About Founders+
We mentor founders,
not businesses.
Most mentorship programs create dependency — the mentor becomes the crutch. Founders+ is built on the opposite belief: the greatest mentorship gives you clarity and then trusts you to act.
Why Founders+ exists
The first ₹1 Crore is the most critical milestone in any startup's journey. It is not a revenue target — it is a structural milestone. By the time a startup crosses that mark, roughly 80% of its foundational challenges are resolved. The customer becomes clear. The value proposition sharpens. Operations find their rhythm. Unit economics become visible.
But most startups never get there. Not because the market is too small or the idea is wrong. They plateau because of maturity gaps — structural weaknesses that no amount of ambition or hustle can fix.
Founders+ exists to close those gaps. Methodically. Dimension by dimension.
What makes this different
Founders+ is not an incubator. It does not provide co-working space or take large equity stakes. It is not an accelerator that runs 3-month batch programs at scale. It is not a course, a workshop, or a coaching session.
It is a deeply personal, long-term mentorship engagement where the mentor has financial skin in the game and works closely with a very small number of founders over 18 months. The mentor's incentive is identical to the founder's: build something that works.
This creates a relationship unlike any other in the startup ecosystem. There is no upsell. No hidden agenda. No demo day performance. Just the quiet, disciplined work of building a business that can stand on its own.
What we believe
Scale without systems is a formula for disaster.Having the right processes and structures is paramount before any scaling attempt. Growth amplifies whatever already exists — including the cracks.
Crossing ₹1 Crore is not about ambition. It is about discipline.The founders who get there are not the loudest or the fastest. They are the ones who treat revenue as a design problem.
The mentor illuminates. The founder decides.Guidance can light the path, but the act of walking it belongs entirely to the one who builds the company. Autonomy, not dependency.
We mentor founders, not just businesses.Every founder in the cohort receives individual attention — because the founder's growth determines the business's growth. Always.
इति ते ज्ञानमाख्यातं गुह्याद् गुह्यतरं मया ।
विमृश्यैतदशेषेण यथेच्छसि तथा कुरु ॥
“Thus I have shared with you the deepest wisdom. Reflect upon it fully, and then act as you choose.”
Bhagavad Gita — Chapter 18, Verse 63
This verse captures the entire philosophy behind Founders+. Inspired by the timeless dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna — where wisdom guides, but action remains the warrior's responsibility. The mentor's role is to illuminate. The founder's role is to reflect and then decide.
Rohan Shah
Founder & Thinking Partner, Founders+
The Founder
Built from the inside out
The Journey
Rohan started his career in 2008 as a Solution Architect with SAP. Working across global organisations, he saw firsthand how large companies design systems, make decisions at scale, and build the kind of operational discipline that most startups never develop. That exposure shaped how he thinks about business, not as a collection of ideas, but as a set of systems that either work or they do not.
In 2017, he stepped out to build his own ventures - The Avent Company, later known as Hedweeg Innovations. Hedweeg is a design thinking and innovation consulting firm that helps organisations design digital products through research-backed user experience. Building from scratch, he experienced every challenge early-stage founders face, finding product-market fit, managing cash flow, hiring, and figuring out what scales and what breaks. The lessons from enterprise taught him what good systems look like. Entrepreneurship taught him how hard they are to build when you are starting from zero.
The Teacher
Rohan teaches innovation, design thinking, and entrepreneurship at multiple universities. At EDII (Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India ), he designed a year-long Experiential Learning course that takes students from identifying opportunities to building business models. It was at EDII that the seeds of Founders+ were planted where students kept asking for structured mentorship, and informal advice could only go so far.
How Founders+ Was Born
The demand for structured mentorship kept growing, but Rohan did not want to build another programme that charges fees and delivers generic advice. The zero-fee, equity-based model came from a simple conviction: if the mentor does not have skin in the game, the relationship is fundamentally unequal. After multiple iterations, the current model emerged. Cohort 1 launched on March 19, 2026 in Ahmedabad with five startups and nine founders.
The Design Thread
Everything at Founders+ carries a design lens. The F+ Assessment mirrors the methodology - deep diagnosis, gap identification, structured building, and iteration based on real results. Most mentorship programmes give advice. Founders+ applies a methodology, adapted for the constraints and chaos of early-stage startups.
Ready to build
with structure?
Apply to Founders+ and join a mentorship built on clarity, discipline, and shared success.
Apply to Founders+ →