Original author: Sandeep Nailwal
Original compilation: Block unicorn
With the launch of the Nailwal Fellowship last month, I spent a lot of time looking back at my roots and thinking about how a program like this could help me on my entrepreneurial journey. Today, I would like to share how I founded the Nailwal Fellowship - from its humble beginnings in a small rural village to now Polygon, a leading blockchain network protocol.
my early life
I was born in Ramnagar, a small mountain town in northern India. My family comes from a very simple background - my grandfather was a house help in a wealthy family, my father was a day laborer and my mother never went to school and was a housewife. To give me better educational opportunities, my family moved to the Jamna-Paar area of Delhi when I was a child. I am proud to call this place home, yet it is often labeled by others as a ghetto or ghetto (pictured below).
Our lives are defined by tension. The tensions came from relocating our lives from Ramnagar to a new neighborhood in Delhi, tensions surrounding my fathers drinking, gambling and violent tendencies, as well as financial strains due to our unstable income. These experiences have shaped my desire to not let my family, now or in the future, have to live like this again. I vividly remember a childhood incident that had a profound impact on my life.
When I was six years old, I visited a temple in Ramnagar before moving to Delhi. In this temple, it is customary to make a wish before leaving. I made a wish to one day be able to provide my family with the life my parents could not provide me. This desire became the force that guided me out of difficult situations and shaped my success as a founder.
Education was my path to a better life, and even after changing schools after relocating, I was still lucky enough to excel academically. When it was time for me to enter junior high school, my neighbors and friends suggested my parents to send me to a school outside Jamna-Paar to realize my full potential. Transitioning from a larger school in Derry was challenging, but I knew it was a step toward a better life for my family. I focused on my studies and once again achieved top grades, which led to the rest of my college education and entrepreneurial journey.
The Burden of Expectations: My Entrepreneurial Journey
Expectations can be a stepping stone toward life goals, or they can be a burden that hinders personal growth. They are a heavy burden that I carry throughout my life. As the eldest son, I was expected to be the breadwinner and provide financial support for the family even while paying off student loans. Sometimes the pressure I felt to provide for my family kept me awake; I distinctly remember not knowing if I would be able to scrape together the funds to finance my sisters wedding. Although I pride myself on being a supportive family member, these expectations often force me to prioritize income stability over entrepreneurial ambitions.
In my personal life, as my relationship with Harshita (my girlfriend, now wife) became serious, I felt the pressure to buy a home and provide her with a certain standard of living. This would have forced me into a career path that was not right for me. Luckily, Harshita encouraged me to pursue my passion, overturning the notion that having a big house is the key to happiness. This support allowed me to follow my interests, which eventually led me to founding my first company and later co-founding Polygon.
However, I know not everyone has such support. The goal of the Nailwal Fellowship is to provide support to individuals so they can follow their passions and free themselves from the constraints of societys expectations. Through a Fellowship, you will receive financial support and access to a network of resources, allowing you to pursue your passion on your own terms. Looking back, I wish I had the opportunity to participate in a program like the Nailwal Fellowship. This will accelerate the creation of Polygon and improve my overall happiness.
The importance of resilience
To summarize my personal experience as a founder, I would like to highlight a quality that I believe is crucial for any founder – resilience. I have always had a passion for entrepreneurship, but throughout my life, factors such as student debt, a family to support, and social expectations often kept me from pursuing my passion. My early entrepreneurial experiences were all part-time, organized around my regular work schedule. Most projects fail due to the inability to commit to them full-time. However, these failures were valuable lessons and built my resilience.
My first real entrepreneurial experience was with a small startup in college where we developed software for government agencies. While we made some progress, we were unable to scale due to time constraints and ultimately had to shut down. My next attempt came a few years later, when I took on a part-time project, a logistics startup, while working as a consultant at Deloitte. We had initial success, but the competition was fierce. However, another startup had to close, and those experiences taught me valuable lessons that I needed to find a blue ocean market—one where I could have a competitive advantage. More importantly, I needed to commit full-time to achieve significant growth.
Me (far left, second from top row) goes back to my college days
With Harshitas encouragement, I left my stable corporate job and started working on my entrepreneurial project full-time. Next, I set out to develop a B2B marketplace that was showing signs of growth. Contracts were signed with big brands and revenue began to flow in steadily. However, we quickly hit a bottleneck. Despite our best efforts, we were unable to break through the growth plateau. We had to shut it down, marking the end of my third effort, three consecutive failures that led to self-doubt. But my resilience was stronger than my doubts. I have learned from past experiences and I have the unwavering support of my family - who encourage me to pick myself up and keep going. And the fourth attempt was indeed an opportunity for success. My next entrepreneurial project is a small blockchain project called Matic. Little did I know at the time, Matic would evolve into Polygon and become incredibly successful.
Me, JD and Sid in the early days of Matic
Resilience (persistence) has played a vital role in where I am today. The Nailwal Fellowship aims to identify and support creators who demonstrate resilience and are willing to overcome setbacks to achieve their dreams. We don’t care how many times you fail, we care about how many times you pick yourself up and try again. To us, this is the most important value any founder must possess. If there’s one lesson founders take away from my story, it’s that you need internal motivation to push you to build something better. You don’t need to have the same background as me, but every great founder I know has something deep inside that drives them to achieve more.
