In the vastness of the Arabian Sea, as I approached the shores of Mumbai recently, the grand structure of The Taj Mahal Palace stirred a multitude of emotions within me.

Once the initial awe settled, my mind, inevitably drifted to the current discourse consuming the startup ecosystem.

Jamshetji Tata wasn’t just a businessman — he was a pioneer who imagined an industrial India long before the nation imagined itself. The cliche “Salt to Steel” narrative speaks not just to the diversification of the Tata group, but to the personal ethos of one man, which has since become an institutional culture.

When you really think about it, modern India is a patchwork of such audacious individuals. Visionaries who dared to dream beyond their time — sometimes without seeing their dreams realized in their own lifetimes. This was our 0 to 1 moment as a nation: a period where beautiful minds proved that it was possible.

Liberalisation, in the ’90s, helped us scale from 1 to 10. Many of us — especially in urban, tech-enabled India — are the beneficiaries of that momentum. But now, in this journey from 10 to 100, we need institutions to step up. The proof of concept exists — in individuals, in stories, in startups. But scaling it? That’s no longer a vision problem. It’s an institution problem.

Rhetoric is seductive. It energises rooms. But when people in positions of power critique food delivery startups and lament the lack of focus on deep tech; they can’t just walk away. They must stay to host the harder conversations — about infrastructure, about patient capital, about academic research, about building environments where long-term bets can thrive. None of this can be outsourced to lone entrepreneurs. And yet, we keep citing the rare successes and expect them to serve as templates, as if vision, grit, and genius can compensate indefinitely for structural absence.

As I sat with this thought, another parallel came to mind — one closer to everyday life: the way corporate appraisal conversations unfold.

We continue to evaluate individuals based solely on whether they met numerical targets, often without considering whether those targets were ever realistic or if the system set them up for failure. An employee might have challenged outdated processes, built something from scratch, laid the groundwork for future success — and still be rated not fairly because the outcome wasn’t immediate. We reward outcomes without interrogating context. And in doing so, we quietly punish resilience, creativity, and long-game thinking.

But who will speak truth to power?

Coming back to the tech world, the talent that could build the next deep tech solution for India or guide us into frontier innovation will continue to decrease. They won’t buy into hollow narratives. They will simply move on — to ecosystems that respect time, that nurture potential, that build with them, not on them. And when these individuals rise to lead global companies, we’re the first to claim their Indian roots. But do we ever pause to ask: would they have reached those heights if they had stayed back?

The answer is uncomfortable.