Conviction beats location. So we started in a Tier 3 city.
Ongole Founders Club is a weekly meetup for people building from Ongole and the towns around it. No fee, no application, no pitch deck required. We started it because the assumption that you must leave home for a big tech city to build anything serious is wrong, and the only way to prove a thing like that is to keep showing up on Sunday mornings.
Where it stands
What actually happens
Two hours on a Sunday morning. Anyone who wants to pitch, pitches — an idea, a running business, a problem they are stuck on. The rest of the room asks the questions a founder does not enjoy being asked, which is the point of the room.
Who turns up
Founders with revenue, students with an idea and no company, shop owners going online for the first time, and people who came to listen. We have never turned anyone away for being too early.
What we do beyond the room
Money, where it moves something
Some of the businesses that come through the club we now back ourselves. Small amounts, early, where the money changes what happens next rather than sitting in an account.
Engineering, where the idea is real
A founder who needs a working product and cannot yet hire an engineer can get one from us. We have built for club members at cost or for nothing when the thing deserved to exist.
Advice, without the performance
Mostly this is telling someone the thing they already suspect but have not said out loud. It is the cheapest useful thing we give away and often the most valuable.
Introductions
More than 140 people have passed through. A meaningful share of what the club produces is one of them knowing another one exists.
Why Ongole
Because somebody has to be first
Ongole is a Tier 3 city. There is no ready-made ecosystem here to plug into, which means anything that exists has to be built. That is exactly why we started. Expanding to Hyderabad does not change why the club exists here — Ongole still needs its own room, so we keep showing up.
In collaboration
The club runs together with Ongole Talkies and Dattu Sree Hari Mudragada. It sits alongside MasterNext rather than inside it — the businesses that come through owe us nothing and are not obliged to become customers of anything.
We hire people who want to build whole products — not tickets.
Every engineer here spends 80% of their time building and 20% teaching what they've learned. You will own things end to end, in Ongole — still our home base as we expand into Hyderabad.
See open roles