This essay is part of Uncomfortable Truths of Impact*, a series on what it takes to build social impact that actually scales.
“This is incredibly interesting and something we would like to fund. Are you open to setting up CoolCoach in Bihar?”
The funder I had just pitched to was completely thrown off by my perplexed reaction to his expression of interest in funding the idea. For some reason, he thought that offering me more options would cheer me up. He added, “It doesn’t have to be Bihar. If you can pick any of the eight least developed states in India, we would be interested.”
I was even more perplexed.
That moment exposed a deeper flaw in how much of the social sector thinks about risk.
I had just explained that while unemployed sportspersons and schools serving low-income students can be found all over India, the fitness industry was growing fastest in India’s largest cities. This was pre-COVID, when fitness had not yet entered the mainstream lexicon. I had therefore taken great pains to explain why all three elements of the CoolCoach model were critical to its success, which is why I piloted it in Pune.
The explanation, however, was straightforward: the funder’s current fund had a geographical mandate.
The mandate itself was not the issue. What concerned me far more was the underlying belief that ideas and projects must first prove themselves in the most difficult and resource-constrained circumstances. The implicit logic seemed to be that if something succeeded in the hardest places, it would be a walk in the park everywhere else.
This thinking is deeply counter-intuitive to how startups actually function.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google by targeting people who already had computers and internet access. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook as a social network for Ivy League students.
They didn’t begin where the need was greatest, but where adoption was easiest.
Imagine if their early backers had told them that their ideas had potential, but that they should first try to build them out in some of the least developed parts of the United States.
If that sounds absurd, you can probably empathise with my reaction to the funder’s remark.
At that point in time, the assumptions underlying the CoolCoach model had yet to be tested. While researching and developing it, I was deliberately trying to de-risk the model from the very beginning. Attempting to test CoolCoach in one of India’s least developed states—before validating its core assumptions—simply did not make sense to me.
A for-profit mindset forces you to confront risk early, because failure is immediate and unforgiving.
Then it hit me.
For some reason, parts of the non-profit and social sector seem structurally inclined to make things harder for themselves. This may stem from a genuine desire to help those who are worst off. But such thinking often makes implementation harder and success even harder to achieve.
Google and Facebook began in the most elite circles imaginable, and within less than two decades, their products could be used by some of the poorest people in the world. It is difficult to say the same about most scaled social-sector interventions, many of which pale in comparison to what these companies have achieved in terms of reach and adoption.
The way forward for the social sector is not to romanticise difficulty, but to test ideas in the least risky environments possible and build from there. If we want social ideas to scale, we must stop demanding heroics before evidence.
*Uncomfortable Truths of Impact explores the lessons I learned while building CoolCoach as a for-profit social enterprise. Chasing social impact through a for-profit structure exposed fundamental differences in how risk, scale, and execution are approached across the for-profit and non-profit worlds. Many of these lessons were unexpected, and some are uncomfortable—but they are central to understanding what it actually takes to build impact that lasts.