India’s next founder class is being built inside companies

How do you assess a founder before the company has had time to prove itself? At the earliest stages, most of the decision rests on the person. It comes down to their relevance to the problem they’re solving and their particular edge, how honestly they see their own gaps, how quickly they learn, and how they respond when things go south.

When there’s little else to evaluate, a founder’s prior experience becomes meaningful evidence on almost every one of these questions.

Over the years, I have met founders who arrived at entrepreneurship through very different paths. Among them, one journey has become increasingly interesting to me: people who spend years building inside a high-growth company before deciding to build one of their own.

The operator advantage

An experienced operator has made decisions and lived with their repercussions at scale. They have seen how a seemingly small decision can become consequential as a company grows, and how the priorities of a business change as it moves through different stages.

That experience also changes the way someone approaches decision-making. They have a reference point for what happens when a team grows faster than its processes, when a product moves beyond its initial use case, or when a strategy that worked at one stage stops working at the next. Over time, those experiences become valuable judgment.

The best operators I have seen bring what they have learnt with them. They remain open to changing their perspective and know when situations demand a different approach. The ability to learn, unlearn and relearn becomes increasingly valuable as they take on new challenges.

This is particularly relevant to how we think about founders at the earliest stages. A company's initial plan will evolve. The product will change as customers use it. The market will reveal things that were not obvious at the outset. The ability to absorb those signals and adapt is often more important than whether the original plan was perfectly conceived.

An operator has had years to develop that muscle.

How experience is valued

Experience can compound quietly for years before its value becomes visible. In venture, that value can show up in how readily an experienced operator is backed when they become a founder.

I have seen this difference emerge from the first institutional round. Prior experience can make it easier for a founder to secure that first cheque, while investor confidence translates into larger commitments and stronger valuations. As the company progresses, that confidence can also carry into subsequent rounds. Experienced founders can then build on the conviction they have already established.

The underlying reason is the time already spent building. When we invest at this stage, we are backing a person whose ability to operate, make decisions and build at scale has been demonstrated over years, even though the company itself is new. The founder may be starting from scratch as an entrepreneur, but not as a builder.

The new economics of building

For years, one of the biggest constraints on building great companies was talent: having enough of it, finding the right people and being able to afford them.

AI is changing the economics of building a company and what a small team can accomplish. Products can be built and iterated faster, and ideas can be tested with fewer resources than before.

When more people can build, the harder question becomes: what is actually worth building?

That puts greater importance on understanding the problem itself. This is where domain depth adds an edge. It gives a founder a closer view of the problem, the customer and the context around it. That understanding can come from years spent inside an industry, a function or a particular business. It can also come from operating close to the problem without eventually building in the same sector.

Experience compounds across the ecosystem

India’s startup ecosystem has now produced several waves of companies built at meaningful scale. The early companies helped create the market itself, while those that followed built on a foundation of consumer adoption, infrastructure and operating knowledge that had already been established.

Each wave has created its own generation of operators, many of whom have gone on to start companies of their own. They have also come through very different market conditions. They experienced the rapid expansion of the pandemic years and the abundance of capital that followed, then the funding winter and the subsequent correction that placed greater emphasis on efficiency and discipline.

Liquidity events at startups such as Flipkart, InMobi and Swiggy have also created another path into entrepreneurship. As early employees and senior leaders realise some of the value they

have helped create, they have greater freedom to take the next risk. Some are choosing to put that capital, experience, and conviction into companies of their own.

Each of those companies then became a training ground for the next generation of founders.

The next founder class

From what I see in the market, the operator path is becoming an increasingly important route into entrepreneurship, but it is one of many. Great companies will continue to emerge from varied founder journeys.

Experience is an unusual asset. It is accumulated slowly, often without being recognised as an asset while it is being built. Its value becomes visible when it changes what someone is able to do with the opportunity in front of them.

India now has a growing generation of people carrying that asset into entrepreneurship. That is a meaningful shift in how the country’s next generation of companies can be built.

(The author is Partner, Asia at RTP Global. Views are personal.)