How do you go from running tuberculosis programs in rural Bihar to studying at Oxford and eventually working with WHO Africa? There is no clean answer — and that is sort of the point.
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Build + Sell - 48 Episodes
Startup launches, fundraising, app development, event-building, product shipping, and the mess of making something real before the story gets polished. This is the lane for founders and builders who were still in the middle of it when they sat down. 48 episodes in the stack.
That's what Avi Pilcer actually shipped while most of us were still picking a domain name. He built an autonomous system called System Zero that does the heavy lifting for him.
Applied AI hiring can feel fake from the outside because the job market keeps asking for years of experience in tools that barely existed five minutes ago. Sowmya Podila, a senior data scientist at Target, walks through how Fortune 500 AI work actually gets staffed, what hiring teams look for, and how to build a story that sounds useful instead of buzzword-heavy.
Hari Prasad Renganathan got rejected from the H1B lottery three times. Most people in that situation spiral.
How To Crack Your First US AI PM Internship (With No Prior PM Experience, Purdue MEM POV) - w/ Aryan
Two weeks into my first semester in the U.S., I remember sitting at my desk refreshing LinkedIn like it was a slot machine. At some point you start asking yourself the obvious question: is this just how it works here… or am I doing it wrong?
Two years ago, I was lying in an ER bed, scared enough to get brutally honest with myself. And the thing that bothered me most was not some giant life philosophy.
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start a business from your laptop in Kolkata: the company setup is the easy part. It's the tax side that'll keep you up at night.
In the noise-saturated landscape of 2026, the barrier to entry for content has never been lower, but the barrier to trust has never been higher. Everyone has access to the same LLMs, the same prompts, and the same "perfect" prose.
Victor Varnado went from Hollywood writing rooms to building AI tools for neurodivergent people, and the path was not cute from the inside. This conversation gets into losing money, rebuilding after a rough first tech deal, and what it means to make AI useful for people who do not fit the default user story.
Shafkat Alam works with rag-picker children in Kolkata through Tiljala Shed, which means this conversation gets far past the glossy version of internet charity. We talk about MrBeast, poverty, education, and what actually changes when the camera leaves but the work still has to continue.
How do you build a community of 600,000 people who want to be alone? In this episode, we sit down with Amanda Black , the founder of The Female Traveler Network , to reveal how she turned a simple travel blog into a global empire and a safe haven for half a million women.
The leap from farming in India to building humanoids at 1X is not the kind of story people usually tell without sanding off the hard parts. This conversation keeps the rough edges intact and shows what it looks like when ambition is paired with actual follow-through instead of just a good LinkedIn post.
If you think running a nonprofit fundraising event is just about booking a venue, finding a caterer, and collecting auction items, you’re in for a rude awakening. The landscape has shifted beneath our feet.
"You need experience to get the job, but you need the job to get experience." It is the classic Product Management "Death Loop." If you are a doctor, a teacher, a marketer, or a salesperson, you are constantly told that you don't have the "technical DNA" to be a Product Manager. You are told to go get an MBA, learn to code, or start at the bottom of a support desk.
This episode is a goldmine for builders: my guest is VJ Swaminathan, a serial entrepreneur you probably already know from Pathfinders and Authentic Hustle. VJ does something rare on this show — he literally pops the hood on his AI recruiting product, , and walks us through the exact tool stack, architecture decisions, and development trade-offs that got him from idea to demo.
What does it take to create the largest gathering ever for skilled Indian immigrants in the United States? In this episode, we sit down with the visionary behind the Open Atlas Summit 2025 , a groundbreaking event designed to connect, empower, and celebrate the Indian professional diaspora in America.
Agentic AI isn’t just hype—it’s the future of how intelligent systems will work. In this episode, we dive deep with Meri, an engineer and educator at the forefront of this next-gen paradigm.
How does studying in Europe prepare you for launching one of the most innovative companies in a country as complex as India? In this dynamic episode, we sit down with Supra , a global strategy professional who helped expand Tesla into new markets , including India.
In this episode my guest is Subhabrata Debnath. Subho is a co-founder and CTO at Neuralgarage, whose proprietary solution VisualDub provides state-of-the-art LipSync using AI while maintaining exceptionally high visual fidelity.
Suchit is the founder of Crucible Institute, a business school that is seeking to completely revamp higher business education in India - by optimizing for practical skills needed for digital first businesses (which the world (including india of course) is currently seeing a boom of) instead of outdated theory taught by industry professionals and with a fee structure that's super unique.
Matt Williams built Approachable, an app for finding friends to explore your city with, at a moment when adult loneliness keeps getting worse. He talks about the build process, why he refused to hire US engineers for early-stage development, how he made $18K from a launch party, and what user behavior data taught him about social products in the real world.
Quitting a BCG job to fix broken news apps sounds dramatic until you sit with what actually pushed the decision. This episode is about the part people skip: the frustration, the tradeoffs, and the strange clarity that shows up when you stop pretending the old system is fine.
Is working for the Indian Government boring? The reality of building India's $350 Billion startup ecosystem is fast-paced, high-stakes, and surprisingly accessible.
How To Start (& Scale) A Podcast in 2025. This episode follows the first moves, tradeoffs, and lessons that show up before a story looks clean from the outside.
How To Cook & Eat Home-Cooked Meals To Lose Fat And/Or Build Muscle (Busy Bachelors POV) - w/ Gaurav
Does "healthy eating" mean boiled chicken, tasteless broccoli, and zero happiness? For most busy bachelors, the choice is usually binary: Order takeout and feel guilty, or try to cook "healthy" and end up eating cardboard.
Jasprit is a climate change advisor at GIZ and a master's degree holder from LSE in climate regulation and policy.
Most people talk about yoga like it is either wellness content or a neat philosophy deck. This conversation goes into the messier middle: what happens when a tradition gets flattened for the internet, how someone actually becomes a guru, and why criticism of Hinduism does not fit into the tidy little boxes people like.
How To Start An AI-based Company & Community opensphere.ai. This episode follows the first moves, tradeoffs, and lessons that show up before a story looks clean from the outside.
Arjun is an IT-professional turned singer/producer/songwriter known for his hit indie songs. Join us for an intimate journey through the life of a musician who traded corporate stability for artistic passion.
Emma is the creative director at The Idea Farm - which is a marketing consultancy with over 50 years of history that seeks to help businesses crack the code of digital marketing in today's privacy-first world.
Can you build a startup while you are still on an F-1 visa? Supreeth Reddy, co-founder of Serene AI, talks through the sleep-tech problem he chose, how he found mentors, what it took to raise support, and the legal and practical mess of building as an international student.
"Born to make art, forced to produce content." It’s the meme that haunts every creative in 2025. We all marvel at the beauty of a masterpiece, but when it comes to the business of art, most of us are clueless.
Product, project, and program manager roles get mashed together until the whole thing starts sounding like one vague career blob. This episode breaks that apart in plain English and gets into what matters if you want to get hired without pretending the title alone is the answer.
Tom is a co-founder at Omnia, which is a one stop-shop for deploying XR content at scale. Another way to think of Omnia is simply the YouTube for XR creators and walks us thru the specific problem Omnia solves, and showcases some stunning use-cases of Omnia that is currently used by realtors in Chicago.
Trishita is an award-winning playback singer and songwriter whose work has been featured on Netflix, HotStar and Zee5 among other notable places such as live events and concerts. Perhaps like most of you all out there, one of my longest-standing loves in life has been my love for music.
Known more commonly as Yudi J online, Pritesh has built and grown his youtube channel to over 280k subscribers - leveraging his knowhow and lived experience to share amazing insights on how to succeed in the US during and after getting your Masters degree . Yudi J shares the exact blueprint he followed to amass such a huge following - covering not just the highs but also the lows that are part of the journey but that not nearly enough creators talk about.
Everyone wants the clean answer for how to get into Meta, but the real path is usually a lot less tidy than the LinkedIn version. This one gets into the stuff that actually moves the needle: the technical bar, the moves that help you switch to better opportunities, and the kind of prep that does not collapse the second an interviewer asks a real question.
Grad school advice gets weird fast because everyone starts talking like they were born with a polished profile. Unnati breaks down the real work behind an Ivy League MEM admit: the GRE, the SOP, the letters, and the part where you stop trying to sound impressive and start sounding clear.
Most LinkedIn advice is written like the person giving it has never actually needed a job. This conversation goes after the habits that quietly cost you interviews and shows what recruiters notice when your profile is trying too hard in all the wrong places.
Soundarya is a founder at and the author of two books - Unshackled and Admitted. Today’s discussion is for anyone who wants to write and publish a non-fiction book today, although we do briefly touch on Soundarya’s next novel which falls into the realm of some fiction as well.
UI and UX advice gets mushy fast because people love talking about taste more than work. Tushar gets specific about the HCI route, what product design at Microsoft actually asks of you, and why good interface work is usually less about pretty screens and more about thinking clearly when the constraints get annoying.
In this episode my guest is Prateek Behera. Prateek is a co-founder at gradCapital, which provides funding for college students in india whose projects can change the world.
Sohan is a data visualization aficionado and loves effective story-telling using data. He’s also been Top Data Visualization Voice on LinkedIn on numerous occasions, spreading the knowledge and empowering others to excel at business analytics and data visualization.
Akshansh and Harshita are computer science engineering students at Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology. Perhaps more notably, they’re also actors and film-makers - having taught themselves how to make short films for their YouTube channel ( and the Film Society at KIIT.
Utpal is a co-founder at Digger, but perhaps more notably, a life-long cricket fanatic. He has played semi-professionally in India and continues to play club cricket in the UK as of May 2024, and has also co-founded The Cricket Revolution, which is a product for cricketers to leverage to get better at the sport.
In this episode, my guests are Ritwik and Kartik Khator. The twin brothers Ritwik and Kartik are the founders of Startup Indian , which is a company that offers research, analysis, and financial expertise services to startups and founders.
In this episode, my guest in this episode is Raghav Taparia . Raghav is a financial investment aficionado who has successfully built out robust systems for making strides towards his financial goals.
In this episode, my guest is Aditya Kothari. Aditya is a Senior Business Analyst at Capital One.