Not a teacher. Not an entrepreneur. Not a climate activist. Or maybe all of them at once.
What happens when you spend a decade in rooms full of young people and realise the biggest problem isn't their ambition — it's what they've been taught to aim for? If you're Supriya Panchangam, you stop handing out frameworks and start asking harder questions. You build a school that isn't really a school, run a startathon that declares every participant a winner, and try to convince a generation raised on Blinkit and Forbes covers that the most important thing they can build starts with understanding their relationship with the planet.
We trace Supriya's path from incubators and program design to founding The Future Founders Co. We talk about the jury moment that broke something in her — watching team after team pitch the same hyperlocal delivery idea, in Bangalore, with every resource available. The ambition was there. The imagination wasn't.
We get into the Kardashian-ification of entrepreneurship, what her grandfather — a government school teacher in 1980s India — understood about energy in a classroom that most institutions have forgotten, and what it means to be a "safe adult": the one person in someone's origin story who made them fall in love with an idea.
We also go deep on Future Founders' three concentric circles of pro-planet behaviour — from personal habit to campus project to climate venture. Students turning parking lots into solar infrastructure, negotiating ESG roles at Bain, and helping young women shift their habits — not through a campaign, but by bringing a sanitation worker on stage and letting her speak. And the India Sustainability Startathon: 112 teams, 220 exit opportunities, because a mindset shift means nothing without evidence from the world that it matters.
This one is for anyone who has felt the gap between what young people are being trained for and what the world actually needs.
Supriya Panchangam's Highlights:
→ Founder of The Future Founders Co., helping young people make pro-planet choices
→ Creator of the India Sustainability Startathon — 112 teams, 220 exit pathways in 2024
→ A decade across entrepreneurship education, incubation, and youth learning programs
→ Author, artist, and facilitator based in Bengaluru