Mekin Maheshwari helped build Flipkart before stepping away in 2016 to found Udhyam Learning Foundation , which builds agency and entrepreneurial mindsets among young people through India’s government schools, reaching 4.7 million students across 15 Indian states in 2026. Maheshwari spoke with Ashoka’s Shruti Nair.

Shruti Nair: You built an extraordinary career at Flipkart before stepping away to work on something much less defined. What made you realize the deeper challenge wasn’t creating more jobs, but changing how people think about their own potential?

Mekin Maheshwari: Flipkart taught me that large-scale change is possible in quick time. A small group of people helped India learn to buy online in under ten years. But as the company grew to 35,000 people, I noticed I got the most joy from watching people succeed, especially those who hadn’t come in with a strong pedigree yet went on to build amazing things. I thought back to my own experience of not making it into India’s top engineering colleges, the IITs, and realized the system was rejecting 99% of people like me while only rewarding a very narrow slice of them. That gap is what I decided to spend the next chapter of my life closing.

Nair: What did you have to unlearn about education itself to build Udhyam?

Maheshwari: I used to think education was about content and exams, until my time at Yahoo and then Flipkart taught me otherwise. Nearly everything I actually learned, whether coding or building teams and organizations, I learned by doing, usually alongside someone who could both critique and guide. Before starting Udhyam, I read India’s ASER report and realized how little I actually knew about the system I wanted to change. For example, that 55% of kids in India attend government schools, and half of fifth graders can’t do second-grade math. Rather than jump in with a technology solution, I spent 18 months visiting schools and universities and meeting over 100 educators, always asking each one who else I should talk to. That grounding is what shaped Udhyam’s core idea: education should be built around doing and reflecting, not memorizing and testing.

Nair: Udhyam works within government schools rather than building parallel systems. What does it take for a system to actually own change like this?

Maheshwari: As we worked with various schools, I kept finding islands of brilliance, but unlike the corporate world, where a competitor’s good idea spreads fast, education often struggled to learn across the system. So we made a deliberate bet: reform the system from within, even when that meant making Udhyam less visible. There is no single “Udhyam curriculum.” There is Kauoshalam in Uttarakhand , the Kushal Business Challenge in Haryana – each state and the teachers who make the change happen are the ones who need full ownership and credit to sustain the change. It’s not easy to work inside a hierarchical system, but building programs that trust kids and teachers by design, rather than trying to control outcomes from the top, is exactly why this has scaled to the size it has.

Nair: How do you measure something as intangible as a shift in mindset, and how do you know you’re not accidentally causing harm at scale?

Maheshwari: That question bothered me enough that, three and a half years ago, someone on our team wrote to 20 researchers worldwide asking how to actually measure agency and mindset shifts. Twelve responded, and Professor Joseph Levitan at McGill University built out a full research lab with seven global scholars to run something rare in this field: a 10-year longitudinal study of 4,220 kids across 106 schools in Uttarakhand, randomly split into control and treatment groups and tracked from age 13 to 29. Two years in, we have yet to see the mindset data mature, but communication, critical thinking and collaboration have already shown effect sizes of 0.2, which is a meaningful early signal. Instead of surveys, the study has observers watch small groups of kids solve real problems together and track micro-behaviors, like whether a child brings the group together or shares a new idea, measuring action instead of what a test can capture.

Nair: If you had to name the one thing every teacher could do differently to nurture agency in students, what would it be?

Maheshwari: Trust young people – let them fail and celebrate them when they succeed. Teachers are often so protective that they hand kids the right answer before a mistake even has the chance to happen, when the more powerful move is trusting that the answer is often already inside the student and letting them find it. Find the gold in all 40 kids in a room, tell them clearly when they’ve done something amazing, and watch what that does to how young people see themselves.

Nair: You come from a tech background. How are you actually using AI, and where does the human mentor remain irreplaceable?

Maheshwari: While the human mentor stays irreplaceable for inspiration, values and integrity, AI has solved a very specific, very real problem for us. We noticed only 47% of students were submitting more than one business idea, despite being clearly capable of more, and realized kids have an entire orchestra of ideas in their heads that shyness and fear of judgment reduce to a faint whistle by the time they write it down. So we built a non-judgmental AI chatbot students could think out loud with. We saw that submissions of two-or-more ideas jumped to 97%. One student in Haryana initially proposed simply “stop stubble burning," yet after talking it through with the AI chatbot, it became a specific business: buying stubble from farmers to manufacture doormats. No teacher can be an expert in every subject a curious kid wants to explore, so we’ve aimed AI at that exact gap, freeing teachers to focus on being the champion, not the encyclopedia.

Nair: In your view, is a successful entrepreneur made through nature or nurture?

Maheshwari: Nurture, clearly, although I’d reframe even that word, because our job isn’t really to nurture so much as to support and enable what’s already there. It’s important to remember that 90% of India’s workforce is already non-salaried, which means the vast majority of the country is already functioning as entrepreneurs. A farmer deciding whether to plant a new crop or invest in fertilizer is making the exact same kind of decision a startup founder makes. Reframing entrepreneurship as agency over your own work, rather than as “founding a startup,” is what makes it accessible and teachable at national scale.

Nair: What would it take to build a world where every young person grows up believing they can be a changemaker?

Maheshwari: Instead of a system that’s built around selecting only the few who “deserve” to succeed, whether through exam scores, college seats or jobs, building a world of changemakers starts with actually believing everyone has potential. The shift is not only about creating another program. It is about moving beyond a scarcity mindset to a much broader, more generous definition of success, some of it economic, some social, some never measured at all. India does not need a system that identifies a few winners. It needs one that helps many more young people begin.

Mekin Maheshwari is a senior Ashoka Fellow .

Shruti Nair is Ashoka’s South Asia Leader.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity by Ashoka.