पाठ Pāṭh. The guide.

A lesson from the Founder Library, with a figure you can move. Written as the house.

• Should you raise at all? — Venture capital is the right fuel for a small number of companies and the wrong one for most. Nine questions decide which you are, and the answer changes with the month. 10 October 2026
• Incorporating in India: private limited, LLP or OPC, and what DPIIT recognition gets you — The entity you register in week one decides who can invest in year three. The choice is simpler than the forms suggest, and the forms are simpler than they were. 10 October 2026
• Burn multiple and the discipline of efficient growth — One number that says what a crore of burn is buying: net burn divided by net new recurring revenue. Why it caught every kind of waste at once, and why India learned it the hard way after 2022. 10 October 2026
• Growth rate is the only number that matters early — At seed, revenue is small by definition. The rate at which it compounds is the one figure that predicts what the company becomes, and the one figure a founder can manage week by week. 10 October 2026
• Vesting and the co-founder cliff — Vesting is the clause co-founders skip because they trust each other. It exists for the day one of them leaves. The standard schedule, the acceleration terms to refuse, and how Indian ESOP rules actually work. 10 October 2026
• Dilution: a cap table you can touch — Every round sells a share of the company equal to money raised over post-money, and everyone who was already there shrinks by the same factor. That one sentence, and what it does to founders over three rounds. 10 October 2026
• Runway: how many months you really have — Cash divided by burn is the answer to the wrong question. The right one is whether the company is default alive, and the date by which you must know. 10 October 2026
• CAC, LTV and payback: the three numbers that decide whether you should grow — What it costs to win a customer, what that customer returns in gross profit, and how many months until the first number is repaid. Get these three honest before you spend a rupee on growth. 10 October 2026
• What product-market fit looks like in the numbers — Product-market fit is not a feeling. It is a retention curve that flattens above zero and a survey in which forty per cent of users would be very disappointed to lose you. Both can be measured this month. 10 October 2026
• The customer interview, done properly — Most founders have already done twenty customer interviews and learned nothing from them, because they pitched, asked about the future and talked. Here is the protocol that produces evidence instead. 10 October 2026
• Market sizing an investor will believe — A market is a count of people who could pay, multiplied by what one pays a year. The rest is a claim about how many you can reach and win, and investors read that claim, not the big number. 10 October 2026
• How to tell a problem from a complaint — Every customer will complain. Very few have a problem they are already paying to solve. The difference is four questions, and most startup ideas die because nobody asked them. 10 October 2026