march 1–5, 2026 · mumbai
cohort 0.
16 builders · 5 days in mumbai · shipped asent, personhood, nazrai, simpleclaw, starcy · yc · ef · spc · 650+ applications, 90+ on the waitlist.
650+
applications
16
founders selected
5
days to prove it
we didn't know if it would work. that's the honest version.
the idea was simple in a way that sounds naive until you actually try it. take a small group of genuinely exceptional founders, not the ones with the best pedigree, the ones with the most fire. put them in a house. remove every distraction. see what happens when the only thing left to do is build.
no lectures. no panels. no "networking opportunities." just a deadline, a room, and the quiet pressure of being surrounded by people who are equally unwilling to fail.
it was a tuesday. everyone showed up with a laptop, two changes of clothes, and a conviction nobody had asked them to have.
650 applications came in. we read all of them.
we weren't looking for the best resume. we were looking for the thing that makes you keep building at 2am when no one's watching. the kind of obsession that reads between the lines.
an 18-year-old with a yc-backed company. a founder who dropped out at 16, got kicked out of his own startup, and was already building again. someone who had been coding since age 9. a researcher who'd developed a new gravity model that outperformed existing ones on cosmological data. they all made it in.
chapter
the build.
day one, hour two. someone brought a speaker. someone brought a camera. nobody brought a plan b.
the loneliness of building alone disappeared the moment everyone sat down.
the house became a war room. people worked through the night. no one needed to be told. no one needed permission.
the environment did the work. when the person next to you hasn't slept and is still shipping, you don't need motivation. you just build.
chapter
the quiet hours.
by 3am the house was a low hum. three screens per human. somewhere, a redbull tower was growing.
the hours no one sees, the ones that change the thing.
day three was for stories. a full production crew came in. founder videos. product demos. content that would last longer than the residency itself.
day four brought the mentors. not speakers. not panelists. founders in the middle of building their own companies, yc-backed, ef-backed, running the thing from zero. real conversations. feedback on what was actually built.
at some point i threw adit in the pool. he took it well.
day five. demo day. the best vcs in the country were in the room. not as judges. as investors having real conversations.
the pitches were tight, the questions were real, and the conversations that followed were the kind you can't manufacture with a "networking event."
chapter
the family photo.
orchestration
every beat ofcohort 0 wasorchestrated.
aditya put the room together. the tempo, the tension, the release. the applications, the selection, the schedule, the pressure, the payoff. 16 builders. 5 days. one hand on the dial.
he read all 650 applications. he chose the 16. he set the deadlines, ran the house, wrote the story, pitched the vcs. he doesn't talk about it much. that's how you know.
the work didn't stop when the house closed.
savio, already yc-backed, is raising his first round. aryan, who dropped out at 16, is raising $1.5m. waris is closing customers. yutish is shipping weekly.
cohort 0 wasn't a test run. it was the proof.
we learned something we couldn't have learned any other way. the model works because the environment is the model.
india has more contrarian builders than anyone's giving it credit for. we found 16 of them. there are hundreds more.
and then we went home
but the roomstayed with us.
aditya vijay
founder, forge · march 2026