E-Paper
Guided mentorship can save India's nascent startups
This article is authored by Rahul Nainwal, senior director, School of Business, UPES and CEO, Runway Incubator.
India's students are not waiting to graduate before they start building.
From over 300 DPIIT-recognised startups in 2016 to more than 1.59 lakh today, much of that momentum has a young face behind it. The Economic Survey 2024-25 tells you why: 65% of India's population is under 35. Entrepreneurship isn't a career detour for this generation. For many, it is the plan.
That ambition is real. But ambition without access is just potential. And right now, India is producing potential at scale and converting it at a trickle.
India does not have a formation problem. It has a progression problem.
The Nasscom-Zinnov India Tech Startup Report 2025 identifies the Seed-to-Series A transition as the ecosystem's most fragile point. Startups reach technical readiness well before they reach commercial readiness. Securing the first customer is harder than securing the first cheque. The Economic Survey 2024-25 is explicit about why the ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship has itself flagged the near-total exclusion of entrepreneurship from formal education, and the absence of mentorship as a structural barrier — not an edge case, but a design flaw.
This gap falls heaviest on people who can least afford it. First-generation entrepreneurs. Founders from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Women navigating rooms not designed with them in mind. McKinsey has established that closing gender gaps in India's economy could add $770 billion to GDP. Some of that is sitting inside ideas that never found the right guide at the right time.
We don't put a pilot in the cockpit without simulation hours or a co-pilot. But we routinely send young founders — many of them first-generation, many building without safety nets — into the market and call encouragement a support system.
Structured mentorship does something specific. It compresses the learning curve that would otherwise cost founders years of expensive mistakes. A mentor who has navigated customer discovery, a hostile term sheet, or a regulatory maze doesn't just provide advice — they provide judgment. The kind that helps a founder validate an idea before burning through capital on the wrong assumption.
According to the Nasscom Tech Startup Report 2025, India's incubator ecosystem successfully helps early-stage businesses but finds it difficult to scale them. The missing piece isn't more pitch events. It is mentorship that follows a founder beyond demo day — all the way to the first real customer.
Most business schools still train people for the economy that existed. Stable industries. Predictable hierarchies. Careers measured in titles, not pivots. That world is shrinking fast.
A B-school built for a disruptive world treats entrepreneurship as a discipline, not an elective. And at the centre of that commitment sits the incubator — not as a branding exercise, but as the operational bridge between classroom and market. Done well, it puts a founder in front of real customer problems with real stakes. It provides access to mentors who have actually built things. It gives early-stage ventures the runway to test, fail cheaply, and iterate before facing the unforgiving scrutiny of the open market.
India now has over 390 incubators and accelerators operating through academia, according to Nasscom. The foundation is there. The question is whether they are being run as genuine launchpads or as infrastructure that looks good in an accreditation file. Student founders get access to real clients, real feedback, and genuine credibility when institutions link incubation to real corporate partnerships—not ceremonial Memorandums of Understanding, but true co-creation. That is how technical readiness becomes commercial readiness.
This is the part that doesn't get enough airtime. Entrepreneurial exposure doesn't just produce founders. It produces sharper professionals.
Early-stage venture building develops abilities such as problem framing, rapid iteration, and leadership through uncertainty, which employers across all industries claim they cannot find. A student who attempted to develop anything, even if it failed, graduates with a different operating system. More self-directed. More resilient. Less dependent on being told what to do next.
In a nation where DPIIT data indicates that 17.2 lakh people are currently directly employed by well-known startups, the talent that enters these businesses is just as significant as the founders who started them.
Too much of India's mentorship ecosystem still runs on luck. A founder meets the right person at the right event. That cannot be the strategy at scale.
What needs to happen is institutionalisation. Faculty trained to advise beyond theory. Alumni networks were stimulated by genuine rewards, such as organized programs worth their time rather than merely sentimentality. Genuine commitment from industry partners goes beyond just brand placement.
B-schools that get this right will produce more than graduates. They will produce ecosystems — communities of founders, mentors, and industry partners that compound in value over time.
India's startup count is a point of national pride. The next chapter isn't about adding to that number. It's about ensuring more of those startups survive long enough to matter.
The ambition is already there. The access is the variable we can control.
This article is authored by Rahul Nainwal, senior director, School of Business, UPES and CEO, Runway Incubator.
