GAME Turns 6: Our journey and what we’ve learned

It’s been six years since we started GAME with a mission to catalyse an India-wide movement of entrepreneurship. Our goal was to create favourable conditions for the growth of both existing and new enterprises, with the ambitious aim of generating 50 million new jobs by 2030.

When I look back on our journey over the last six years, I’m reminded of two stories—Bill Gates’ and Thomas Edison’s. When Bill Gates began his philanthropic journey, he invested many years and billions of dollars in improving the U.S. schools and education system. After all these efforts, someone asked him how it was going. His response was, "Well, we've learned what doesn’t work." Similarly, while developing the light bulb, Thomas Edison said, “I haven’t failed; I have found 9,999 ways that won’t work.”

That’s where we are—learning through experimentation, figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

Jobs aren’t going to appear out of nowhere

India today has two critical challenges: climate change and employment. We need to figure out how to address both, and I’m glad we’re working on one of them.

We started with an ambitious mission:

To create an entrepreneurial hub in every district and a future where young people would see starting entrepreneurship as their primary career choice. This will go a long way towards solving India’s employment problem.

Read more about it here: https://bit.ly/4e9Jkjh .

If you look at the chief economic advisor's pre-budget speech, the focus was largely on small businesses and entrepreneurship, as these are the engines that will create jobs and drive prosperity in the country.

Why we chose "Systems Change" over "Programmatic Interventions"

When we started, one of the key decisions we made was to rely solely on programmatic interventions to achieve our goal. Training people, skilling them, offering loans, and launching initiatives are helpful but not enough to make entrepreneurship aspirational.

Hence, we took a different approach—focusing on systems change and building healthy local ecosystems. Programmatic interventions often address symptoms, whereas systems change targets the root causes of issues by transforming the underlying structures and processes.

And creating an entrepreneurial movement in India demanded a fundamental shift in how local ecosystems function.

GAME’s progress so far

In the last six years, this theory of change has been validated. We identified tipping points in the system—critical problems that needed scalable solutions—and brought together partners to address them. Our focus has been on creating an ecosystem that allows entrepreneurship to flourish.

For a healthy ecosystem, you need the right seed, soil, and climate. ‘Seed’ in this context is the talent with useful skills and an entrepreneurial mindset. ‘Soil’ is physical and digital infrastructure, access to markets, capital, and networks of capabilities. ‘Climate’ refers to the ease of doing business and the inspiration and mentoring by lots of successful role models. ?

Here are some of our key interventions:

• Entrepreneurship Education: My co-founder, Mekin Maheshwari , has been instrumental with Udhyam Learning Foundation in developing a curriculum that now reaches 1.5 million children across 10 states in government schools, equipping them with the mindset and skills to start a business (https://bit.ly/472fVVF)?

• Delayed Payments Reform: We addressed the persistent issue of delayed payments to small businesses, driving policy changes and legislative amendments to the MSME Act and promoting platforms like TReDS to ensure timely payments.
• Simplifying Business in Punjab: In Punjab, we worked closely with the government to dramatically simplify the process of starting and running a small business. Read more here https://bit.ly/3X4Kc2G
• Access to Credit: Understanding the challenges faced by small NBFCs, we partnered with SIDBI(Small Industries Development Bank of India) to create an accelerator, enabling these institutions to raise capital and better serve small businesses. Read more here https://bit.ly/3STiWBE

The quiet work of systems change

This approach to systems change isn’t quick or easy. It requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to rethink traditional methods. One of the challenges we face is that our work is not direct. This means that sometimes, months go by, and we don’t see any visible impact, which can be disheartening.

Funders often ask, “How many entrepreneurs have you helped?” We can’t give a number like 135,678 because our impact is broader and deeper.

Our work might not always lead to immediate, direct impact, but it’s incredibly rewarding when it does. And it’s the individual stories that resonate the most.

For example,

• When our first cohort in Ludhiana saw their businesses grow by 35%, it was a wonderful feeling.
• When the NBFC accelerator program helped businesses secure loans from SIDBI, it felt like a significant achievement.?
• Occasionally, you see an individual and feel inspired. For example, in the EMC school program, there is a boy named Monu. He’s from a poor school in Delhi, repairs electric auto-rickshaws at night to support his family, and attends school during the day. He was paying his way through school and supporting his family. We asked him what he needed, and he said, "A toolbox." So, we bought him a Bosch toolbox on the spot. Moments like these remind us why we do what we do. Another kid from the same program is now running a logistics business with revenues of a couple of crores straight out of school.
• And then seeing first-time women entrepreneurs getting loans through the NRLM program is empowering. Read more here https://bit.ly/3Mz6aFf

And it’s these stories that keep us going.?

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing

We’ve tried things that didn’t work, and we adapted. There have been interventions and initiatives we rolled back because they were not what people needed. This taught us a very important lesson—don’t go pan-India. Focus on specific locations, build excitement there, and then scale. That’s what worked in Ludhiana, and that’s the approach we’re taking now.

On this journey, there have been a few lessons for me as well:

• Learning how to build an organisation with the right people and culture in the social sector. I made mistakes—I hired good people but not necessarily the right fit for our mission. As a result, we lost momentum. Building this type of organisation—one that combines the best of the social sector and business is not easy. It’s been a significant learning curve for me.
• I also realised that the founder’s involvement in the business is irreplaceable. As a founder, you have to be engaged with the business and cannot absolve your responsibility by hiring a CEO. Setting the right culture and standards of excellence—both in work and behaviour—is essential, and that is ultimately the founder’s responsibility.

The journey is far from over, but I am sure we are headed in the right direction. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of it—our partners, funders - IKEA Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Tata Trusts , Microsoft (India), ZS , team members, and the entrepreneurs who inspire us every day