How Mumbai Trained Me for Founder Poverty in Australia

Living in Mumbai did not make me rich.

It did something far more useful: it removed the illusion that anyone was coming to save me.

Mumbai teaches you early that scarcity is not an emergency state—it is the default operating system. You learn to move, negotiate, improvise, and persist inside constraints that never apologize for existing. Nothing is abstract. If something breaks, you fix it. If you don’t have money, you substitute effort. If effort fails, you substitute relationships. If relationships fail, you substitute time. You always substitute something.

That is founder training.

In Mumbai, people with almost nothing still treat builders like they matter. Not because they are naïve, but because hope is a collective survival strategy. Faith isn’t a branding exercise; it’s a functional tool. When the system offers no guarantees, belief becomes infrastructure.

Australia, by contrast, is wealthy enough to outsource belief to institutions.

Here, skill is abundant, capital is concentrated, and risk is considered a lifestyle choice rather than a necessity. People are competent, comfortable, and deeply allergic to uncertainty. They don’t hate entrepreneurs—they simply don’t need them.

That difference is everything.

In Mumbai, an entrepreneur is someone trying to escape gravity.

In Australia, an entrepreneur is someone voluntarily leaving a well-lit room.

The poor with faith will back you with nothing but encouragement, introductions, and prayers—because they understand asymmetric upside. They know one win can lift ten families. They don’t ask for proof first; they ask what you need.

The rich with low faith ask for proof that already looks like success—traction, customers, revenue, validation from someone they already respect. In other words: they want you after the hard part is over.

This is why slumming it works.

Slumming it strips away the polite lies. It removes the soft buffers. It puts you back into an environment where progress is measured by motion, not perception. You stop optimizing for approval and start optimizing for survival. You build things that work because they must, not because they photograph well.

Highly skilled populations tend to confuse risk avoidance with intelligence.

Low skilled populations understand that risk avoidance is a luxury.

So when you show up with nothing but an idea and the will to suffer for it, the poor say:

“Good. Suffering means you’re serious.”

The comfortable say:

“Come back when this looks safer.”

Mumbai trained me to ignore the second group entirely.

It taught me that entrepreneurship is not about funding—it’s about tolerance for prolonged humiliation in service of a future that only you can see. It taught me that faith compounds faster than capital, and that belief from people who have nothing is often worth more than money from people who have everything to lose.

Running a startup with no funders and no local interest isn’t a failure mode.

It’s a familiar one.

It’s just Mumbai—without the chai, the chaos, or the honesty.

And that’s fine.

Because founders aren’t made in boardrooms.

They’re made in places where quitting is cheaper than continuing—and you continue anyway.

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