This is something that really pains me.
Most Indian D2C “founders” today are not risk-takers.
They are risk-avoiders who accidentally became founders.
And that is exactly why most of them will never build something meaningful.
And, don’t get me wrong. Safety isn’t bad. It’s just not how great companies are built.
Early founders were forced to take risks just to exist.
You needed:
0 to 1 was painful, messy & uncertain.
Today?
You can:
Which is exactly why everyone is doing it.
But a low barrier to entry also means high noise and low differentiation.
And when something feels safe to enter, the average risk appetite of entrants drops.
Yes, starting a brand is easier.
Scaling one isn’t.
Building something that lasts?
Something people remember?
Much harder than before.
Why?
Because if 100,000 brands can do the same thing, then doing the same thing is no longer a strategy.
Innovation is the only edge left.
You cannot innovate without being early, uncomfortable, wrong in public, or misunderstood at first.
And that’s exactly what most founders are now avoiding.
Earlier, risk lived in:
Now, risk lives in:
This is far more psychological than financial.
And most founders have never been trained for it.
But that’s the thing about being a founder - nobody “trains” you for things. You should not need playbooks. You should be willing to Christopher Columbus it.
Also - don’t get me wrong - i’m not saying don’t follow playbooks. They are an essential boon for modern founders to speed up things. Just saying that that’s not the only thing you must be doing. You cannot be dependent on existing playbooks.
We hear it in the questions they ask:
That mindset is fine… if your goal is to survive.
But survival is not growth.
Growth comes from asymmetry.
From bets where upside massively outweighs downside.
And those bets feel scary before they work.
This is the part that sounds counterintuitive but is absolutely true.
Because:
You cannot afford to be conservative.
Risk needs to show up everywhere:
If there is any part of your business where you’re not taking a risk, someone else is.
And they will outgrow you.
Indian founders don’t become risk-averse by accident.
We’re conditioned into it.
For decades, risk was punished in this country, not rewarded.
Colonial rule stripped people of economic agency. Post-independence scarcity made survival the priority. Stability became virtue. Government jobs became the gold standard. Predictable income > upside. Safety > ambition.
Entire generations were trained to optimise for not losing, not for winning.
Yes, there has always been a business class in India where risk-taking was inherited. Trading families. Industrialists. Communities where uncertainty was normal and upside thinking was part of the bloodline. They still exist.
But the new wave of founders mostly doesn’t come from there.
Most modern D2C founders come from:
So when these people become entrepreneurs, they don’t suddenly shed that wiring.
They carry it with them.
The only reason many of them became founders in the first place is because the cost of entry dropped.
Shopify. China sourcing. Agencies. Playbooks. Ads.
If starting a brand today required the same pain, uncertainty, and capital it did 10–15 years ago, 80–90% of these brands would not exist.
So now you have something strange:
People who are entrepreneurs by role…
but risk-averse by conditioning.
And this is where investors enter the picture.
Instead of correcting this mindset, the Indian investment ecosystem quietly exploits it.
Investors here largely optimise for:
Very few reward bold bets that look messy before they work.
So founders, especially first-generation ones, respond predictably.
If you’ve never seen ₹2 crore in your bank account and suddenly an investor wires it in, you don’t think in asymmetry. You think in protection. You stop challenging. You stop experimenting. You start pleasing.
Challenging your investor is a risk.
Running counter-intuitive strategy is a risk.
Explaining volatility is a risk.
So founders default to obedience.
At that point, how different is this from a job?
You took a risk to get funded.
Then you spend the next three years avoiding risk so you don’t lose what you raised.
That’s the real tragedy.
Here’s where things get even more dangerous.
Most founders who do take a big 0 to 1 risk don’t fail at courage.
They fail at preserving risk culture as the company grows.
The moment you move from 1 to 10, risk doesn’t disappear - it gets delegated.
Decision-making shifts from founder to:
And this is where risk quietly dies.
Because this layer is not optimising for upside.
They are optimising for job safety.
A founder can survive a bad month.
A hired operator often can’t.
So what do they protect?
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
You cannot do 80–100% YoY growth without volatility.
You will have 10–30% down months.
That is not failure - that is the cost of experimentation.
If your revenue graph is perfectly linear, it’s not healthy.
It means there is hidden upside you’re refusing to chase.
And this is compounded by something very Indian: early delegation and comfort addiction.
In the US, you’ll see:
In India, you’ll see:
We delegate because we’re culturally trained to.
We hire help for everything. We escape discomfort quickly.
And comfort is the enemy of risk.
When founders pull themselves out early, risk injection stops.
No founder pressure.
No founder discomfort.
No founder saying, “This might break, but let’s try.”
And once risk stops flowing from the top, the organisation optimises for:
That’s how brands get stuck at:
₹4–5 Cr/month
forever.
Your risk appetite should reduce with learning.
It should not reduce with fear.
Less reckless risk is good.
Less risk overall is fatal.
This is the dark side of 1 to 10 that nobody talks about.
This is the biggest misunderstanding about risk. Risk does not mean gambling.
The best founders I know don’t take random risks. They take intentional, structured, repeatable risks.
The next generation of winning D2C founders will:
They will look reckless to outsiders.
But they will be deliberate on the inside.
Every meaningful breakthrough I’ve seen at Porcellia - for us and our clients - came from a risk that felt uncomfortable at the time.
Not one came from playing safe.
This is why we’re obsessed with decoding:
Not reckless risk.
Not motivational nonsense.
But scientific, intentional risk-taking.
Because in a world where everyone is playing safe,
the biggest competitive advantage is the courage to be different.
And difference always begins with risk.
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Porcellia is not a traditional marketing agency.
We don’t exist to “execute services” or make your brand look correct.
We exist to push your business into the uncomfortable zone where real growth actually happens.
Every creative strategy we design.
Every copy decision we make.
Every growth lever we pull.
All of it intentionally leans toward the riskier side. Because innovation at its core… is a risky business.
The founders we work with aren’t looking to play it safe.
They’re ambitious and aggressive about growth.
And they understand that doing what everyone else is doing is the fastest way to become irrelevant.
That’s why we don’t operate like an agency.
We operate like a fractional CMO who thinks like an owner.
Our job isn’t just to help your brand take better risks.
Our job is to help you become a founder who takes better risks.
Sometimes that comes directly from you.
Sometimes we redesign your team processes, decision frameworks, and marketing systems in a way that leaves you with no option but to take smarter, bolder bets.
Either way, the outcome compounds:
If this way of thinking resonates
If you feel like you’re playing too safe, or know you should be bolder but don’t know how to structure it….we should talk.
January 2026 is fully booked.
Two slots open for brands starting February 2026.
No pitch.
Just a conversation to see whether this approach to risk, innovation, and growth, combined with the technicals of building & scaling D2C aligns with how you want to build your business.
If you’re in 0 to 1, your biggest enemy is false certainty.
You don’t need more playbooks.
You need more conviction-building experiments.
Here’s what taking better risks actually looks like at this stage:
0 to 1 is not about protecting the downside.
It’s about discovering upside before anyone else sees it.
This is where most founders mess it up.
Not because they stop being smart.
But because they stop being uncomfortable.
Here’s how to protect risk culture at 1 to 10:
1 to 10 is not about avoiding mistakes.
It’s about making fewer, better, higher-conviction mistakes.
If you read this and felt uncomfortable - good.
That’s usually a signal.
If you’re struggling to take more risk in your business,
or you didn’t realise how much safety has quietly crept into your decision-making,
or you’re somewhere between 0 to 1 or 1 to 10 and feel stuck…
Just write to me.
Email me.
DM me on Instagram.
Whether you’re early or scaling,
something interesting usually comes out of these conversations.
And at the very least, you’ll walk away thinking a little differently about risk.
In a world optimized for speed and dopamine, meaning is the only thing that lasts.
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