Building Real
Building Real explores how companies, restaurants, labs, careers, and side projects actually get built, without the polished highlight reel. Each episode is an unscripted conversation with founders, operators, educators, scientists, restaurateurs, investors, and others in the middle of building something. Guests discuss doubts, trade-offs, and decisions that rarely appear in funding announcements or LinkedIn posts. They share how they find worthwhile problems, test ideas, hire, manage money and time, and handle failure, burnout, and luck. The show offers practical insight into product, markets, teams, and personal resilience through specific stories rather than generic advice.
Episodes
A Million Players in the Real World, Across 1,000 Cities. Then He Walked Away. | Claudiu Petria
Why would you walk away from something a million people love?Claudiu Petria was born at home in a Romanian village of four houses. At eight, he told his father to choose between school and the goats. His father sold the goats. Claudiu went to high school in "Hackerville", turned down a crew of scammers, and talked his way into advertising by asking too many questions. Then he co-founded Questo, a
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
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
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
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 c
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 be
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: Eve
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 th
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
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 thr
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 betwe
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 disorde
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 hom
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, a
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