percentile on the bar exam. He recalled the split reaction inside his own team, how he went back into “founder mode,” coding again and experimenting with prompt engineering, and finally, how before the acquisition he printed out an Excel sheet showing what the payout would mean for each employee, a reminder of how decisions ripple across people’s lives.

You can watch the full Social Radars episode with Jake Heller here.

https://youtu.be/NcV_NSkXNsc?si=nYtTBgIXpsmphoJA

Some interesting segments from this Social Radars conversation:

> Growing up in Sunnyvale, coding with his dad instead of playing catch.
> His dad, a high-school dropout, building one of the first internet businesses in a garage.
> Building tools inside a big law firm, only to be told the firm owned them.
> Leaving law to start Casetext after that push.
> Sam Altman’s YC feedback: “that’s not fast enough.”
> GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 dismissed as “plausible nonsense.”
> GPT-4 suddenly scoring in the 90th percentile on the bar exam.
> A team divided, half excited, half tired of another pivot.
> Jake going back into founder mode, coding and hacking prompts before the term existed.
> Printing out an Excel sheet of payouts before the acquisition, realizing how life-changing it would be for long-time employees.

When you hear it in his words, it’s clear why this story sits in the Founder Mode series. The pivot didn’t just change Casetext’s roadmap. It changed the company’s pace, its people, and even the founder himself. That is what it looks like when a pivot truly changes everything.

https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1963945838285136226

I first met Kasish Yadav in Ahmedabad during one of our Founders Heritage Walks. She was in town for another program but decided to join in. As we walked through the old city lanes, she said, “I want to build something like this in my city.”

At the time, eChai Jaipur wasn’t very frequent. That walk planted a thought, and over the next few months Kasish began to shape it in her own way.

She started hosting panels, putting together founder meetups, and curating spaces where conversations could flow. Some gatherings were formal, with speakers and sessions. Others were dinners at her place, where strangers slowly became friends. Alongside what she was leading, she also joined other groups, women founder circles, local meetups, WhatsApp communities. Some days she was the host. Some days she was just another founder in the room.

That’s how you find your tribe. You don’t wait for it to appear. You show up. You host. You join. You add your energy wherever you can. Slowly, the circles stitch together, and the city that once felt unfamiliar begins to feel like home.

For Kasish, that’s what Jaipur became. Not just a place she moved to, but a place she belonged.

Radhika’s work begins with listening. Every part of what she does, the Elevate sessions that feel like conversations with a friend, the fortnightly check-ins in her relationship coaching, the confidential introductions on WhatsApp and Zoom, the sober curious parties where strangers meet without the crutch of alcohol, rests on how deeply she hears people. What starts as a short call often turns into a space where people share family pressures, past relationships, or the quiet loneliness of being misunderstood.

As a matchmaker, relationship coach, and social health advocate, her work is about creating spaces for meaningful connections, one-on-one, in small groups, and through personal introductions, where people feel safe to open up and build relationships that last. She often says, “I strongly believe that the quality of our questions defines the quality of our conversations which then defines the quality of our relationships and therefore life. Let's start with being kind and curious, asking good questions and truly listening.” That belief runs through everything she designs, from intimate conversations to larger gatherings.

Her business is built around this practice. The introductions matter because the stories behind them are understood. The coaching works because the check-ins reflect what people genuinely feel. The gatherings leave a mark because people sense they can be themselves without pretense.

It leaves behind questions that linger: In our rush to move fast, how often do we pause to listen? What shifts in our work when we treat listening as the center? And as founders, when was the last time we created space where someone could speak freely?