Factories Without Formulas
India is investing billions in battery manufacturing. But without the capital to fund indigenous technology, the intelligence inside those factories may continue to be imported.
BK
MJ
Bharti Krishnan & Mridu Jhangiani
Entrepreneurship Startups And Innovation
123 results
·Product & Innovation
From Bazaar to Breakthrough
The next phase of global innovation may emerge not from invention, but from how India adapts and stretches existing tools.
SV
Shrinath V
Founder, The Salient Advisory | Product & AI Strategy Advisor
·Founder Journeys
The risk taker
What makes Elon Musk tick? Insights from the biography by Walter Isaacson
DS
D Shivakumar
Operating Partner | Advent International
·Founder Journeys
From employee to entrepreneur
A message to young graduates: Don’t ignore regular salaried employment. It can gain you valuable business experience and serve as a springboard to an entrepreneurial career
SV
S. Ramakrishna (Rama) Velamuri
Strategic Growth & Innovation Expert | Visiting Professor
·Founder Journeys
The Middle India consumer
Middle India has low trust for a new interface. Here’s how Razorpay, Smartstaff, Meesho, Dehaat and Krazybee are investing in gaining trust. An extract from ‘Winning Middle India: The Story of India’s New-Age Entrepreneurs’, by Bala Srinivasa and T.N. Hari
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
FF Insights #701: Making trillion-dollar companies
July 25, 2022: Climate propaganda; The trouble with education’s ‘success formula’; Age of surveillance
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
FF Insights #696: Treat everything as an experiment
July 18, 2022: James Webb’s impact; What can’t be taught; The paradox
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
The Contrarian
Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom. For the longest time, no one took much notice. But now people are curious about what makes him—and Zoho—tick
NR
N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
FF Insights #592: Sustainable innovation
February 17, 2022: The average and the poor in India; How to be a bad boss; Corrigendum
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
How Sugar Cosmetics found its sweet spot
Vineeta Singh, CEO of Sugar Cosmetics, talks about turning fears into wins, taking an unconventional approach to succeed in a David & Goliath scenario, and building resilience from unexpected sources
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
An edtech entrepreneur’s learning journey
Parul Gupta, co-founder and president of Springboard, talks about how to build a trusted education brand, cultivate a growth mindset and unlock the big opportunities that lie ahead in edtech
AB
Aparajita (Opu) Bhattacharyya
Product Strategy & Monetization | Microsoft Azure, Seattle
·Founder Journeys
FF Daily #459: Why show not tell matters
August 26, 2021: Unbundling market infra & market governance; How Taliban used tech; Road signs for a polarized world
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
FF Daily #453: The phases of disruption
August 19, 2021: How balloon angioplasty proved to be a disruptive technology; The difficulty of interpreting data; How Amazon wins; Star Wars explained
FF
Founding Fuel
·Product & Innovation
FF Daily #416: Practical innovation
July 6, 2021: Innovate to solve immediate and consequential problems; Vaccine hesitancy; The space race; Thinking time
FF
Founding Fuel
·Product & Innovation
FF Daily #411: What the Wright brothers got right
June 30, 2021: Clayton Christensen on reframing the problem; A new normal in Singapore; Michael Holding on racism; How teachers feel now
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
An Indian beauty upstart in the West
A new breed of South Asian women entrepreneurs is leading Americans to embrace the Indian grandmother’s age-old beauty secrets in new easy-to-use ways. As a marketing strategy, it is Indian tradition marketed in digitally native formats
AB
Aparajita (Opu) Bhattacharyya
Product Strategy & Monetization | Microsoft Azure, Seattle
·Product & Innovation
FF Daily #382: The battle between fuel and friction
May 27, 2021: Why do new ideas meet with resistance; The politics of Gandhi; Zoom fatigue; Here comes the sun
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
FF Daily #291: Should you shift from WhatsApp?
February 5, 2021: Meditations on entrepreneurship; Misinformation—WhatsApp vs Signal and Telegram; How to read online reviews; Be yourself
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
FF Daily #283: Technology and trust in agriculture
January 27, 2021: How to perform under pressure; Why you should throw away your Bucket List; The state of Machine Learning
FF
Founding Fuel
·Venture Ecosystem
Trendspotting 2021: Inside India’s Great Digital Reset
A new set of winners and losers are poised to emerge from the ashes of the pandemic. And a wall of foreign capital is pouring in to fund a slew of digital startups. A peek into what 2021 portends
HC
Haresh Chawla
Investor | Entrepreneur
·Founder Journeys
To learn fast, go to the real place, look at real things, talk to real people
In this excerpt from his new book ‘The Learning Factory: How the Leaders of Tata Became Nation Builders’ Arun Maira talks about what he learned about learning from TELCO’s Sumant Moolgaokar
AM
Arun Maira
Former Chairman, BCG India | Member, Planning Commission
·Product & Innovation
When the Swiggy generation rediscovers the home kitchen
Home food was boring for millennials, but the pandemic and the sudden loss of options to eat out or order in is forcing them into the kitchen. They are discovering the joys of being creative and the assurance of being self-sufficient, but they still want convenience. Food entrepreneurs are taking note
RK
SK
Rachita Kapoor & Sanjeev Kapoor
·Social enterprise
The doughnut and the hole
A message for social change-makers seeking ‘impact on scale’ even as sources of funding dry up: Stay focused on the purpose (the doughnut) and not the scale and brand of your organisation (the hole). Innovate. And learn to be a catalyst
AM
Arun Maira
Former Chairman, BCG India | Member, Planning Commission
·Founder Journeys
WFH Daily #180: The Paytm playbook
September 19, 2020: How to say no; Climate change—a harder problem than the pandemic; Four Covid-19 personality types
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
Everybody loves a startup…
Or maybe not, as Pallavi Desai found out when she told her dad she wanted to take the plunge. But dad Santosh Desai, CEO of Futurebrands, thinks it’s appropriate to ask any venture hard questions. And they’ve both learnt from Pallavi’s startup journey
PD
SD
Pallavi Desai & Santosh Desai
·Founder Journeys
WFH Daily #105: Focus on how you are solving the problem
July 6: Be right, but also be helpful; thrive under constraints; spot the creative destruction
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
What to copy from China
The Growth Factor: Local problems, global solutions; China strategy; MSME loans
NR
N S Ramnath
Senior Editor | Founding Fuel
·Product & Innovation
Six learnings on innovation from anti-Covid efforts
Organisations across the spectrum have been able to get their act together, focus, and solve tough problems quickly. This makes you wonder—why are they unable to muster even a fraction of this ability in normal times?
RK
Rishikesha T Krishnan
Former Director, IIMB | Professor of Strategy
·Founder Journeys
The Satara uprising
Across Maharashtra, fresh farm produce was rotting after supply chains were disrupted by the national lockdown. The local administration in one of the districts offered a window of opportunity to small farmers’ collectives to build a farm-to-home model—and dramatically turn the tide
AS
Anmol Shrivastava
Entrepreneur, strategist, and technology consultant
·Founder Journeys
Masterclass: Shaping startup culture
‘We are customer-driven’, ‘we are data-driven’. Those are typical refrains from companies. But are they really? It all boils down to culture
FF
Founding Fuel
·Ethnography and Design Thinking
Why ethnography is the fuel for innovation
Ethnography is a life skill that many business executives and entrepreneurial leaders need to learn. It keeps them grounded and in tune with the lives of real people they hope to serve
FF
Founding Fuel
·Product & Innovation
Where do ideas come from?
Great ideas are built on a base of hard work and many small insights from a range of observations
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
‘The value of technology is in solving meaningful human problems’
In this podcast Scott Hartley, bestselling author of ‘The Fuzzy and the Techie’, talks about why tech knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient for entrepreneurs. They also need a broader curiosity about the world around them
·Founder Journeys
What they don't teach you at the IITs
Entrepreneurs need to be able to understand humans, individually and as a collective. For them, a liberal arts education is necessary. Because the scientific method teaches you inquiry. But the humanities teach you to apply that inquiry to yourself
TB
Tanuj Bhojwani
Fellow | iSPIRT foundation
·Product & Innovation
Walk a mile in the user’s shoes
For ground-breaking innovation, keep the user at the centre, and get a good cultural understanding of the actual place where your product will be used
FF
Founding Fuel
·Product & Innovation
The walls of innovation
It requires sustained effort to move innovation from a poster on the wall to conversation and action in the hall
FF
Founding Fuel
·Founder Journeys
Embrace chaos and ambiguity to build world class software products
Products often mean you are embarking on a choppy, risky, longish journey. You are thinking about a customer problem from first principles, with no sight of when you will get anywhere close to a business model, revenues, customers and profits
AR
Amit Ranjan
Architect for the National Digital Locker Project | Ministry of Electronics and IT
·Venture Ecosystem
The difficulty of entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurs operate in an environment where consumers want the best a capitalist society can offer, but insist on protectionism of the kind only a socialist system confers
FF
Founding Fuel
·Product & Innovation
The root of human ingenuity
This Week: Behind the Wunderman-JWT global merger, Facebook’s moral dilemma, the changing nature of work, digital inclusion, creative imagination and more
FF
Founding Fuel
·Venture Ecosystem
The best of 2018
Walmart vs Amazon, how large firms and start-ups can partner for innovation, societal platforms, startups and the ease of doing business, dreamers vs entrepreneurs, the trouble with B-Schools, grand challenges, and the purpose of enterprise
FF
Founding Fuel
📚 Curated Collections
Explore hand-picked article collections in this category
The Future of Work and Agentic AI Series
Much of the conversation around AI focuses on tools and productivity. This series looks deeper: at how AI is reshaping organisational architecture—how decisions are made, how knowledge flows, and how work itself is organised.
5 articles28
War in the Middle East: Global Faultlines
Stories that place the Middle East’s conflicts in a wider global, historical and cultural context.
7 articles55
Journeys, Not Itineraries
Reflective travelogues on attention, place, and inner change.
8 articles112
Thinking Through India’s AI Moment
Essays and conversations on AI, institutions, and scale in India.
7 articles52
Leadership When Judgment Matters
A curated selection on leadership under uncertainty.
7 articles75
Best of FF Life 2025
Personal essays on work, learning, and the inner life.
11 articles161