›परिचयThe RecordWork with meपरिचयThe Record
Nikhil Sharma. Building companies since 2005.
You are not buying a cohort. You are buying twenty years of someone else’s mistakes, applied to your company, by the person who made them.
Startup mentor and investor. Digital evangelist for twenty years. Has mentored over a hundred founders. Writes as Nishkrant Nikhil. In the business of happiness, via better business, better wellness, better travel and better skills. English and Hindi.
Work with meWhat I think
Experience
What he runs, and since when.
As it stands on LinkedIn, with NS Transform added: formal since 2023, informal for a decade before.
LinkedIn ↗Founder & Managing Director
Fabulous Media
Jul 2008 – present · Gurugram
Marketing That Drives ROI®. The agency that became the eight-city Fabulous.Media network.
Founder
NS Transform
2023 – present · Gurugram · Jaipur · Pune
Formally since 2023. Informally for over a decade before that, as the backing behind founders he worked with.
Founder
GoCommercially
Jan 2020 – present · Gurugram
Productised marketing services for small business. Fixed scope, bought from a site.
Founder & Managing Director
Vibence Global
Nov 2019 – present · Gurugram
Business setup, compliance and filings. The fintech instance of the stack.
CEO & Founder
Wellpro Wellness
Jan 2022 – present · Gurugram
Evidence-based reversal of lifestyle disorders. Urzano Wellness Private Limited.
CEO & Founder
WakeUp Life Inc.
Feb 2022 – present
Spiritual intelligence, measured. The WakeUp Score and a seven-habit programme.
Founder
AnandBodh — The Happy Life
2022 – present · Jaipur · Calgary
The umbrella over the wellness work. Community, content and the two centres.
Co-Founder
TaCa Healthcare
Aug – Oct 2022 · New Delhi
Technology for patient care in underserved India. A short engagement.
Brand Ambassador
Truecaller
Mar 2015 – Dec 2019 · Delhi
Four years as the face of the app in India.
The record
Twenty years, in dates.
Every dated line below rests on a document: an incorporation, a cover, a share transfer, a patent application. The first line is the one exception; it is a date, not a filing.
2005
The start
Digital evangelist from the year the Indian web turned commercial. Building companies since. Dated, not filed.
2008
Fabulous Media
Founded in Gurugram. Grows into India’s first agency network built from scratch: eight cities, 850+ brands, 35 nations.
17 Dec 2009
Fabulous Media Private Limited
The first company incorporated. The record on paper begins here.
Feb 2019
Consultants Review
Cover story.
Oct 2021
siliconindia
Cover story. The same month, equity in a backed venture is transferred on FORM SH-4: the equity-not-retainers model, on paper.
25 Aug 2022
Urzano Wellness Private Limited
Wellpro incorporated with Dr Ashutosh Rastogi. Seed round priced at ₹100 crore. Minority shareholding on the company record.
What the ₹100 crore was paid for →2 Mar 2023
Patent filed
Indian patent application 202311014252, the Soleus Activation Series. Inventors Dr Ashutosh Rastogi and Nikhil Sharma.
2023
NS Transform
The programme is formalised after running informally for over a decade. The 2024 intake opens on National Startup Day.
2024–25
The reset
The agency taken deliberately lean and rebuilt AI-first. Clients back to cost by the end of it.
2026
NS Transform 2027 and सोच Soch
The programme that carries up to ₹1 crore of a startup’s operating cost for equity opens its 2027 intake. The writing goes out under सामरिक Saamrik.
Receipts
Scale, and what the backing produced.
No venture is named. Every figure sits on a priced round, a published cover or the investment papers.
In twenty years I have worked with 850+ brands across 35 nations and built an agency network in 8 cities. Our Google campaigns alone have served 100 crore ad impressions, one billion, since 2009. The programme carries up to a crore of running cost for every startup it selects.
What the backing produced
- Top 3In Shopping Ads, nationally
One venture taken from launch to the top three in India inside eighteen months, against Amazon and Flipkart, profitable from the first month. Then lost to a founders’ dispute, not to the market. That ending is why month one of the programme is founder terms, in writing. The Google Ads auction record for its Shopping campaigns shows a 48.65% impression share, second only to Amazon.in and ahead of Flipkart.
- ₹100 crSeed valuation, a venture I co-founded
A wellness venture I co-founded, priced at a hundred crore in its seed round. Minority shareholding, on the company record and the investment papers.
- ₹400 crInside eighteen months, as reported
One venture backed through GoCommercially, as reported in siliconindia’s October 2021 cover story. A press report, not a priced round, and labelled as one.
Excluding ventures whose figures are not mine to publish, these are the three with paper behind them — a priced round, an ad-account record, or a report in the press, each labelled for what it is. No portfolio company is named.
What it is for
In the business of happiness.
The companies are the vehicle. The method under all of them is four words: commit, act, account, consequence. The point is a more realised self, for the people who work in them and the people they serve.
The whole housesiliconindia
Cover story · October 2021
Consultants Review
Cover story · February 2019
Truecaller
Ex-brand ambassador
सोच·What I have written
Essays, columns and sutras under सामरिक Saamrik. The essays close on dated wagers, scored in public.
विमर्श Vimarsh · Udyamnīti
An Expectation Is Not an Agreement
In three weeks Google released its strongest model to defenders first, gave its new agent an email address and won in court against the publishers who fed it. OpenAI shelved a model that lied. Nobody would swear their AI was safe. What it means for an Indian business, from someone who has sold search since 2008.
11 October 2026 · 8 min· Standing
सामरिक SAAMRIKउद्यमनीतिUdyamnītiTHE ENTERPRISEविमर्श Vimarsh · Udyamnīti
Startup at the Speed of Light: The Nikhil Sharma Way
Most startups do not die of a bad idea. They die of the distance between deciding and doing. Twenty years of building, and the nine laws I now run every company by, from the founder agreement on day one to the habit of stopping.
11 October 2026 · 9 min· Standing
विमर्श Vimarsh · Udyamnīti
If There Had Been No Ratan Tata
He took a ₹10,627 crore group in 1991 and left a $100 billion one in 2012. The decisions, the numbers, the trivia, the mistakes and the man, with the sources attached. And then the question nobody asked at the funeral: what would be different if he had stayed in Los Angeles.
9 October 2026 · 16 min· Standing
विमर्श Vimarsh · Itihāsa
The Ones Who Wrote the Method
From Kautilya’s seven parts of a state to a milk cooperative in Anand, India’s path-breakers share one habit. They did not leave an idea. They left a procedure. Twenty-three centuries of it, with the myths taken out.
9 October 2026 · 21 min· Standing
विमर्श Vimarsh · Rājnīti
Pakistan Needs One More General. The One Who Hands It Back.
Thirty-three years of direct rule in seventy-nine, and not one prime minister who finished a term. The repair cannot come from outside the army, so it must come from an officer who gives the country back, and from an India disciplined enough to say nothing while he does. Written on the day of Operation Sindoor and held for seventeen months.
7 October 2026 · 25 min· Standing
विमर्श Vimarsh · Udyamnīti
The Real Startup
Almost nothing is coming to kill your venture. The first of the countdown to NS Transform 2027.
30 September 2026 · 17 min· Standing
विमर्श Vimarsh · Lokanīti
India Is Already the Doctor
India performs a large share of the world’s affordable complex surgery and sells it on the one thing nobody should sell. Price. The position it has never claimed is outcome at scale, and the layer that would let it claim that position has not been built.
9 September 2026 · 17 min· Standing
विमर्श Vimarsh · Udyamnīti
The Argument for India Is a Supply Argument
Everyone arguing for India argues demand. Demand without capacity is a queue. The real argument is on the other side of the ledger, and it is the one I have spent a career inside.
22 July 2026 · 19 min· Standing
विमर्श Vimarsh · Samājnīti
Happiness Is an Operations Problem
Every tradition that took happiness seriously ended in the same inconvenient place. It is not a feeling to be summoned. It is a set of conditions to be maintained.
3 June 2026 · 18 min· Standing
स्तम्भ Stambh · Parihās
The Most Powerful Person on Earth Should Be a Crown, Not a Clown
A peace prize he did not win. A lake he renamed. A strait he annexed on a map with a typo. A war he scheduled around an election. A satire on the loudest office in the world, aimed up, and at every founder who confuses noise with authority.
11 October 2026 · 7 min
विमर्श Vimarsh · Udyamnīti
The Shop Next to the Gold
T. S. Kalyanaraman sold cloth for two decades beside a lane of jewellers in Thrissur. In 1993, five days short of his forty-sixth birthday, he opened one showroom, put a price on every piece and then waited seven years before opening a second. It is now 507 showrooms and ₹35,743 crore of revenue. What a founder should take from it, and what not to.
11 October 2026 · 7 min
विमर्श Vimarsh · Udyamnīti
What a ₹100 Crore Seed Price Was Paid For
Wellpro, the wellness company I co-founded with Dr Ashutosh Rastogi, was priced at ₹100 crore in its first seed round. Not on revenue. On a patent application, a protocol, a portfolio of formulations and a distribution system built in about sixty days. The operational record, what the price did and did not mean, and what a founder can copy.
11 October 2026 · 7 min
सामरिक SAAMRIKरणनीतिRaṇanītiSTRATEGYस्तम्भ Stambh · Raṇanīti
Choose the Narrow Pass
What a film about Thermopylae, a law drama built on a lie and a comedy about a compression startup teach a founder about strategy. Pick the ground where numbers stop counting. Guard the path you were told nobody uses. Know which launch to stop.
11 October 2026 · 7 min
सामरिक SAAMRIKअर्थनीतिArthanītiTHE ECONOMYस्तम्भ Stambh · Arthanīti
The Phone Is the Easy Part
Smartphones are now India’s largest export, and three in four of them are iPhones. That is a real achievement and the easy half of one. What India builds next is the part inside the phone, and that is where a founder should be looking.
11 October 2026 · 4 min
पाठ Pāṭh
Burn multiple and the discipline of efficient growth
One number that says what a crore of burn is buying: net burn divided by net new recurring revenue. Why it caught every kind of waste at once, and why India learned it the hard way after 2022.
10 October 2026 · 9 min
पाठ Pāṭh
CAC, LTV and payback: the three numbers that decide whether you should grow
What it costs to win a customer, what that customer returns in gross profit, and how many months until the first number is repaid. Get these three honest before you spend a rupee on growth.
10 October 2026 · 9 min
पाठ Pāṭh
Dilution: a cap table you can touch
Every round sells a share of the company equal to money raised over post-money, and everyone who was already there shrinks by the same factor. That one sentence, and what it does to founders over three rounds.
10 October 2026 · 4 min
पाठ Pāṭh
Growth rate is the only number that matters early
At seed, revenue is small by definition. The rate at which it compounds is the one figure that predicts what the company becomes, and the one figure a founder can manage week by week.
10 October 2026 · 9 min
पाठ Pāṭh
How to tell a problem from a complaint
Every customer will complain. Very few have a problem they are already paying to solve. The difference is four questions, and most startup ideas die because nobody asked them.
10 October 2026 · 7 min
पाठ Pāṭh
Incorporating in India: private limited, LLP or OPC, and what DPIIT recognition gets you
The entity you register in week one decides who can invest in year three. The choice is simpler than the forms suggest, and the forms are simpler than they were.
10 October 2026 · 9 min
पाठ Pāṭh
Market sizing an investor will believe
A market is a count of people who could pay, multiplied by what one pays a year. The rest is a claim about how many you can reach and win, and investors read that claim, not the big number.
10 October 2026 · 9 min
पाठ Pāṭh
Runway: how many months you really have
Cash divided by burn is the answer to the wrong question. The right one is whether the company is default alive, and the date by which you must know.
10 October 2026 · 5 min
पाठ Pāṭh
Should you raise at all?
Venture capital is the right fuel for a small number of companies and the wrong one for most. Nine questions decide which you are, and the answer changes with the month.
10 October 2026 · 8 min
पाठ Pāṭh
The customer interview, done properly
Most founders have already done twenty customer interviews and learned nothing from them, because they pitched, asked about the future and talked. Here is the protocol that produces evidence instead.
10 October 2026 · 7 min
पाठ Pāṭh
Vesting and the co-founder cliff
Vesting is the clause co-founders skip because they trust each other. It exists for the day one of them leaves. The standard schedule, the acceleration terms to refuse, and how Indian ESOP rules actually work.
10 October 2026 · 9 min
पाठ Pāṭh
What product-market fit looks like in the numbers
Product-market fit is not a feeling. It is a retention curve that flattens above zero and a survey in which forty per cent of users would be very disappointed to lose you. Both can be measured this month.
10 October 2026 · 8 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Parihās
The Omnipotent Machine Asked Me to Prove I Was Human
Every age builds its own Maya. Ours ships with a status page, a monthly plan and a box that says I am not a robot. A satire, aimed up, with one hand on my own keyboard.
9 October 2026 · 6 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Itihāsa
Nightingale Kept a Ledger
The most famous nurse in history is remembered for a lamp. What changed the British Army was a table of deaths and a diagram nobody could argue with. The hospital that counts its outcomes beats the one that describes them.
23 September 2026 · 4 min
सामरिक SAAMRIKलोकनीतिLokanītiPUBLIC POLICYसूत्र Sutra · Lokanīti
Nobody frightened buys a hospital; they buy whoever answers the phone.
Sutra 06
16 September 2026 · 1 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Swanīti
Ask How Many Times
One question separates the surgeon you want from the one you were given, and it works on lawyers, agencies and founders too. The rule I use and the number that made me use it.
2 September 2026 · 4 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Kūṭanīti
The Visa Is the First Appointment
Three in four foreign patients who come to India come from one neighbour, and in 2024 India showed what happens to a hospital when a visa becomes a weapon. The medical visa is the cheapest diplomacy the country has.
26 August 2026 · 4 min
सामरिक SAAMRIKउद्यमनीतिUdyamnītiTHE ENTERPRISEसूत्र Sutra · Udyamnīti
Sell on price and you have named your replacement.
Sutra 05
19 August 2026 · 1 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Udyamnīti
The Discount Is a Confession
India’s largest export industry was built on being cheaper per hour. The next cheaper country is a machine. What a services firm is actually saying when it leads with the price.
12 August 2026 · 3 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Itihāsa
The Chettiars Ran a Network Before the Word
In 1930 one community from a dry corner of Tamil Nadu had offices in 217 towns across Burma under one standard and one rate. Then it lost everything. The column that cuts against me.
5 August 2026 · 4 min
सामरिक SAAMRIKस्वनीतिSwanītiTHE PERSONसूत्र Sutra · Swanīti
Trust is the only asset that gets cheaper every year you hold it.
Sutra 04
29 July 2026 · 1 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Swanīti
The Partner You See Twice a Year
A network runs on people you do not sit with. Here is how one man keeps faith with eight of them, and the three habits that have held when nothing else did.
15 July 2026 · 4 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Lokanīti
Eight Cities, Eight Rulebooks
A national market was promised in 2017. A firm that works in eight states still obeys eight versions of the law. The compliance load is the quiet tax on every Indian network.
8 July 2026 · 3 min
सामरिक SAAMRIKउद्यमनीतिUdyamnītiTHE ENTERPRISEसूत्र Sutra · Udyamnīti
Demand without capacity is not a market. It is a queue.
Sutra 03
1 July 2026 · 1 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Udyamnīti
Seven Crore Firms and No Firm of Firms
India has registered more enterprises than most countries have adults. It has registered almost nothing that joins them.
24 June 2026 · 4 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Itihāsa
Pataliputra Wrote the First Timetable
Kautilya divided a king’s day and night into sixteen blocks and wrote down what went in each. He got the architecture right and the sleep wrong. We have done the reverse.
17 June 2026 · 5 min
सामरिक SAAMRIKउद्यमनीतिUdyamnītiTHE ENTERPRISEसूत्र Sutra · Udyamnīti
Nobody is short of advice. Everyone is short of delivery.
Sutra 02
10 June 2026 · 1 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Swanīti
Ten Minutes Before the Day Gets a Vote
Anything you leave for the evening you have given to the evening. How one person actually keeps a condition, with the only habit study worth quoting.
27 May 2026 · 4 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Lokanīti
A Ten-Hour Day Is a Rule. Say Who Pays for It.
Telangana made the ten-hour working day legal in July 2025 and called it ease of doing business. The week did not get longer. The evening got shorter.
20 May 2026 · 4 min
सामरिक SAAMRIKसमाजनीतिSamājnītiSOCIETYसूत्र Sutra · Samājnīti
Happiness is a condition you maintain, not a feeling you find.
Sutra 01
13 May 2026 · 1 min
स्तम्भ Stambh · Udyamnīti
Seventy Hours Is a Capacity Confession
When a founder asks his people for seventy hours he is telling you something about his company and nothing about his people.
6 May 2026 · 4 min
विमर्श Vimarsh · Samājnīti
The Longest Consequence Loop I Know
Why I am asking you to plant trees — and why One Tree Planted is where I would send the money.
28 April 2026 · 13 min