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After spending roughly three years working across the entrepreneurship and venture ecosystem in India, I realized it was time to finally put pen to paper about why I choose to be in venture capital. And here, I want to potray my unfiltered, irrational reasons, not the polished, rational ones I usually speak about for the sake of brevity or interviews.

What follows is an attempt to articulate that pull toward the ecosystem.

Aman Jaiswal

10 January 2026

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In early 2026, I began developing real conviction about my career trajectory- where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do to get there. It was a period marked by both clarity and excitement. While that sense of direction crystallized at the start of the year, my conviction around why I wanted to build a career in venture capital emerged more gradually, through a series of moments. Some were significant- like experiencing an Investment Committee (IC) meeting with a venture fund as a startup; others were unexpectedly small- like reading Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby, feeling my heart race, and experiencing a sense of excitement.

In the next few paragraphs, I have tried to segregate different phases of my career during which I slowly built conviction for a career in venture capital. This conviction did not develop in a straight line, nor are these phases mutually exclusive. Each phase is an amalgamation of hundreds of micro-events that both led to, and followed from, one another.

Broadly, the first phase captures when I began absorbing the concept of venture capital through others around me; the second reflects a period where I tried my hand at the craft, struggled, and failed- but in a way that was deeply energizing; and the third is when I truly fell in love with the process of venture capital operations itself. Taken together, these phases are meant to be read as parts of a whole, each revealing a different layer of how this conviction ultimately formed.

Phase 1 of Conviction

I am an automobile engineer by background who moved to Bengaluru in 2021, during the COVID period, purely by chance. Like many others, I fell in love with the city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. If you have lived in the city or read *Unboxing Bengaluru by Malini Goyal and Prashanth Prakash*, you will recognize the city as a hotspot for serendipitous encounters and unlikely collaborations. Combine that with a young population leveraging technology to solve problems, alongside a wave of first-generation entrepreneurs mentoring and passing the batton, and you have the perfect recipie for innovation. That, in many ways, became my story as well.

Serendipitiously, I met a group of passionate individuals in the climate technology space with whom I went on to build Carbonstrong- what was, at the time, just a vision. The entrepreneurial journey naturally brought me closer to the wider ecosystem and multiple events occurred during that stage of life, but the story goes all the way back to the origins of my first meaningful personal exposure to venture capital. It was meeting Ashish Goel, an angel investor in the climate technology space. He was the founder and CEO of Urban Ladder, who had a successful venture exit to Reliance, and he was now giving back to the entrepreneurial ecosystem- specifically in a domain my team and I were deeply passionate about. We were lucky enough to onboard him as an advisor at Carbonstrong, and for the next stage, we engaged with him regularly.

Working with someone like Ashish is a masterclass in entrepreneurship. You could see his curiosity and passion about climate tech businesses clearly. A serial entrepreneur turned investor does not just bring capital and networks to the table- they bring empathy: empathy for the entrepreneur. That quality was unmistakable in Ashish. By then, he had already invested in multiple climate tech startups and was actively building his own personal ecosystem of climate entrepreneurs and investors. He would meet founders and teams like ours, and if he felt there was a strong missionary intent, he would come onboard- collaborate, share his network, and supercharge the startup’s journey. Thats what he did for us.

As our team identified and validated a market whitespace in the concrete industry and began a fundraising roadshow, we travelled to Gurugram to meet Huddle Ventures and attend an IC meeting for a potential investment in CarbonStrong. By then, we had met several venture capitalists, but this IC meeting turned out to be impactful in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. Vishesh Khurana from Shiprocket was part of the IC who we were pitching to. As we pitched, he took notes on his iPad. Through a series of questions and back-and-forth discussions, he broke our business down to its fundamentals and pinpointed the exact levers that would make or break it.

I was dumbfounded! Here we were, having spent months building and understanding the business, and this person walked in, grasped it at a fundamental level, and offered feedback that was priceless. That moment became my benchmark for clarity and business rigor. That was the first time a spark truly ignited in me, the realization that this is what I want to do. To be that person. Someone with the clarity not just to analyze a business, but to form strong, well-reasoned opinions around it. ****We spoke to over 30 VC funds, and some eventually invested in us. But that IC meeting left an impression deeper than any of the others.