Wrote this at 3:14am, May 16, 2026.

This is both an explanation of why I'm here, and a request — to have you on my side.

India's founders have been failed.

Not by the market. Not by capital. By the layer in between — the consultants who bill ₹12L to read a founder their own deck back, the accelerators that hands out templates, the advisors who've 10 gigs going on side by side.

For over a decade, the best thing an Indian founder could do was leave. Get into YC. Build elsewhere. Come back a success story. Repeat. That cycle is the gap. And the gap is still there.

I started Grit to ask a different question: what would it take to build the thing India's founders actually need — here, for this market, by people who've done the work?

I'm not going to tell you Grit is already that thing. It isn't.

Here's what I've actually done. I've run India market entry for global companies. I've sat across from founders at zero revenue and helped them find their first customers, fix broken GTM, and build systems that didn't fall over at scale. Every engagement with skin in the game — I won when the founder won, and not before.

That's where the lessons came from. Not from a deck. Not from a framework imported from a market that doesn't look anything like ours. From the rooms. With the buyers. At the stages of the company where it actually counts.

Grit is what's being built from those lessons.

It's been attempted before. The Foundry. Accelerators. Programs. The gap is still enormous.

So let me be honest about what I think is true:

This is not a one-person job. It's not a two-person job. No one builds institutions alone — and most people who read this won't help. Most VCs will pattern-match this to something safer. Most "operators" will say the right things on LinkedIn and do nothing. That's fine. I'm not writing this for them.

I'm writing this for the small number of you — unicorn founders, investors, operators who've actually built something — who look at the state of support for Indian founders and feel the same thing I do. That this is unacceptable. That the next generation deserves better infrastructure than the one we had.

The long-term bet is an accelerator. The thing Indian founders have had to leave the country to find. Built from the inside out — one founder backed, one engagement run, one relationship at a time.

We are not there yet. We won't be for a while. I'm not in a rush to lie about that.

What I will tell you: every company we back, every engagement we run, every person who joins our community/network, every person who joins Grit — is a building block. The institution is being built in public, from scratch, by someone willing to take the long view.

India's founders deserve infrastructure built for them.

We're building it. Come help, or watch.

— Yash Kumar, Founder