BusinessEntrepreneurship

Building Real

Arjun Thomas

Building Real is about how things actually get built—companies, restaurants, labs, careers, and side projects—without the highlight reel gloss.

Each episode is a real, unscripted conversation with someone in the middle of building: founders, operators, educators, scientists, restaurateurs, investors, and people quietly doing important work.

We talk through the doubts, trade‑offs, and decisions that never make it into funding announcements or LinkedIn posts. You’ll hear how guests find problems worth working on, test ideas, hire (or don’t), manage money and time, and deal with failure, burnout, and luck along the way.

If you’re building something yourself—or thinking about it—you’ll get practical insight into product, markets, teams, and personal resilience, told through specific stories rather than generic advice. No scripts, no manufactured drama, no “five hacks”; just the process of how it actually happens, one builder at a time.

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13 episodes
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Avg 1 hr 18 min
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#13
Tuesday · 1 hr 1 min
He Built Startups for Corporates. Then He Opened a Coffee Bar That Won Gold | Ivan Chandra Suriady
Why would someone who builds startups for corporates open a single coffee bar in one of the most crowded markets in Singapore? Ivan Chandra Suriady spent years building ventures inside large companies: market maps, white-space analysis, concepts that had to make sense to a board 20 years out. Then he picked a market everyone warns you away from. He co-founded Paco Coffee, opened one bar at The Sail @ Marina Bay at the end of January 2026, and within five months its Madame Parodox blend won Gold at the Global Coffee Awards Asia, judged double-blind. In this conversation we get into why chain coffee and specialty coffee are converging, and why Ivan believes "coffee is 50% storytelling and 50% product." Paco sells specialty-grade beans through illustrated characters instead of tasting notes. It releases new coffees in seasons that double as A/B tests, and it logs every espresso shot so a problem in one store can be traced, which is the kind of system you build when you plan to run hundreds. We also talk about building your own software with AI instead of buying SaaS, the difference between corporate venture building and founding in the wild, and the 1am Biscoff thief who inspired a coffee that sold out in three days. This one is for anyone who's been told a market is too competitive to enter. Connect with Ivan & Paco Coffee: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivansuriady/ Paco Coffee: https://letspaco.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/letspaco Visit: 2 Marina Boulevard, The Sail @ Marina Bay, #B1-08C, Singapore (weekdays) Find Building Real: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@buildingrealpodcast Website: https://buildingreal.com Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RZ2toxpA0ITJrZgWiCHdH Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1884485435 Building something interesting? Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas Building Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss. Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks. #BuildingReal #Podcast #SpecialtyCoffee #Singapore #Startups #FnB
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#12
September 8 · 1 hr 24 min
Turning Bali's Garbage Crisis Into Nutrient-Dense Soil in 24 Hours | Tobias Wilson
Food waste generates 2.6 times the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire global airline industry — and yet only 5-6% of it ever gets composted. Tobias Wilson calls that number "the gold we're throwing away." Tobias spent nearly two decades in Singapore's advertising, marketing and digital-tech world before something started to feel missing. He began doing beach and river cleanups in Bali with his kids — "go and break a sweat for somebody else," he says, "it's incredible what that time does to you, and it's not for the benefit of you." That instinct led him to aerobic digestion, and eventually to founding Shiva Industries: a Bali-based team building on-site rapid composters that turn food and organic waste into nutrient-dense soil in 24 hours, not the 3-9 months traditional composting takes. We go deep on why most "composters" on the market are really just mechanical dehydrators wearing a green label — no live microbes in, no microbes out, and pathogens that can go dormant and reactivate once they hit soil — versus Shiva's proprietary strain of thermophilic microbes doing real aerobic digestion. Tobias walks through "Will It Digest," the series where his team stress-tests the machine on the strangest inputs they can find: 13 hours on elephant dung from Mason Elephant Park, a river-cleanup haul with Sungai Watch that included a dead duck, a chicken, a koi and a rat, even an accidental mop-bucket chemical dump. We talk unit economics — a two-year payback period and roughly 500 million rupiah in annual savings at just one ton of throughput a day — and the four forces (payback, regulation, brand, staff morale) that are finally turning holdout hotel owners into buyers now that Bali's landfills are closing. This one is for anyone who has ever looked at an "unglamorous" industry and wondered if the real opportunity was hiding in what everyone else calls trash. SHIVA INDUSTRIES & TOBIAS — HIGHLIGHTS & IMPACT Turns food and organic waste into nutrient-dense soil in 24 hours, versus 3-9 months for traditional composting 26 machines live across 4 Indonesian islands, diverting 2,000,000+ kg of waste from landfill every year New factory opened in Denpasar, Bali in July 2025 to scale production, quality control and delivery ~2-year payback period and ~500M rupiah in annual savings for a business running one ton of waste a day Used by hotels, resorts, restaurants, food processors, mining operations, schools and local government programs across Bali and Indonesia ABOUT TOBIAS WILSON Founder of Shiva Industries, a Bali-based green-tech company engineering on-site aerobic composting machines that convert organic waste into nutrient-dense soil in 24 hours. Tobias grew up on a farm in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, spent nearly 20 years in Singapore's advertising, marketing and digital-technology industries, then pivoted into sustainability after a series of beach and river cleanups in Bali turned into a mission to solve Southeast Asia's most overlooked waste problem. Connect with Tobias & Shiva Industries: Tobias Wilson (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiasjwilson/ Shiva Industries: https://www.shivaindustries.tech Building something interesting? Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ · https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas
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#11
August 25 · 1 hr 14 min
Rebuilding Cold Chain for Southeast Asia's Priciest, Least Reliable Power Grid | Joe Khoo
What if fixing cold chain in one of the most flood-prone, power-starved cities in Southeast Asia didn't take a mega-warehouse and millions in capital — just a modular box the size of a quarter shipping container, fifteen sensors, and a monthly rental? Joe Khoo is a hardware engineer chasing a climate mission since a solo trip through Japan's Zen temples convinced him, seventeen years ago, to build a career around sustainability. He studied electrical engineering at NUS, built VR hardware at a startup later acquired by Facebook, then designed "military-grade" padlocks as a product manager. Two solo startups went nowhere. One week after shutting down an AI device for blind users, ENGIE's venture studio called, needing a technical co-founder for the world's most energy-efficient cold room. That became Polar Cold. Then the model that got them funded nearly sank them: six-to-eight-month sales cycles didn't bring in enough cash, forcing a pivot to renting modular units instead. The day before this conversation, Joe sent a photo: stuck in Manila traffic, half the road underwater — as good a summary as any of the market he builds in. We go deep into why Joe would skip the Philippines in hindsight — Indonesia's market is bigger, its bureaucracy lighter — and why he built here anyway: identical energy savings are worth three times more at 30 cents a kilowatt-hour than Indonesia's subsidized 10. We get into the fifteen months it took to legally collect a credit-card payment, the word Joe coined for this market — "lumpy," squeezed by flood season, a truck curfew, and customs officials who double-charge on arrival — and how ENGIE's venture studio, with patient CapEx-friendly capital, made a two-year pivot survivable in a category most VCs won't touch. On the tech, we unpack how a cold room works, why Polar Cold tracks fifteen to sixteen variables per unit to catch a leak before it strands a customer's inventory, and how a 4G router on backup power tells Joe brownout from broken box, from his phone, mid-flight. Two months after 50% inventory utilization, Polar Cold is now at 95%, closing deals every week. This one is for anyone building inside a corporate venture studio and wondering if the business will ever feel like their own, choosing the harder market on purpose because the math said so, or keeping a CapEx-intensive business alive on someone else's patience. POLAR COLD & JOE — HIGHLIGHTS & IMPACT Modular cold rooms deploy in ~2 days vs. a 6-to-9-month traditional build 15–16 sensors per unit power predictive maintenance, catching leaks and dirty filters before they spoil inventory Inventory utilization jumped from ~50% to ~95% in two months; 24 boxes live in the Philippines, ~90–100 targeted by year-end CapEx payback period cut from 22 months to ~10 months Facebook/AI lead gen at ~$0.20/lead, converting into 6-to-12-month rentals Built inside ENGIE's venture studio — a rare CapEx-heavy climate idea to survive first-round validation Connect with Joe LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/khooliqiangjoe/ Polar Cold - http://polar-cold.com/ Building something interesting? Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ · https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas Building Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss.
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#10
July 28 · 56 min
From $2M eBay SaaS to Mosquito Deep Tech to Starting Over on an Island | Vic Levitin
What if the deadliest animal on earth could be fought not with chemicals, but with millions of sterile versions of itself — engineered by AI and released into the wild to breed the population into collapse? Vic Levitin is a self-described builder. Born in Ukraine, raised in Israel, he'd already taken CrazyLister — the "Wix for eBay" — to ~$2M ARR before burning out and going looking for something completely different. He found it in a post from two Weizmann Institute scientists who were "fighting mosquitoes with mosquitoes" and needed a CEO — one who didn't yet know that only the females bite. That became Diptera.ai. Then, on October 7th, war broke out; nine hours later Vic and his family were on a plane to Thailand with a suitcase packed for two weeks. Two weeks became almost three years. We go deep into the science (sex-sorting mosquitoes at the larval stage with AI, a feat long thought impossible), the problem nobody warned him about — "there's no money in this industry" — and the pivot that unlocked the round: to save lives from malaria in Africa, you first have to help rich Americans get a little less itchy. Vic explains the letters of intent from US mosquito-control districts (Los Angeles included), why the technology is now backed by the Gates Foundation and deploying in Ethiopia, and then the harder story — rebuilding a life on Koh Samui with no network and no industry. The survival months when no long-term decision was possible. The sofa he bought as "a signal you're here to stay." His wife's complete 180 — from refusing to even visit, to fluent Thai, Muay Thai and a Thai flag tattooed on her arm. And why, as the builder, he chooses to carry the pain so his family doesn't have to. This one is for anyone who has ever felt trapped by their own success, tried to make a noble mission survive contact with a brutal market, or rebuilt a life from zero somewhere they never chose. DIPTERA.AI & VIC — HIGHLIGHTS & IMPACT AI that sex-sorts mosquitoes at the larval stage — a breakthrough long considered impossible ~$3M seed — among the first VC rounds in the sterile-insect space — backed by letters of intent from US mosquito-control districts, including Los Angeles Technology now backed by the Gates Foundation, deploying in Ethiopia to fight malaria — where a child dies every two minutes Previously built CrazyLister — the "Wix for eBay" — to ~$2M ARR on the back of a 200,000-reader blog Rebuilt from scratch on Koh Samui, growing a new AI-SaaS venture to $90K MRR in months Connect with Vic Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vic-levitin/ Website - https://www.viclevitin.com/ Diptera.ai - https://diptera.ai Building something interesting? Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ · https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas Building Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss. Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks.
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#9
July 14 · 1 hr 17 min
From Plastic Waste to Load-Bearing Walls: The Brick Made Entirely of Trash | Kunjpreet Arora
What if the cheapest — and one of the most polluting — building materials on earth could be replaced by a brick made entirely from the plastic and rubble we throw away? Kunjpreet Arora grew up in Udaipur, the "Lake City of India," watching plastic, marble and construction waste pile up around the lakes and the Aravalli hills. She and her co-founder Lokesh asked a different question — could waste become a resource? That became Angirus, and its product Wricks: a brick made from single-use plastic and construction & demolition waste, built to the exact shape, size and feel of a clay brick so masons don't have to change a thing. We go deep into the material science (plastic as the binder, rubble as the filler, a 1:2:3 ratio borrowed from cement mortar), the "3M" process — mixing, melting, molding — and the reality of building a deep-tech company with "no money, no experience, no mentorship." Kunjpreet explains why builders "buy outcomes, not sustainability," how Wricks turned out accidentally waterproof (its "hero property"), why a builder threw the bricks off a five-storey building to prove they don't break, the ~Rs 8/sq ft saved on plaster, being a young woman in a male-dominated industry, and why Angirus is moving from owning factories to contract manufacturing so a "localized" product can scale. This one is for anyone who has ever looked at a pile of waste and wondered if it could be something else — and anyone building hard, physical things against long odds. ANGIRUS & WRICKS — RECOGNITION & IMPACT • 200,000 Wricks deployed across India • 400+ tons of waste recycled • 100TCO2eq+ avoided • In-house Manufacturing facility operational in Bangalore • 15+ livelihoods created for marginalized communities • Global recognition from Global Citizen × PayPal, Climate-KIC, TiE Global, World Economic forum, Clinton Global Initiatives, and Forbes 30U30 Asia. ABOUT KUNJPREET ARORA Co-founder & CEO of Angirus, building Wricks out of Udaipur. A WEF UpLink Top Innovator and PayPal Small Business Impact Award winner, she led Angirus to 2nd worldwide at the TiE University Global Pitch Competition — one of the few women founders scaling a deep-tech materials company in India's male-dominated construction industry. Connect with Kunjpreet & Angirus: Kunjpreet Arora (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunjpreet-arora-1a9599126/ Angirus (Wricks): https://www.angirusind.com/ Building something interesting? Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ · https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas Building Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss. Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks.
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#8
June 30 · 1 hr 35 min
No Website Existed for His Ladakh Ride. So He's Building the Marketplace | Karthik Srinivasan
India is one of the biggest motorcycle markets on earth — so why is booking a Himalayan ride still done over Instagram DMs and "DM for price"? Karthik Srinivasan is a designer who rediscovered motorcycling later in life, tried to plan a ride to Ladakh, and ended up on 20 different websites because there was no common place to compare tours, schools or stays. So he and his co-founders built one: Everything Motorcycling — a marketplace for motorcycling experiences (tours, riding schools, moto-stays, festivals, parts and races) for a community that has always run on word of mouth and WhatsApp. In this conversation, we get into why an entire industry never organized itself ("it's like asking an artist to do the sales work"), the B2B SaaS backend that replaces the Excel-and-WhatsApp chaos behind India's biggest riding businesses, and the verticals — from "MotoParks" with built-in trails to highway pit-stops designed to stop riders pushing 700km in one dangerous shot. Karthik talks about verifying riders through DigiLocker, the safety culture transforming the sport (breathalyzers and "please don't wear Crocs" texts before group rides), and the push to make a famously masculine, "bikini-bike-wash" industry genuinely inclusive of women and families. He's also refreshingly honest about shipping the entire platform himself with AI tools — saving "easily $100,000" and half a year — and where he believes human judgment still has to sit. This one is for anyone who has a side project quietly turning into the main thing — and anyone curious about how you organize an "unorganized" industry from the inside. Connect with Karthik & Everything Motorcycling: Everything Motorcycling: Everything Motorcycling LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthik-srinivasan-1017128/ Building something interesting? - Reach out to Arjun: Arjun Thomas - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas Building Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss.
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#7
June 16 · 1 hr 22 min
From Scratch to the Paralympics: Building India's Blind Football Team | Sunil Mathew
What does it take to build a national team that beats the best in the world -- with no government funding, no salary, and players who have never seen a football? India had never fielded a blind football team that could trouble the world's powerhouses. Sunil Mathew built one anyway -- starting from a 20-minute demo game and turning it into teams now ranked in the global top five, on a fraction of the budget of the nations they beat. In this conversation, we go inside a sport played entirely without sight -- four totally-blind outfield players, a sighted keeper, a ball with a bell inside, and three voices guiding play -- and the moments that made Sunil's mission: the player offered surgery to restore his sight who turned it down because he "cannot play football without this," the 13-year-old who promised "I will fight for you, I will die for you" before scoring at the World Cup, and the boy who fell from a jackfruit tree and now captains India with a road named after him in his village. We also get a clear-eyed look at the work -- roughly 15 million visually impaired Indians, 75-80% of that blindness preventable, no government funding, and a coach who refuses a salary -- plus how India went from importing footballs from England to manufacturing them in Jalandhar, and the assistive-tech device Sunil is building to catch a fall within the golden hour. This one is for anyone who's been told the odds, the budget, or the obstacles are too big to start. Connect with Sunil & his work: - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunil-j-mathew/ - India's blind football team: The Home of Blind Football in India - Home - SRVC (Sunil's NGO for the visually challenged): SOCIETY FOR REHABILITATION OF THE VISUALLY CHALLENGED - Heart2Heart Orchestra: SOCIETY FOR REHABILITATION OF THE VISUALLY CHALLENGED Building something interesting? - Reach out to Arjun: Arjun Thomas - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas Building Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss. Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks.
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#6
June 2 · 1 hr 27 min
Teaching Young People to Build for Impact, Not Forbes | Supriya Panchangam
Not a teacher. Not an entrepreneur. Not a climate activist. Or maybe all of them at once. What happens when you spend a decade in rooms full of young people and realise the biggest problem isn't their ambition — it's what they've been taught to aim for? If you're Supriya Panchangam, you stop handing out frameworks and start asking harder questions. You build a school that isn't really a school, run a startathon that declares every participant a winner, and try to convince a generation raised on Blinkit and Forbes covers that the most important thing they can build starts with understanding their relationship with the planet. We trace Supriya's path from incubators and program design to founding The Future Founders Co. We talk about the jury moment that broke something in her — watching team after team pitch the same hyperlocal delivery idea, in Bangalore, with every resource available. The ambition was there. The imagination wasn't. We get into the Kardashian-ification of entrepreneurship, what her grandfather — a government school teacher in 1980s India — understood about energy in a classroom that most institutions have forgotten, and what it means to be a "safe adult": the one person in someone's origin story who made them fall in love with an idea. We also go deep on Future Founders' three concentric circles of pro-planet behaviour — from personal habit to campus project to climate venture. Students turning parking lots into solar infrastructure, negotiating ESG roles at Bain, and helping young women shift their habits — not through a campaign, but by bringing a sanitation worker on stage and letting her speak. And the India Sustainability Startathon: 112 teams, 220 exit opportunities, because a mindset shift means nothing without evidence from the world that it matters. This one is for anyone who has felt the gap between what young people are being trained for and what the world actually needs. Supriya Panchangam's Highlights: → Founder of The Future Founders Co., helping young people make pro-planet choices → Creator of the India Sustainability Startathon — 112 teams, 220 exit pathways in 2024 → A decade across entrepreneurship education, incubation, and youth learning programs → Author, artist, and facilitator based in Bengaluru 🔗 Connect with Our Guest Supriya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/supanchangam/ The Future Founders Co.: http://www.thefuturefounders.co 🎙️ Want to be featured on Building Real? Reach out: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ 🤝 Let's connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas
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May 19 · 2 hr 9 min
Can AI Replace Human Creativity? | Vinayak Varma
Not a writer. Not an illustrator. Not a designer. Not a musician. Or maybe all of them at once. What do you do when your creative career refuses to fit into a neat LinkedIn headline? If you’re Vinayak Varma, you stop trying to choose. You write picture books, art-direct science magazines, build beer brands, teach design students, make strange dystopian synth music, and somehow connect all of it through the same underlying creative process. In this episode, we trace Vinayak’s wonderfully strange creative arc - from defining himself as a design generalist, to building Brainwave, a science magazine for kids that tried to turn textbooks into time machines, tapeworm zombies, detective stories, flying machines, invisible light, and child versions of Einstein and Aryabhata. We get into the messy business of making science fun without making it wrong, why distribution killed great magazines before Instagram ever had a chance to save them, and why a children’s science magazine was really a startup hiding inside a publishing house. We also talk about Angry Akku, Vinayak’s deceptively simple picture book about a child dealing with anger, how it found its way into classrooms, reading campaigns, and eventually the Nobel Museum orbit, and why the most “utilitarian” creative work can sometimes travel the furthest. Later, we move into design education, the explosion of design schools in India, the vanishing apprenticeship layer for young designers, and the uncomfortable question of what generative AI does to process, originality, livelihood, and the next generation’s ability to think. This one is for anyone who has ever struggled to describe what they do, tried to make complex ideas accessible, built creative work for children, worried about AI eating the messy middle of creation, or wondered whether the best work comes from freedom, constraints, or some strange argument between the two. This is a LONG one, so if you’re jumping in for a specific thread, we broadly move through four big arcs: → Storytelling and science from [13:40] → Angry Akku from [1:13:35], → AI and the future of human creative work from [1:35:07] → And finally creativity and authenticity from [1:45:19], Vinayak Varma’s Highlights: → Author-illustrator of The Sunshower Song, Angry Akku, Jadav and the Tree-Place, and more → Founding editor and art director of Brainwave, a science magazine for young readers → Editor of the science fiction anthology Strange Worlds! Strange Times! → Recipient of The Hindu Young World-Goodbooks Award and the Publishing Next Digital Book of the Year Award → Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the BSFA Award → Former Brand Custodian at Geist Brewing Company during its first six years → Makes strange, dystopian synth-driven soundscapes as Moral Panic Button 🔗 Connect with Our Guest Vinayak Varma’s work: https://mixtape.in/brainwave-illustrations Instagram / Moral Panic Button: https://www.instagram.com/moralpanicbutton/ 🎙️ Want to be featured on Building Real? Reach out: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ 🤝 Let's connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas
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#4
May 5 · 1 hr 10 min
The Man Who Found Poison In Your Curtains | Nanda Kumar
Not a polyester curtain, not a fast-fashion home brand. Just cotton, two founders from Tamil Nadu, and a vision to build India's next 100-year legacy brand. What do you do when you move into a new home, go looking for natural fiber curtains, and realise that 95% of the Indian market is plastic? If you're Nandakumar and Abhinaya — a couple with 16 years of FMCG experience and an FP&A brain between them — you go visit the factories yourself, buy fabric nobody is selling locally, furnish your own house, and quietly start wondering why no one has done this properly yet. That question became The Yellow Dwelling. In this episode, we trace the full arc — from selling to friends and family out of a curated stash, to local exhibitions in Bangalore where return visitors started outnumbering first-timers, to launching their first store in Hennur in 2019, scaling through COVID (yes, growing through COVID), and eventually building a custom tech platform that more than doubled their conversion rates and average order value. We get into the microplastics problem nobody talks about, why 95% of Indian home textile is polyblend and who benefits from keeping it that way, and the single customer complaint about Bangalore traffic that accidentally unlocked their most powerful sales channel. We also get into what it actually means to run a business as a married couple, and how two very different risk appetites can become a genuine competitive advantage. This one is for anyone building a brand in a traditional category, thinking about the long game, or trying to figure out how to sell something people don't yet know they need. The Yellow Dwelling's Highlights: → Bootstrapped from zero to 8 stores across 5 Indian cities — profitable every single month → Conversion rate doubled from 20% to 50% and average order value more than doubled — after building their own tech platform → 30% repeat purchase rate in a category most people buy once every few years → 100% natural fiber, zero-bleed, zero-shrink — priced on par with premium polyblend → Featured in Vogue India, Good Homes India, and Architect & Interiors India 🔗 Connect with Our Guest Nanda Kumar (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/nanda3081/ The Yellow Dwelling: https://theyellowdwelling.com/ 🎙️ Want to be featured on Building Real? Reach out: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ 🤝 Let's connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas
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April 21 · 52 min
He Left Tech to Fix Mental Health Infrastructure in SE Asia | Barry Ooi
Not another wellness app. This one started with a loved one's struggle. For Barry Ooi — economist turned fashion founder, data analytics entrepreneur, and corporate venture builder — the industries changed constantly. As he puts it, he went wherever the wind blew. But the one constant running underneath it all was watching a loved one navigate depression, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder: the exhausting cycle of finding the wrong therapist, starting over, reopening old wounds, never feeling like they'd found the right kind of help. In this episode, we dig into how that lived experience became Chengal, a one-stop clinical mental health centre that deliberately broke every convention in Malaysian healthcare — from irreverent social media that makes psychiatrists look human, to being the only clinic in the country publicly declaring itself queer-affirming, to building a multidisciplinary team where a psychiatrist, an art therapist, and a life coach sit in the same room with no hierarchy. We cover the regulatory landmines of building in healthcare versus tech, the founder who takes anxiety medication and openly says so, and what it actually means to build a business where kindness isn't a culture initiative — it's the entire product. For founders, the second half is a masterclass in finding your unfair advantage when you have none. Jump straight to the start if you want the personal origin story — how a decade of watching someone you love struggle eventually becomes the clearest brief you've ever been given. The anti-hustle, anti-tech, deeply personal mental health story. Chengal's Highlights: → Profitable by Month 4 of operations → Only psychiatric centre in Malaysia publicly queer-affirming → Clients across Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and the Middle East → ~30% student clientele — reaching the most underserved demographic → Next step: inpatient care facility to fill the gap between institutions and full independence 🔗 Connect with Our Guest Barry Ooi (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryooi Chengal Centre: https://chengalcentre.com WhatsApp / Appointments: +603-5633 8386 🎙️ Want to be featured on Building Real? Reach out: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ 🤝 Let's connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas
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#2
April 7 · 1 hr 18 min
He Got Deported. Then Built Airbnb's #1 Culinary Experience | Dhruv Shanker
Not a restaurant, not a food-tech startup. Just a balcony, four aunties, and the world's highest-rated cooking experience. What do you do when a startup folds, immigration botches your paperwork, and you find yourself locked out of Singapore for five months — no job, no income, and a lease you can't escape? For Dhruv Shanker — former Alibaba exec (Lazada, Daraaz), Groupon marketer, and obsessive home cook — the answer was to open a cooking class on his balcony. A deliberately, defiantly "boring" cooking class that Airbnb literally tried to reject. In this episode, we unpack how Dhruv runs two wildly different businesses — CashCounter (e-commerce enablement for brands entering Southeast Asia) and Boring Indian Food (private dining, cooking classes, catering). We get into the AI playbook he uses on Lazada and Shopee, the K-pop hot sauce story that explains Asian e-commerce, and the guests who've walked through his door: a drug lord's private chef, a blind guest who cooked an entire meal unaided, and a nine-months pregnant woman who just needed Gongura chicken. The first half is for anyone building a business on marketplaces — Dhruv draws on years inside Alibaba, Lazada, Groupon and Google to break down what separates great e-commerce sellers from everyone else. If food, people, and what happens when real passion meets a real crisis is more your thing, jump straight to [40:37] — that's where the story gets personal. The anti-restaurant story that hit 10,000 guests without a single table. Dhruv's Highlights: → Airbnb's highest-rated culinary experience in the world — perfect 5.0 stars, 100+ reviews → 10,000+ guests hosted across 8 years of private dining in Singapore → Featured in SG60 — one of 60 remarkable people in Singapore → 2 years of forward bookings filled in a single night after Airbnb's global campaign 🔗 Connect with Our Guest Dhruv Shanker (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/madonionslicer/ Mad Onion Slicer: https://www.madonionslicer.com Instagram / All platforms: @madonionslicer 🎙️ Want to be featured on Building Real? Reach out: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ 🤝 Let's connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas
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#1
March 31 · 1 hr 10 min
The Dirtiest Problem No One Wanted to Solve | Tharun Kumar
Not another AI startup — this is deep tech that runs on bacteria. What do you do when your apartment's "sewage treatment plant" overflows and you discover it's just a fake tank dumping raw waste into a lake? For Tharun Kumar — former IT architect behind India's Aadhaar system — that crisis became EcoSTP: a sewage treatment system inspired by a cow's stomach that runs on zero power, zero chemicals, and almost no human intervention. In this episode, we dig into how Tharun left corporate IT to spend a decade "in deep shit," why 100-year-old STP technology never evolved, and how EcoSTP uses anaerobic bacteria and biomimicry to let some clients reuse the same water over 1,000 times. We cover the jargon wall that protected a broken industry for a century, the regulator who first banned his tech and then became his case study, and what it took to scale a licensing model across 24 Indian states plus Bangladesh and the Maldives — all managed from Bangalore. If the business model and scale story is what you're here for, the whole episode delivers. If you want to jump straight to the science — how cow stomachs inspired a zero-energy treatment system — head to [10:17]. That's where it gets fascinating. A cleantech and circular economy story that started with a real crisis. Not a pitch deck. EcoSTP's Impact: → 8 billion litres of water reclaimed → 12,000 tons of coal avoided (no energy-hungry aeration) → Startup India's "Most Circular Innovator" — pitched to the Prime Minister of India → Phenol-eating bacteria research underway at IIT Jammu — a shot at drinking-quality water from sewage 🔗 Connect with Our Guest Tharun Kumar (LinkedIn): https://linkedin.com/in/tharun/ EcoSTP: https://ecostp.com/ 🎙️ Want to be featured on Building Real? Reach out: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ 🤝 Let's connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas
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