Founders Office @ Shifu

Sri and Prateek had already been in the trenches together. Prateek was an early employee at Almabase, the B2B SaaS company Sri had co-founded and bootstrapped into a profitable category leader, now approaching $10M in ARR. They'd seen firsthand what it takes to build from India to the world. The late nights, the first 10 customers, the grind of enterprise sales, the loneliness of the founder journey.

Then life happened. Sri stepped down from Almabase. Prateek moved on. A year later, they found each other again, both itching to build something together. And that's when one question kept coming up:

But at Almabase, Sri had also noticed a pattern. Founders across India were building genuinely good products. Real technology, solving real problems. But they were struggling with GTM. They didn't have the go-to-market muscle, the fundraising networks, or the operational playbooks to take a good product and turn it into a growing business. The product was there. The demand was often there. But the engine to scale was missing.

Almabase had cracked the code to go from 0 to $1M and $1M to $10M. Bootstrapped, capital efficient. The question was: could that playbook be repeated? For hundreds of companies?

To find out, they hit the road.

For nine months, they traveled across India. Not a vacation. Not a "finding myself" trip. A full-blown Yatra. City after city, meeting hundreds and hundreds of founders and thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs. Small towns, big cities, college campuses, co-working spaces, chai stalls. Anywhere someone was trying to build something.

And in those conversations, sitting across tables from founders who were brilliant but stuck, the clarity hit.

Two things became obvious:

A gap we knew how to fill. That's why we built Shifu Ventures.

There are playbooks out there. Companies have scaled to $10M ARR before. The knowledge exists. But knowing that you need to nail ABM, or hire a VP of Sales, or build an outbound engine, and actually knowing how to do it, are two very different things. A VC might tell a founder to go hire a great VP of Sales. But who helps that founder figure out what "great" even looks like for their stage? Who helps them structure the hiring process, set the right targets, build the motion that the VP walks into?

That gap, between knowing what needs to happen and knowing how to make it happen, is where most founders get stuck. Not because they lack ambition or capital, but because they've never done it before at this level.

Sri and Prateek had. And more than that, they loved it. The zero-to-one grind. The first customer, the first outbound sequence that actually worked, the first enterprise deal closed. That was their mojo. Going back into that with founders, again and again, wasn't a sacrifice. It was exactly what they wanted to do.

Why $10M ARR? Because it's one of the most meaningful milestones in a company's life. At $10M ARR in ~6 years, built capital-efficiently, the founder retains real ownership, real optionality, and real wealth. They're not diluted into irrelevance by 5 rounds of funding. They're not beholden to a board that wants a 100× return or nothing. They have a profitable, growing business that they control, and from there, they can choose to keep compounding, raise strategically, or exit on their own terms. That's a beautiful outcome. And we want to help build hundreds of them.

The vision became clear: build hundreds of Almabases. From India, to the world. That became Shifu Ventures, a venture studio with one mission: 100 Companies → 100 Crores in Revenue.

The India we saw. The one that became Shifu Foundation.

The startup ecosystem has a concentration problem. Most of the capital, attention, and inspiration flows to five cities, maybe fewer. The assumption, spoken or not, is that great tech companies come from metros.

The Yatra broke that assumption completely.

In Nellore, they met Bhanu, a solopreneur doing $15K MRR, single-person team, who eventually sold his company for ~$250K. In Bokaro, they met Vikash, building Bulk Mockup, doing ₹15 lakhs in monthly revenue. In Kakching, a small town in Manipur, they found another entrepreneur quietly building something remarkable. Or in Bhopal, someone quietly doing a 200Cr business.

These weren't stories you'd hear at a startup conference. They were coming from districts a VC might never think to visit, and yet the builders were there, figuring it out with no ecosystem, no mentors, and no one telling them it was even possible.

What struck Sri and Prateek wasn't just the stories. It was the question those stories raised: if one person from Bokaro could do this, what could ten more aspiring founders from that same district do? What happens when a student in Kakching sees someone from their own world build and exit a company, and thinks, if they can do it, even I can?

India has 780 districts. Shifu Foundation's vision is simple: one tech entrepreneur from every single one of them. Not just the metros. Not just the top tier cities. Every district.

Today, with AI, a founder in Bhopal has access to the same tools as a founder in Bangalore. The moat of the metro is shrinking. What's still missing is inspiration and a support system that meets them where they are. That's why Shifu Foundation was born.

Two companies. One Yatra. One conviction.

We help founders win the valley of death. Not with advice from a distance. Not with a cheque and a quarterly board meeting. With real, hands-on co-building across GTM, Product, Fundraising, Hiring, and Ops, until they reach $10M+ ARR sustainably.

We're not a VC. We're not an accelerator. We co-build.

Traditional VCs write cheques and wait. Traditional accelerators onboard 100+ companies a year with surface-level involvement, high-level guidance, cohorts, demo days, advisory-led support. They follow the power-law model: chase unicorns by design. That works for some founders, but not for most.

We do it completely differently.

We work with only 4–5 companies a year, because we go deep. We don't do cohorts. We don't do demo days. We co-execute with founders across the most critical functions from day one, getting into the depth of things, rolling up our sleeves, and helping them figure out everything from ICP research to closing their first $100K deal.

Our northstar isn't a billion-dollar valuation. It's building capital-efficient businesses to $10M ARR, profitable, sustainable, and founder-controlled.

What are we building? And why?

Our first 10 portfolio companies are Outcome-as-a-Service (OaaS) businesses, and that's a deliberate choice.

Traditional services businesses have always been hard to scale. Low margins, manual execution, and growth tied directly to headcount. AI changes that equation. For the first time, services can be delivered with software-like leverage, where the work is powered by AI, not just people.

Instead of selling tools to help customers do the work, these companies use AI internally to deliver the outcome end-to-end, and charge accordingly. Think: a design firm producing finished creative before a contract is signed, or a legal firm drafting documents in minutes instead of weeks.

These businesses won't look like agencies. They'll look like software companies, with ~80% gross margins and ~20% net margins. That's the kind of company we co-build.

We start with OaaS because these companies compound fast, serve the broader Shifu ecosystem from day one, and prove the co-building playbook that we'll then apply across 100 companies over our lifetime.

The Shifu Philosophy: Shifu to the Panda

If you've watched Kung Fu Panda, you know. Shifu doesn't just give Po a pep talk and send him off. He gets into the training with him. Hands dirty, pushing, correcting, demonstrating. And as Po grows, Shifu steps back.

That's exactly how we work. In the early years, we're deep in the trenches, operating alongside founders, sitting in their standups, helping close deals, building their GTM playbooks, hiring their first team members. We're not advisors watching from the sidelines. We're in the ring.

As PortCos mature and build their own muscle, we gradually shift from operator to guide, always available, but no longer running the plays. The goal is always the same: make the founder self-sufficient, not dependent.

Paul Graham looked at thousands of successful founders and tried to find the one thing they all had in common. Not intelligence. Not pedigree. Not domain expertise. Just two words: relentlessly resourceful.

Not merely relentless, that's just grinding. And not merely resourceful, that's just clever. The magic is in the combination: someone who hits a wall and doesn't just push harder, but finds a completely different way around it. Someone who doesn't know the answer but figures it out anyway. Someone who treats every obstacle as a puzzle, not a dead end.

That's exactly who we're looking for in the Founder's Office.

This is an entrepreneurial role. It is not a "job" in the traditional sense. There's no fixed playbook. No one's going to hand you a task list every morning. You'll need to look at Shifu and its PortCos, see what needs to happen, and make it happen, the way a founder would.

The depth is in AI and GTM. The breadth is in everything else a founder would do. That's what makes this a Founder's Office, not a function, but a way of operating.

Culture is the foundation of everything we're building at Shifu.

We're intentionally staying small. 10–15 people at most. Building a tight-knit team of long-term thinkers who care deeply about craft, character, and sustainable company-building. This isn't a company that's going to bloat to 200 people. Every person at Shifu matters. Every person shapes the culture.

We live by five core values. They're painted on our office wall. They show up in how we make decisions, how we treat each other, and how we build companies.

₹24–30L CTC per annum.

Generous ESOPs. You'll be the first Founder's Office hire at Shifu. In a team that's intentionally staying at 10–15 people even a decade from now, every person holds real weight. The ESOPs reflect that. You're not employee #200 at a company that'll dilute you into irrelevance. You're one of the first people building this, and your equity will reflect the value of that.