Belief Is Not a Business Model

On founders, faith, and the clear arithmetic of why no one owes you a cheque for your dreams.

I. The Idea Fallacy

Every few days, someone slides into my inbox with a version of the same line:

“Hi Harnidh, I have an idea and I’m looking for funding.”

Sometimes it’s polite. Sometimes it’s confident. Sometimes it’s straight-up audacious, like “We’re building the next OpenAI for agriculture” kind of audacious. But the structure is always the same. A sentence that collapses three universes of work, building, proving, scaling, into one vague, desperate hope: funding.

And every single time, I feel the same cocktail of emotions: mild amusement, faint dread, and a pinch of existential fatigue. Because genuinely, I don’t think people are dumb. I think people have been sold a fantasy about how venture capital works.

They’ve watched too many startup montages. They’ve read one too many breathless “$3 million pre-seed for idea-stage founder” headlines and assumed that’s how this works.

It’s not.

The average founder in India still seems to believe that venture capitalists are in the business of funding potential. That we see a wild-eyed dreamer with a Notion doc and think, “Yes, this one. This is how I’ll make my LPs proud.” But venture doesn’t fund dreams. Venture funds proof.

It funds evidence that you can take an ambiguous problem, define it with clarity, and build something that works under pressure. It funds the ability to turn chaos into order. To wrestle an idea out of your head and into the world where it can actually be tested, broken, iterated, and rebuilt.

An idea isn’t proof. It’s the starting gun.

The first mistake young founders make is believing that having an idea is the hardest part.

Again, it’s not.

Ideas are the easiest, cheapest, most disposable currency in the ecosystem. Everyone has them. Cab drivers have them. Cousins have them. VCs have them (god help us). The scarcity isn’t ideas, it’s execution under constraint.

That’s what we’re actually betting on when we write a cheque.
Not originality. Not charisma. Not your deck aesthetic.
We’re betting that when things get hard (and they will get hard), you know how to make the next best decision faster than anyone else in the room.

That’s what “founder-market fit” really means. It’s not that you’ve had a spiritual calling about logistics or fintech or climate tech. It’s that you understand the problem so deeply, so intimately, that your solutions are faster, sharper, and more informed than the average outsider’s guesses.

So no, you don’t “need funding.”

You need proof that your idea works, that people want it, and that you can deliver it.

Because here’s the unspoken rule of venture:

Belief follows evidence. Not the other way around.

And if that sounds brutal, good. It should.

Because this is the non-glamorous, non-Inc42’d part of a founder’s journey: the months where you’re running experiments in the dark, bootstrapping, learning to make ₹1 feel like ₹10, and trying to make something real enough that someone else might finally care.

That’s what we fund.

Not the idea.
The proof that you’re capable of dragging it into existence.

II. What Venture Capital Actually Is (And Isn’t)

Listen, venture capital isn’t a cathedral.

It’s a spreadsheet.

It’s not a space where intellect and intuition collide to birth the next great innovation; it’s a structured system for managing uncertainty very badly papered over with Patagonia vests, jargon, and self-importance. The mythology around venture capital paints us as visionaries, patrons of genius, early believers.

The reality is duller, and far less flattering. We are, at best, liability managers.

We take money from people far richer than us (institutional investors, family offices, sovereign funds, endowments) and we make them a single, statistically sound promise: we will lose your money responsibly. That’s the game. That’s the whole game. We agree to lose often, lose intelligently, and occasionally win so spectacularly that the math forgives us. Our business model is built on the probability that one exceptional outlier will make up for the nineteen corpses scattered across the rest of the portfolio.

To make this palatable, we give it language. We wrap it in words like conviction and thesis, or macro tailwinds. We use phrases like “taking a bet on the future” when, really, what we mean is “we’re placing a hedge that this specific chaos will be slightly less ruinous than other chaos.” It sounds nobler than it is. Venture capital is not the art of seeing around corners; it’s the discipline of calculating how much disorder we can live with and still pretend it was foresight.

Every fund has its rituals of control.
The Monday morning pipeline calls.
The half-serious debates about “optionality.”
The spreadsheet cells with conditional formatting that glow red when your IRR dips below expectation.

Behind the glamour of demo days and founder dinners lies a thrumming, chronic anxiety. Because the truth is, nobody knows anything. Not the VCs, not the founders, not even the markets. Everyone is just trying to make the volatility look like a strategy.

A venture fund is, in essence, an anxiety machine. It converts chaos into story and sells that story as structure. When we write a cheque, we’re not validating brilliance; we’re buying time. Time for you to figure out if your experiment works, and time for us to figure out if our spreadsheet was right.

Now you know our dirty little secret: venture capital isn’t belief; it’s time arbitrage.

Founders often imagine that investors sit in some moral position above them, as if we can “see potential” others can’t. We don’t. What we have is pattern recognition honed by repetition. We learn to spot the familiar shapes of progress: the founder who executes faster than they can explain; the problem that’s too specific to be performative; the deck that hides precision under bad design.

When something in that pattern fits, we convince ourselves it’s conviction. And when it doesn’t, we call it “risk management.”

The myth of VC genius is just that, a myth. Most of us are not visionaries. We’re portfolio constructors with good social skills. We make PowerPoints that turn luck into logic. When something works, we claim insight. When it fails, we call it learning.

We aren’t the architects of innovation; we’re the auditors of it.
We arrive once someone has already proven something might work, and we scale it, not because we foresaw it, but because we can now hedge it.

So when someone says, “We believe in founders,” understand what that actually means. It means, “We believe you might fail less catastrophically than most.”

Belief is optional. Hedging is mandatory.

That’s why pre-product funding is so rare. Without data, traction, or history, you’re pure volatility. You’re a blank chart, a story with no back-tested evidence. And for an industry that thrives on managing exposure, that’s too much chaos to hold.

Venture capital, at its core, is a system for turning unpredictability into an elaborate performance. The narrative of “early belief” makes it sound romantic. But behind that performance is a more prosaic truth: we’re not betting on genius, or purity of vision. We’re betting that, mathematically speaking, you might be the least ruinous option.

III. Who Actually Gets Pre-Product Funding (and Why You Probably Won’t)

There’s a kind of founder who walks into a room and instantly rearranges the air.
They don’t pitch. They don’t perform. They don’t even seem to ask for money.
They explain, not what they’re building, but how the world already behaves, and how their product is the only logical next step.

These are the rare few who get funded before they have a product. And inconveniently, it’s not because they’re charming, or lucky, or connected. It’s because they are the hedge.

Pre-product funding is the most misunderstood phenomenon in venture.

People read TechCrunch headlines “ex-Stripe founder raises $3 million on a napkin” and assume that the napkin is the point. It’s not. The person is the proof. The napkin is just, as we say in Hindi, sone pe suhaga (very terribly translated to the icing on the cake.)

When investors fund someone pre-product, they’re not betting on the idea.

They’re betting on a track record of certainty under chaos. The founder has already demonstrated a pattern of turning ambiguity into outcomes. Maybe they took a company from 0→1. Maybe they shipped something complex in an impossible environment. Maybe they’ve spent a decade in the trenches of an industry so esoteric that only five people on earth truly understand it.

That kind of proximity, of having lived a problem so deeply that the edges of it have scarred you, is what makes investors move. Because experience is a liability hedge. It reduces the number of ways you can fail.

Every fund has its shorthand for this kind of founder.

The repeat operator. The domain obsessive. The lab escapee. The “been-there-done-that-and-hated-it-enough-to-fix-it” archetype.

They are the people who make uncertainty feel almost responsible.
A researcher leaving IISc to spin out a new material for energy storage.
A product lead from Swiggy who’s obsessed with last-mile logistics and can talk in percentages of spoilage like most people talk about the weather.
A data scientist who’s spent ten years buried in some unglamorous corner of the BFSI system and has the scars (and spreadsheets) to prove it.

These are the people who get funded before there’s a prototype, a user, or a revenue model. Not because they asked. Because they’ve already proven they can turn loose threads into working machines.

The cheque is not for an idea. It’s a down payment on their pattern of excellence.

Now, contrast that with what most first-time founders think will work: the generic pitch deck filled with buzzwords, TAM calculations, and pastel gradients.

It’s earnest, sometimes even interesting. But it’s untested.
And untested means uninsured.

To a VC, that’s what you are until you’ve built something real: an uninsured asset.

It’s not personal. I promise.

Without a prior proof of execution, you are asking an industry built on managing volatility to take raw volatility as its product.

That’s not how this system is designed.

We are not patrons of potential; we are financiers of probability.

It’s tempting to moralize this. To call it unfair or elitist. And yes, in many ways, it is. The world does tilt toward those who’ve already had access to rooms where they could build, fail, or be visible. The repeat founders, the ex-FAANGs, the academic spin-outs, they’re all already inside the system.

But that’s precisely why it works the way it does.
Venture is not meritocratic. It’s riskocratic.
Money flows toward those who’ve proven they can minimize loss.

I call this the Funding Ouroboros: if you’ve never built before, you have to build something first to earn the right to be funded to build.

Which sounds circular, because it is.

So when you read about a “pre-product raise,” remember this: the pre-product part is misleading. The product may be unbuilt, but the founder is already overbuilt.

They have already spent years accumulating the credibility that now functions as collateral. They’re not getting funded because someone took a wild bet. They’re getting funded because someone finally found a way to quantify the unquantifiable: trust.

The idea is incidental. The person is the proof.

IV. Why Most Founders Misunderstand Risk

Every founder thinks they understand risk until they actually have to hold it.

In the abstract, risk feels like bravado. It looks like quitting your job, building in stealth, raising a friends-and-family round. It sounds like a podcast line: “I took the leap.” But real risk isn’t cinematic. It doesn’t have a Hans Zimmer soundtrack. There’s no camera following you. It’s boring, granular, and exhausting.

It’s not the leap that tests you, it’s the landing.

Hilariously, founders and VCs talk about “risk appetite” all the time, but they mean completely different things.

For founders, risk is emotional. It’s the uncertainty of whether they’re smart enough, capable enough, or simply lucky enough. It’s personal. Existential. It’s their name, reputation, and self-worth on the line.

For VCs, risk is arithmetic. It’s a spreadsheet variable, a percentage of expected loss we’ve learned to describe in the language of optimism. We reduce your uncertainty to a number, hedge it across twenty bets, and call that diversification. Your courage becomes our coefficient.

The gap between those two definitions of risk is where most early founders fall apart. They think funding is a validation of their emotional courage, when in reality, it’s a calculation of their statistical reliability.

That’s why so many “we just have an idea” founders misread the room. They walk in asking for belief, not realizing that the other side of the table is measuring probability. They think they’re selling a dream, when they’re actually selling an insurance policy.

You can almost map the archetypes of early-stage misunderstanding.

There’s the Romantic, usually brilliant, always in love with their idea. They talk about market potential the way poets talk about lost lovers. They quote Clayton Christensen. They think insight will protect them from entropy. It never does. The market doesn’t care how well you understand disruption if you can’t distribute your product.

Then there’s the Performer, the founder who’s consumed enough startup content to know exactly how to mimic conviction. They’ve read Zero to One twice, can recite Paul Graham essays verbatim, and know how to say “flywheel” in three different accents. They don’t lack ambition; they lack friction. They’ve never actually had to test how conviction behaves when it stops being theoretical.

The Operator is next. They come from corporate or consulting backgrounds and assume efficiency translates into creativity. They treat building like process management, not problem intimacy. Their decks are perfect. Their prototypes, sterile. They confuse control for clarity.

And then there’s my personal favourite: the Weekend Builder, the “I could code this in a week” guy. The ones who think the world just needs a few lines of Python and better UI. Their confidence is inversely proportional to their comprehension of human behaviour. They treat markets like math equations and are always shocked when people don’t act rationally.

These archetypes share one fatal flaw: they misunderstand the nature of uncertainty.

They believe that risk disappears when you have funding, when in reality, risk only compounds once money enters the equation. Because now, it’s not just your idea on the line, it’s other people’s patience and capital.

Money amplifies pressure; it doesn’t dissolve it.
Every rupee you raise is an implicit promise to convert imagination into arithmetic.
You are now accountable to a clock.

And that’s where most first-time founders crumble.
They wanted money to buy time, but what they’ve really bought is acceleration.
The market expects more, faster. Your investors expect updates. Your team expects direction. You start making decisions not from conviction, but from compression.

That’s the part of “risk” no one teaches you: that uncertainty isn’t the enemy. It’s the material.
You don’t eliminate it, you just learn to metabolize it. And if you don’t, the indigestion will kill you.

Experienced founders have a pervasive calm about them. They’ve been betrayed by randomness enough times to stop taking it personally. They no longer confuse chaos for failure; they see it as data. They understand that risk isn’t what you avoid. It’s what you learn to price correctly.

The truth is that founders who truly grasp risk stop talking about it altogether. They’re not the ones posting about “building in public” or “stepping out of comfort zones.” They’re too busy living inside that discomfort, calibrating, adjusting, iterating. They don’t need to brand their uncertainty as bravery. They know it’s just the cost of entry.

The more comfortable you get with chaos, the more fundable you become. And the more obsessed you are with being seen as brave, the less ready you probably are.

V. Ideas Are Overrated (and Why Originality Is Dead)

Every generation believes it is sitting on the edge of an original moment.

And every generation is wrong.

We talk about innovation as if it’s a form of divine revelation, as if newness itself were proof of value. But if you step back and look closely, almost nothing in our world is original in the way we like to imagine. Not products. Not politics. Not even the patterns of our rebellion.

Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, argued that liberal democracy might represent the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution, not because it was perfect, but because it exhausted the plausible alternatives. The idea was not that nothing would ever happen again, but that the horizon of human imagination had narrowed; we had entered the era of repetition and refinement.

In venture capital, we live in that horizon every day.
There are no new problems, only new distributions of attention.

When founders say, “I have an idea no one has ever thought of,” what they usually mean is, “I haven’t read enough history.” Every supposed innovation has a lineage.

Uber was not born out of thin air. It was the natural evolution of dispatch logistics and mobile payments. Airbnb was not a revolution in hospitality; it was a recombination of trust, scarcity, and the internet’s newfound capacity for reputation. OpenAI didn’t invent artificial intelligence; it industrialized the energy consumption required to make it legible to ordinary people.

Hannah Arendt called this the “banality of novelty.” The idea that in modernity, the new is rarely new, it’s simply the rearrangement of the familiar into a more tolerable form. We don’t create ex nihilo; we remix reality until it feels fresh.

The sociologist Everett Rogers formalized this in Diffusion of Innovations (1962): adoption curves follow predictably because innovation itself is predictable. Each “new” thing is a re-expression of an old desire: speed, convenience, safety, belonging, recognition. The technology changes, but the appetite doesn’t.

So why do we still fetishize the idea?

Because we’ve mistaken creativity for originality, and novelty for depth.

Slavoj Žižek once said that capitalism’s greatest trick was to make rebellion feel like participation. That line could describe half the startup ecosystem. Founders imagine themselves as disruptors, when in fact, they are often reinforcing the same power structures: faster, glossier, more efficiently monetized.

The “idea” becomes a performative rebellion against stagnation, even when it’s fully compatible with the system it claims to challenge. The disruption myth survives because it flatters both parties: the founder gets to feel visionary; the investor gets to feel early.

Jean Baudrillard would have called this the simulacrum of innovation; copies with no original. A startup becomes a hyperreal performance of progress: language without referent, iteration without transformation. We raise money on the illusion of newness, and then use that money to slightly rearrange old things.

To a philosopher, this is tragedy.
To a VC, it’s risk management.

We don’t need originality to make money. We need momentum.
And momentum is the only form of novelty that the market still rewards.

Joseph Schumpeter, in his theory of “creative destruction,” argued that capitalism advances not through creation alone but through the systematic dismantling of what came before. The startup world, in its own twisted way, has industrialized that process. We no longer destroy to create; we iterate to survive. Each startup is an echo of another, slightly cheaper, slightly faster, slightly more algorithmically optimized.

The founder calls it vision.
The investor calls it traction.
The historian, if we had the courage to ask them, would probably call it recurrence.

The death of originality doesn’t mean the death of imagination. It means that imagination must now operate inside narrower margins, not to conjure the never-before-seen, but to reconfigure the already-known in ways that feel meaningful again.

This is why the best founders I know aren’t obsessed with being first; they’re obsessed with being right. They don’t waste time trying to be unique. They’re trying to be inevitable.

When we say, “There are no new ideas,” what we really mean is: the frontier has shifted.
The work now is not invention but synthesis. Not vision, but pattern recognition.
And that’s not cynicism. That’s realism.

So when a founder tells me, “I have an idea,” I sometimes want to ask: “Which century?” Because every idea is a palimpsest of layers of past attempts, forgotten failures, and cultural debris, rewritten until it feels like revelation again.

The question isn’t whether it’s original or unique or ‘first-of-its-kind;. The question is whether you can will it into coherence.

Because that, and not novelty, is what venture capital ultimately rewards: the ability to turn the inevitable into the obvious, and the obvious into the unavoidable.

VI. The Icy Math of Venture: Funding as a Liability Exchange

Every cheque is a transaction between two forms of fear.
The founder fears obscurity. The investor fears regret.
The money sits somewhere between the two, pretending to be belief.

That’s the icy truth of funding. It’s not romance, it’s arithmetic. I say this as a hapless romantic. It’s not “I believe in you.” It’s “I’m willing to exchange this risk for that one.”

Venture capital isn’t a reward for potential. It’s a liability swap. You, the founder, take our money and our expectations. We, the investor, take your uncertainty and repackage it as optionality. Both sides pretend this is a partnership; in reality, it’s a carefully priced anxiety trade.

Founders like to think raising money is about being chosen. But if you look closely, the power dynamic is more mercenary. The investor is buying something very specific: a hedge. Not against the market, not against the product, but against the total randomness of the world.

That hedge might come in the form of:

• Your reputation as someone who has built before.

• Your expertise in a space so complex that outsiders can’t easily compete.

• Your network, your clarity, your execution speed.

Those are all instruments of reduction, ways to shrink the surface area of uncertainty.

Every fund, no matter how poetic its pitch deck, is ultimately measured in the same dull ratios: IRR, DPI, MOIC. Our success is not whether you “changed the world,” but whether the numbers we projected to our LPs become reality.

And those numbers, ironically, have nothing to do with imagination. They are a product of probability, liquidity, and timing; all the things most founders have no control over.

This is why the mythology of “smart money” is a little funny if you’ve ever been inside the room.
There is no smart money. There’s only money that’s slightly better at storytelling.

What we call “conviction” is often pattern-matching: a way to assign shape to uncertainty so we can feel less foolish about being in an inherently foolish business. We’re not backing innovation; we’re backing execution that looks defensible.

That’s what “fundability” really means.

It means: can this person carry my anxiety for the next ten years and make it look like progress?

Every deal memo has two halves: a story for the investment committee and a story for the soul. The committee version talks about market size, moat, timing, and valuation discipline. The soul version whispers: please, let this not be the one that ruins the fund.

That’s the emotional architecture of venture. We rationalize risk through spreadsheets, but what we’re really doing is narrating our fear in Excel.

Because make no mistake: venture capital is institutionalized fear. It’s the monetization of doubt.

VII. Why “Belief” Is Not a Substitute for Proof

There’s a sentence I hear from early founders that always makes me pause:

“I just need someone to believe in me.”

It’s sincere, sometimes even moving. But it’s also the most dangerous misunderstanding in this entire ecosystem.

Belief, in the venture sense, is not faith.

It’s not the leap Kierkegaard wrote about the teleological suspension of the ethical, the idea that faith is irrational and noble precisely because it transcends proof.

Venture capital has no such poetry in it. We don’t suspend disbelief. We price it.

When a founder asks for belief, what they’re really asking for is mercy. They want someone to substitute trust for data, conviction for evidence. But the market is merciless. It doesn’t reward mercy; it rewards repeatability.

We don’t believe in founders because they ask us to. We believe in founders because they’ve already shown us that belief would be rational.

William James wrote that “belief creates its own verification.” The act of believing, he argued, changes the believer and the believed into a new reality. It’s a beautiful thought, but it belongs to the domain of human intimacy, not capital allocation.

In venture, belief doesn’t create verification; verification creates belief.
The arrow runs in reverse. Because here, belief is a liability marketed as a gift. It costs us time, money, and reputation.

So we hedge it with proof.

There’s something almost theological about how we misuse the language of faith in business. Founders talk about “true believers,” “evangelists,” “disciples of the mission.”

It sounds spiritual, but it’s actually transactional.

What they’re really building isn’t faith, it’s evidence of faith. Metrics, usage, retention, testimonials. Proof that people care enough to stay.

Annette Baier wrote that trust is not optimism. It’s accepted vulnerability. It’s the willingness to be harmed because you believe the other will not harm you. In venture, belief without proof is simply unearned vulnerability, and unearned vulnerability, in markets, is malpractice.

The romantic image of the “believer investor” persists because it flatters everyone involved.
The founder gets to feel chosen.
The investor gets to feel visionary.
And when it all collapses, both get to say the same thing: “At least we believed.”

But that’s not belief. That’s projection.
Belief, in its truest sense, is not emotional. it’s empirical.
It’s the act of noticing consistency and saying, “Yes, this pattern is real.”

Think about the people who do get funded on belief alone: the scientist leaving a lab, the ex-founder with a billion-dollar exit, the operator who’s already built a system that works. We call it “early conviction,” but it’s really accumulated evidence. It’s the residue of prior proof.

When they walk into a room, belief is no longer a favour; it’s a reflex.
Their credibility does the talking. Their track record functions as data.
They’ve already earned what newer founders still think they can ask for.

The most humbling part of venture is realizing that “being believed in” is not a right, it’s a lagging indicator.

By the time people start believing, you’ve already proven enough to make belief feel inevitable.

Belief isn’t what gets you funded. Belief is what arrives after you’ve stopped needing it.

This is what people cannot stomach: that belief and proof are not opposing forces. They’re the same motion seen from two angles, one emotional, one temporal.

You begin with obsession, endure through ambiguity, and produce something undeniable.
At some point, the proof becomes so visible that belief feels natural.
That’s when the cheques arrive. Not before.

So if you find yourself thinking, “I just need someone to believe in me,” stop.
You don’t.
You need to believe in yourself long enough to produce the proof that makes others irrelevant.

Because you cannot borrow conviction. You just have to build it.

From the founder’s perspective, this dynamic often feels like betrayal. They think they’ve found believers. What they’ve actually found are risk managers. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just a different religion.

When an investor says, “We believe in you,” what they mean is: “We believe that you can convert this capital into data points that will make our next fundraising cycle easier.” That’s not cynicism; that’s the structure.

The investor’s real customer is not the founder, it’s the Limited Partner.
The founder is the instrument through which the investor manufactures returns.
The LP is the one who buys the story.

So when you raise capital, remember: you are not being “funded.”
You are being underwritten.

And the underwriting isn’t about your idea, it’s about your ability to handle entropy.

Capital doesn’t dissolve risk. It transfers it from the investor’s books to yours. From the spreadsheet to the sleepless nights. That’s the true cost of venture, not the dilution, not the board seats, not the pressure to scale. It’s the moment, months later, when you realize: you no longer own your risk; you lease it.

Funding, at its purest, is the art of risk transference.
You turn uncertainty into narrative. We turn narrative into numbers.
And then both sides pray to the same indifferent god: time.

VIII. What You Can Do Instead

If you’ve read this far and felt defensive, good. That’s the right reaction.
It means you care enough to take this personally. But once the ego burn fades, the real question is: what do you do instead?

Because you can’t fund your way into conviction. You have to build your way into credibility.

1. Build small. Build fast. Build ugly.

The first act of proof isn’t beauty. It’s movement.

Every founder fantasizes about the elegant version: the polished pitch, the perfect prototype, the glowing first user testimonial. But the earliest proof is always wonky, duct-taped, and embarrassing.

A proof of concept is not a mini version of your product. It’s a stress test of your assumption.
The moment you build something tangible, a working prototype, a user flow, a no-code demo, even a spreadsheet simulation, you stop being an “idea person.” You become a participant in reality.

That shift matters more than any investor conversation. Because now, you’re not selling belief; you’re showing evidence.

2. Find ten people who would miss you if you disappeared.

Don’t aim for virality. Aim for indispensability.
Start with a small circle of users, peers, or collaborators who need what you’re building. If ten people would be upset if your product shut down tomorrow, you’ve already proven something that most idea-stage founders never do: you matter to someone other than yourself.

Marc Andreessen once said that “product–market fit feels like the market is pulling the product out of your hands.”
But before that happens, you have to create micro-fit: ten humans who prove the idea isn’t a hallucination. That’s the beginning of traction.

3. Earn believers before you seek investors.

There’s a reason the best early-stage founders have cult followings long before their first fundraise. They’ve built conviction ecosystems: small networks of collaborators, early adopters, and advocates who see what they see.

These believers don’t have to be famous. They just have to be real.
A designer who volunteers to build a landing page because they love the idea.
A friend who keeps sending you users.
A stranger who DMs you that your product solved a problem they didn’t know they could articulate.

That’s belief earned, not requested. And it compounds.

4. Document your obsession.

Proof isn’t just in what you build; it’s in how visibly you’re building it.
Show your work: your research, your failed experiments, your progress logs. Publish learnings. Talk to users. Share insights.

Not because you need an audience, but because visibility creates accountability which the invisible fuel of early-stage momentum.

You’re not showing off; you’re showing stamina.
In a world where everyone claims to be building, the mere act of consistently proving that you are building becomes a differentiator.

5. Know your numbers, even when they’re small.

A founder who can say, “We’ve tested with 26 users, 19 of whom returned within 48 hours,” sounds infinitely more fundable than someone who says, “We’re seeing early excitement.”

The difference is precision.
Numbers show that you’ve begun to the map chaos.
Even if the numbers are unimpressive, they give shape to uncertainty, and shape is the beginning of trust.

In behavioural economics, Kahneman calls this “anchoring bias.” The human brain needs reference points. If you don’t define your own metrics, investors will make up their own, and you will always lose that game.

So: measure something. Anything. Then measure it again next week.

6. Stop talking about rounds. Start talking about runways of proof.

The obsession with “raising a round” is one of the most pernicious cultural distortions in the startup ecosystem. It turns capital into theatre.

Instead, think in runways of proof:

• Proof of problem: Have you found people who feel pain sharply enough to pay?

• Proof of pull: Can you get them to come back?

• Proof of process: Can you deliver consistently?

Each of these stages deserves its own experiment, and often its own tiny budget. You don’t need ₹10 crores to find out if ten people care. You need time, clarity, and a Google From.

Money is not the beginning of the journey; it’s an accelerant for one that’s already in motion.

7. Treat scarcity as design.

Constraint is not the enemy; it’s the forge.

When you have less, you think more clearly. You prioritize. You test faster. You listen harder.

The founders who complain about lack of capital often reveal what they really lack: discipline.

Great companies are rarely born out of abundance. They are born out of necessity.
Scarcity forces taste. It teaches you what matters, and what doesn’t.

The early-stage grind needs to be reframed as calibration, not punishment. And the founders who learn to treat constraint as creative oxygen are the ones who eventually make abundance look effortless.

8. Be less secretive, more specific.

There’s a special kind of paranoia that infects early founders: the fear of being “copied.” But the truth is, no one is waiting to steal your idea. Everyone is too busy trying to make their own work.

You gain nothing from hoarding thoughts. You gain everything from testing them publicly.
When you articulate clearly, you attract collaborators who can sharpen your thinking.
When you stay vague, you attract confusion.

Specificity is both your shield and your signal.

9. Reframe feedback as funding.

Every critique is a free due-diligence report. The people who poke holes in your logic are not enemies; they’re unpaid auditors. Treat them as such.

Real founders don’t defend ideas; they defend learning loops.
They collect rejections like Pokemon cards, and use them to improve their odds.
You don’t need yeses to grow. You need sharper nos.

10. Remember that money doesn’t build conviction. Work does.

The ultimate proof isn’t the cheque. It’s the compulsion to keep going after every no.
Funding gives you leverage, not legitimacy. Legitimacy comes from the brutal work of making something no one else will make for you.

You don’t need belief. You need evidence.
You don’t need a patron. You need proof of life.

The rest will follow.

IX. Why This Myth Persists in India

Every ecosystem produces its own myths about success.

Silicon Valley has the garage. China has the scale. India has the story.

We are a storytelling country. We mythologize everything, cricket, film, politics, even traffic jams. And so, when startups entered our cultural bloodstream, they didn’t arrive as companies. They arrived as narratives of possibility.

To the public imagination, a “startup” wasn’t a business. It was a moral arc: a young person with an idea, defying the system, conjuring value from think air. And for a society that has long measured worth through inherited structures of family, surname, caste, and network, that myth felt revolutionary.

It wasn’t. But it felt that way.

The Inherited Infrastructure of Trust

In India, capital doesn’t move through institutions first. It moves through relationships. A family friend. A senior from your college. Your father’s batchmate. Your caste association’s investment wing.

Every cheque carries not just money, but social history.

That’s why our version of “pre-product” funding often looks more like patronage than venture. You’re not being evaluated on your ability to execute; you’re being adopted into someone’s circle of risk.

André Béteille once wrote that Indian modernity is “a blend of mobility and hierarchy.” The startup world perfectly illustrates that. We talk about meritocracy, but the real currency is familiarity. The fastest way to derisk yourself as a founder in India isn’t through traction, it’s proximity.

Caste and community are informal venture structures. A Marwari entrepreneur raising from other Marwaris, a Tamil Brahmin angel network funding a Chennai spinout, a Gujarati syndicate betting on a Surat logistics play. These aren’t coincidences.

It’s not malice. It’s math. I am not defending it. I am just outlining it.
When capital lacks transparency, trust fills the gap.
And trust in India is almost always inherited.

The Aspiration Economy

The other reason this myth persists is emotional. Funding, in India, became a synonym for arrival.

In the West, a seed round is a small, private milestone.
Here, it’s a press release.
We celebrate the raise, not the revenue. The cheque becomes the cultural validation that you’ve escaped.

Part of this is generational. We are a country that spent fifty years under scarcity. Our parents were taught to save. We were taught to signal.

To our generation, raising capital is proof that we’ve cracked a code, that someone outside the system has blessed our defiance of it.

But that validation comes at a cost. We’ve built an ecosystem where visibility is confused with viability. Where founders spend more time on LinkedIn than in the lab. Where an “idea” feels fundable because attention itself has become currency.

The result is a theatre of optimism.
Startups as performance. Founders as protagonists.
The story sells faster than the substance.

The Confusion Between Entrepreneurship and Employment

There’s also a structural confusion that’s uniquely Indian: we don’t really understand entrepreneurship yet.

Our middle class still treats business as something other people’s fathers do.

So when young Indians break away from jobs to “start something,” they frame it like a new job title rather than a long-term craft. They want the stability of self-employment with the glamour of entrepreneurship.

Which explains the obsession with funding. It’s a way to reinsert stability back into the narrative. The money becomes a salary proxy. A symbolic safety net that says, “See? I’m still part of the system.”

It’s just re-domesticated risk.

The Media Machinery

Of course, the media didn’t invent this fantasy, but it industrialized it.
We built a generation of founders who learned startup vocabulary before startup literacy.
Every headline about a 21-year-old raising a million dollars creates ten thousand others who think “idea + charisma = cheque.”

But what those headlines never show are the invisible factors:
The alumni network that made the intro,
The consulting job that funded the first prototype,
The VC associate who was a batchmate,
The parent who underwrote the rent.

The story flattens complexity into miracle. And the miracle makes everyone else feel like they’re one pitch deck away from escape.

The Social Cost of Failure

In the U.S., failure is a credential. In India, it’s a stain.

That alone changes how people perceive “idea-stage funding.”
Because when you’re not culturally allowed to fail, you become obsessed with outsourcing risk.
You want someone else, anyone else- an investor, a grant, a mentor- to absorb it on your behalf.

That’s what’s hiding under the “someone should believe in me” plea. It’s not entitlement; it’s fear. A fear of being publicly wrong in a country that punishes failure and worships hindsight.

We don’t celebrate experimentation.
We celebrate endurance.
And venture capital, unfortunately, is not built for that morality. It’s built for iteration, not penance.

The Return of Faith

And then, beneath all this, there’s something deeper, almost spiritual.
India’s relationship with belief has always been devotional.
We don’t “trust” gods; we believe in them.
We don’t verify; we surrender.

That grammar seeps into how we build and how we fund.
We ask for belief the way our parents asked for blessings: as a gesture of hope, not a contract of proof.

And yet, venture capital is a postmodern god. It doesn’t perform miracles. It performs audits.

The founder prays for faith; the VC prays for exits.
Both call it conviction. Both mean survival.

The reason this myth endures isn’t stupidity.
It’s history. It’s sociology. It’s longing.

We are a young, hungry nation trying to metabolize modern capitalism through the language of old faith. We haven’t yet learned that belief, in this new world, is not the seed. It’s the harvest.

X. Proof Over Pitch

Every founder thinks they’re in the business of building companies.
They’re not. They’re in the business of building proof.

Proof that the world needs what they see.
Proof that they can drag it into being.
Proof that someone will care enough to pay for it.
Proof that they won’t break before the product does.

That’s what all of this is: the long, humiliating search for proof.

Funding doesn’t fix that search. It only amplifies it.
The more capital you raise, the more loudly the universe asks: “Were you right?”

And sometimes you will be. Often you won’t. The proof will wobble, the pitch will decay, the data will betray you. You’ll stare at your dashboards like a priest staring at a silent god, waiting for a sign that refuses to come.

That silence is part of the work. That’s what separates founders from fantasists.

Because eventually, the only metric that matters is how you behave when the world stops clapping.

We romanticize the pitch: the ten slides, the theater of confidence, the temporary suspension of doubt. But the real test of a founder isn’t how well they sell the story. It’s how long they can hold the silence between stories.

The proof lives there. In the persistence, the spreadsheets no one sees, the 2 a.m. bug fixes, the customer calls you dread but still make.

Proof is not sexy. It’s sedimentary. It builds in layers, over time, until suddenly, everyone calls it “inevitable.”

The irony is that venture capital, for all its talk of disruption and audacity, still bows before proof.
Even the most intuitive investor has a spreadsheet hiding behind their hunch.
Even the most romantic story has a line item for unit economics.
We may call it conviction, but it’s just comfort measured in numbers.

And yet, that’s not entirely cynical. It’s just human.
We are pattern-seeking creatures.
We are desperate to see in others what we fear we’ve lost in ourselves: clarity, courage, control.

When an investor funds a founder, it’s not just capital. It’s projection. We are buying a version of ourselves that still believes in the possibility of certainty.

Which is why the greatest founders are, in the end, philosophers.
They understand that proof isn’t a number, it’s an ethic.
It’s the discipline of showing up to reality, even when it refuses to show up for you.

They don’t waste energy trying to be believed. They build in such a way that belief becomes irrelevant. They understand that money is not meaning. It’s momentum. That capital can accelerate only what already exists. That proof precedes pitch. Always.

So if you’re sitting somewhere, idea in hand, refreshing your inbox for a miracle, stop.

No one is coming to rescue your potential.
And more importantly, no one should.

Start smaller. Build something truer.
Find one person who needs it. Then another. Then ten.
Prove that you can survive indifference.

Because belief is overrated. Proof is sacred.
And in the long run, that’s the only thing worth funding.

I probably do more research than anyone really needs. As much as it’s a compulsion, I’d also like to be paid for it. You can support my writing by buying me a coffee here.