The year the graph turned green.

Wyoming Paranoia — a game we played in high school, run end to end from a free website I built myself: rules, round-by-round brackets, entries to an email address. $5 a player, $25 a team, capped at the first 28 teams. Over $500 in prize money, plus bragging rights.

• Nobody assigned this. No format, no marks, no syllabus. That's the point.
• The organizer's instinct — design the game everyone wants to play, and hold the deadline.

The t-shirt money paid for DJ equipment. None of it was really about money — it was about people. Then the gap opened. I told a professor I didn't know what to do with my life, only that I wanted to help people. She said: start volunteering.

• Hospice, New York — sitting with people at the end of life, reading to them.
• South Africa, 2009 — hospice fieldwork, delivering food and medicine. It settled it: I want to help people.
• India — first at twelve, backpacking Karnataka with my family. Then a final-year term abroad in 2009, when the bus stopped in a village called Bagru — and a light bulb went off.

Union's Minerva Fellowship offered $10,000 to go abroad and build something. The format said join an established NGO — I submitted a wild card application for my own idea instead. Eight fellows were chosen that year. One wild card. On June 28, 2010, at 22, I moved into the village and lived with the Chhipa family — "Chhipa" means to print; it is both the craft and their surname.

• I didn't speak the language and knew nothing about textiles — I knew one useful thing: how the internet worked.
• So we traded — free office hours teaching digital marketing at the printing society; the village taught me everything else.
• Nobody certifies you to begin — there is no rank list for beginning. The work makes you qualified.

The printers had the skill and the four-hundred-year method. What they didn't have was the market. Fabric arrived from a trader; the family printed and finished it; it went back out — paid by the metre — while every middleman in the chain captured margin with marketing and language skills the printers were never given.

• Bagru Textiles: "Know Your Source" — cut out the middlemen, hand digital commerce straight to the home-based artisans.
• The printer named, not anonymised behind a label — and no retraining, no redesigning the craft.
• Orders from ABC Home and Anthropologie — and printers opening shops with their own names above the door.

"Bagru Textiles: Know Your Source", by Andrew McLain — vimeo.com/92201560

Watch a master printer work. One carved block, pressed into dye, stamped onto fabric. Then the hand moves a few centimetres and stamps again. Aligned by eye. Thousands of times.

Up close, it looks like nothing — repetition. Step back, and it's a pattern. Step back further, and it's beautiful. Keep that image. It is what building anything actually looks like — including a contribution graph.

The principle is timeless: constraints create innovation.

A $50,000 endowment to the college kept the fellowship sending builders to Bagru after I left. I went back to the US for an MBA in Global Management — and it was a second India: most of my cohort was Indian, and I got on with them immediately.

• Student body president — the t-shirts-and-turntables instinct, now with a budget.
• QuZuu — my first digital product — queue up videos and it runs as a 24-hour channel. Twitch, or YouTube TV, before either existed.
• I didn't have the technical skill to push it — my studies took over, and I dropped it. Remember this one.
• ISB exchange — a study programme at the Indian School of Business. India kept pulling.

Then MGF Sourcing — supply-chain management and optimisation for a company moving billions of dollars of US retail — Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie, Express — through Hong Kong, China, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh.

• I learned an enormous amount — the volume end of the trade, at planetary scale.
• The Rana Plaza years — when the fashion industry was forced to answer for itself.
• The lesson — I could run the volume end. I wanted the village end.

So I quit. In February 2016, Studio Bagru launched — founder and CEO this time, alongside Anup Chhipa, a fifth-generation printer taking his family's craft to the world.

• Shipped to 50+ countries — hotels, fashion houses, designers, all B2B, all printed by the same families.
• A Jaipur studio in a city of 20 million tourists — workshops at the top of the travel rankings; an Airbnb cofounder once walked in and printed with us.
• The goal was independence, not suppliers — we introduced our own buyers to the other family workshops, and taught them the storytelling.
• Mahila Print — cultural-IP work so artisan designers earn royalties on their own patterns.

COVID took revenue to zero, overnight — weeks after we opened a second shop. Tourism stopped. Orders stopped. We printed masks. We ran fundraisers for artisan families. We held on, and the company survived — it is still alive today.

And then my fiancée — she's from Assam — said: flights are grounded, revenue is zero, why don't we go do a yoga teacher training? So when the airports opened, we flew to Mysore and became yoga teachers.

The year the business stopped became the year we learned something else. That is also a founder skill.

Her parents wanted to invite two thousand people. Covid restrictions capped it at six hundred — which, as a compromise, still didn't entirely make sense to me.

Notice what the journey looks like by now: an American who found his life's work in a Rajasthani village, marrying into an Assamese family, about to move back to Ohio. None of this was in a plan. All of it came from saying yes to the strange door.

2021: home to Cincinnati — the same city where I was a four-year-old assistant paperboy — back into textiles at Standard Textile. Then in 2022 I found my stride at Alloy Growth Lab, a top-10 incubator in the world, with the job title I've kept ever since: catalyst.

• 500+ startups supported — $50M+ raised by portfolio companies, $40M+ in sales booked.
• 8,000+ coaching hours — logged in the room with founders, not in a curriculum.
• Morning Mentoring — 400+ founders through the format; 80% still operating.

What I watched happen: experienced people systematically giving time to inexperienced people — and the whole city getting smarter at once. Hold that thought.

At Alloy I built Alloy Online — a marketplace for commercial capital, economic development, and startup growth: member spaces, a library, events, messages. The room, on the days there is no room.

And then PeaceRise — the same convening machinery, pointed at the hardest problem I could find: driving global peace through innovation. Challenges, community, events — the incubator format with a global remit.

The lesson: once you've built one engine — coaching, community, capital, customers — you can point it at anything.

June 2024: my son was born. And instead of settling down, we did the opposite of everything the parenting books recommend. December 2024: our family boarded a one-way flight to India.

• Third continent, second country, same job description — move the family, find the school run, start again on day one.
• Not a sacrifice — a bet — that the most interesting building decade on Earth is happening here.

February 2025: CEO of VentureStudio at Ahmedabad University — the incubation hub founded in 2011 in collaboration with Stanford's d.school, just across the river from where you're sitting.

• 180+ startups supported — and about ₹5 crore in funding being disbursed this year.
• Nirmit Parekh, one of our earliest incubatees, now leads Apna — a billion-dollar company.
• What separates founders who make it isn't intelligence, money, or connections. It's whether they keep making squares turn green when nothing is working.

Pictured: the VentureStudio welcoming committee.

That's my personal mission statement — organisations have vision statements, why shouldn't people? It settles the question of what I am at this stage of my career: an enabler. The job now is to share knowledge and put other people in a position to build.

• I teach the VentureStudio Fellowship — and an open course on building websites with AI.
• Weekly office hours — come with three sentences: the problem, who feels it, why now.
• Write your own mission statement — it's fluid; it changes as your life does. I ask all my students to try.

• Write a 140-character problem statement — one problem you actually care about. Who hurts if it stays unsolved?
• Open a GitHub account and make today's square green — anything counts. A readme is a start.
• Build the smallest prototype that tests your riskiest assumption — with AI working beside you. Three evenings is enough.
• Find one ally in this hall — trade problem statements before you leave. That's an ecosystem, day one.

Need money for it? Every central scheme is searchable at fritzhand.github.io/startup-india-guide — free, no login, built for you.