A phone, a microphone and a Wednesday release schedule. Six years on, an outside publication has put our founder’s story on record and landed on the question our whole business turns on.
The Entrepreneur Post, a publication that covers Indian startups and the founders behind them, has published a profile of our founder, Rajan Nazran. It covers ground we rarely put on record ourselves: two decades of travel across more than 70 countries, the media career he walked away from, the month GIN nearly stopped, and why we still refuse to judge ourselves on member count.
We are sharing it here for a reason beyond the obvious one. The piece arrives at a conclusion we have been arguing internally for years. GIN’s product was never the content.
Disconnection is a commercial problem, not a sentimental one
Rajan’s starting observation was simple enough that it is easy to miss. Indian communities abroad tend to operate in isolation from each other. A founder in London has no working line to a founder in Singapore. A business community in Suriname has no relationship with its equivalent in Lebanon. Everyone has the same origin story and almost none of the same contacts.
The profile records a second gap. Policymakers in India don’t always read the diaspora accurately, and parts of the diaspora don’t read contemporary India accurately either. Two groups with an obvious shared interest, talking past each other.
Translate that into business terms, and it stops sounding cultural. No relationships means no trust. No trust means longer deal cycles, failed market entries, capital that stays where it is, and partnerships that die in the introduction stage. That framing is what GIN is built on. We are not in the business of celebrating the diaspora. We are in the business of shortening the distance between people who should already know one another.
A phone, a microphone and a Wednesday
The profile is honest about how small the start was, and we appreciate that. There was no studio and no product roadmap. During the pandemic, with travel gone and the consulting work with it, Rajan began calling people he already knew from twenty years on the road: heads of state, ministers, chief executives, community leaders. He published on Wednesdays and sent the episodes out over WhatsApp.
That archive now includes more than 300 conversations across 18 shows, in a network that touches 49 countries and counting. People tend to react to the volume. The number that matters to us is different: every one of those conversations was a relationship before it was an episode. The archive is not a content library. It is a map of who picks up the phone.
For partners, that distinction is the proposition. Anyone can buy an audience. Very few organisations can open a door in Kampala, Kuala Lumpur and Kingston in the same week and have the person on the other side already know the name.
The December that almost ended it
The section most founders will recognise is the one about money. Rajan told his wife that if a contract had not landed by December, he would stop. It arrived two or three days before Christmas. Then it turned out to be worth considerably less than he had expected, and he went back to the drawing board.
We could have asked for that part to be left out. We didn’t, because polished founder stories are useless to people in our network who are three months away from the same decision. Belief in the idea and a real risk of running out of money are not contradictions. They sit together in almost every business worth building.
Why we speak to applicants before they join
On membership, the profile puts a position on record that costs us revenue in the short term. Scale alone does not produce a community. We review every GIN application, and Rajan speaks with the applicant before admitting them.
It is slower, more expensive to run, and the only version that works. The value of a network to any individual member is the quality of everyone else inside it. Admit people whose reasons for joining have nothing to do with each other, and you do not get a larger network; you get a quieter one. Our members join for introductions, market entry, and co-investors and partners they couldn’t source at a conference. That only holds if we are strict at the door.
The media question sitting underneath all of this
Rajan spent years in media before GIN and became disillusioned with it. His criticism in the profile is blunt: attention often goes to people with access, while people with genuine knowledge or lived experience go unheard.
That is not a grievance; it is an editorial policy. That is why our shows have covered autism, domestic violence, and other subjects that don’t trend, alongside trade and investment. It is also why guests who decline other invitations accept ours, and that is an asset no advertising budget buys.
Why independent coverage matters to our commercial work
We want this profile in circulation for practical reasons. GIN sits in conversations with governments, development institutions, banks and corporates. In those rooms, our own material can only carry so much weight, because everyone understands that we wrote it.
When a bank in East Africa or a ministry weighing a partnership looks us up, the deck is not the first thing they read. What other people have written about us is. A profile that reports the near-failure alongside the growth is far more useful to us in that moment than a flattering one would be, because it reads as journalism rather than marketing. Credibility of that kind compounds quietly, and it is doing work for us long before anyone gets on a call.
The question we are being judged on
The Entrepreneur Post ends with a fair test. GIN has earned an audience through media and credibility through the conversations. The harder task now is turning years of trust into a network valuable enough that people do not simply follow it, but want to belong to it. That is a bigger bet than building another community, and we agree with the framing.
It’s also the test we set ourselves. Rajan’s advice to anyone building in this space, quoted in the piece, is the standard we are held to internally:
“Build something of substance, build something with integrity.”
The question he puts to other community founders is the one we answer every week. Not how many people are in it, but who it is for and what difference it makes. For us, the answer hasn’t changed: it is for Indians and people of Indian origin trying to build something across borders, and the difference is the introduction that would otherwise have taken them three years to make on their own.
If that describes a network you want to be inside, applications are open. And yes, we will want to speak with you first.
Read the full profile in The Entrepreneur Post: https://www.theentrepreneurpost.in/p/rajan-nazran-global-indian-network
