# The Long Grind, Amardeep Singh, & The Hard Thing About Hope > Source: > Published: 2026-07-27 10:42:27+00:00 # The Long Grind, Amardeep Singh, & The Hard Thing About Hope For a long time, he said nothing. Then, almost to himself: "I am not built for this." The thought frightened him. It wasn't supposed to. After all, this was exactly where he had wanted to be for almost a decade. In 2023, Amardeep Singh was in Silicon Valley as part of the SaaSBoomi US Caravan, surrounded by some of the world's best SaaS founders. For an entrepreneur who had spent nearly a decade building SaaS, it should have felt like validation. Instead, it felt strangely unfamiliar. Silicon Valley had a rhythm of its own. Conversations refused to end. A debate over breakfast spilled into the shuttle ride. A discussion inside the conference hall continued over paper cups of lukewarm coffee. Small circles of founders formed, dissolved and reappeared with remarkable speed. Someone was debating AI. Another was pulling apart enterprise sales. Everywhere he turned, people spoke the same language: Software, scale, growth. ## Greening the Future 23 Jul 2026 - Vol 05 | Issue 30 Securing a sustainable India [Read Now Greening the Future](/magazine/greening-the-future) Singh drifted from one conversation to another. He listened. Asked questions. Nodded. Smiled. From the outside, he looked exactly where he belonged. Inside, a different conversation had begun. What if I've spent all these years climbing the wrong mountain? For nearly ten years, software and SaaS had become his life. He had shut down one company, started another, taught himself to code, built the product himself, won enterprise customers, learnt pricing, GTM, and SaaS. He had done everything founders are told to do. So why did every conversation here leave everyone else more alive and leave him feeling less certain? Look at them. They light up when they talk about this. Why don't I? The question followed him everywhere: Breakfast, shuttle rides, coffee breaks, and late-night dinners. Every founder conversation made it louder. Until it became impossible to ignore. "I realised SaaS is not for me," he recounts. "I had learnt a lot...but it was still not instinctive at all." It wasn't failure that haunted him. It was something far more dangerous: success. He had become good at something that no longer felt like him. If SaaS wasn't where he belonged, where was he? The answer wasn't waiting in Silicon Valley. It had been waiting for him all along. **How a Silicon Valley trip changed Amardeep Singh's career forever** Years earlier, IIT Bombay had already shown him where he truly belonged. Singh arrived on campus as an aerospace engineering student with an engineer's curiosity. He loved understanding how things worked. Better still, he loved building them. The five years that followed changed more than his résumé. They changed his ambitions. By his final year, the campus had settled into its familiar placement season. Students hurried from one interview to another. Formal shirts replaced T-shirts, résumés were revised one last time, and offer letters became the only conversations that mattered. Around him, friends were chasing certainty. Singh realised he wasn't. Jobs promised security. Building promised possibility. And Singh couldn't stop thinking about the latter. Singh knew only one thing: he wanted to build drones. Everything else was uncertain. He didn't have a co-founder. He certainly didn't have money. But he did have a stubborn belief that he wanted to create, not inherit. It wasn't a rational decision. "I had absolutely no money. Nothing. No plan," he says with a laugh today. "Maybe I was a little delusional." Perhaps he was. India's startup ecosystem was still finding its feet. Hardware startups were almost unheard of. Venture capital for deep tech was scarce. The safer choice was obvious: Take the job, earn the salary, and build later. Singh chose the opposite. He found people chasing the same obsession. A year earlier, a group of IIT Bombay seniors had started a company called IdeaForge. They were experimenting with drones at a time when few people in India believed unmanned aircraft had a future. Singh joined them as a founding member and equity holder. It turned out to be the education no classroom could have offered. **Inside IdeaForge: The startup that shaped Amardeep Singh's entrepreneurial journey** IdeaForge didn't have the luxury of staying inside an office. If the drones were going to work in the real world, someone had to take them there. For the next six and a half years, that someone was often Singh. His office kept changing: Border with Pakistan, forests of Chhattisgarh, jungles of Jharkhand, remote districts of Maharashtra, West Bengal...wherever a drone was needed, he went. The work was never just about flying machines. It was about understanding the people who would depend on them. Every deployment taught him something no classroom ever could. Technology mattered, only if it solved a real problem. Then came Uttarakhand. In June 2013, devastating floods tore through the Himalayan state, washing away roads, bridges and entire settlements. IdeaForge received a call. The team rushed to Delhi, coordinated with the National Disaster Response Force, flew to Dehradun and was airlifted into the disaster zone. Nothing had prepared Singh for what he saw. Engineering had taught him how to solve problems. It hadn't taught him how to witness tragedy. "Everywhere you looked, there were dead bodies," he recalls. "We were flying the drone, trying to look for survivors." For two days, the drone searched where people couldn't. Then the weather turned. Helicopters stopped flying. There was only one way out: Walk. The team trekked back through the mountains, carrying their equipment across narrow, slippery trails where one wrong step could have been fatal. Years later, sitting in Silicon Valley, surrounded by conversations about software, Singh finally understood what had been bothering him. He hadn't fallen out of love with building. He had fallen out of love with building things that felt distant from the real world. The mountains had shown him what kind of engineer he wanted to be. Silicon Valley merely helped him remember it. After six-and-a-half years at ideaForge, Singh felt the itch to build something of his own. Not because he felt disconnected from ideaForge. Quite the opposite. As an equity holder, he always saw himself as one of the people building the company. But somewhere along the way, he had begun imagining different products and different problems. The instinct hadn't changed. He still believed in hardware. So in 2014, he took another leap. The company was called NexGear. If IdeaForge had taught him how to build drones, NexGear would test whether he could build a company from scratch. The timing, however, was unforgiving. Deep-tech hardware wasn't fashionable. Investors chased software businesses that scaled quickly. Hardware demanded years of research, expensive prototypes and manufacturing long before it generated meaningful revenue. Singh knew the odds. He built anyway. The team raised about ₹1.8 crore. It wasn't much. But it was enough to build the product they had imagined. Then came a breakthrough. NexGear unveiled its product at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, one of the world's biggest technology showcases. Their crowdfunding campaign succeeded. Customers placed pre-orders. For the first time, it felt as though the hardest part was over. It wasn't. **Why NexGear failed despite breakthrough technology** Building a prototype is engineering. Building thousands is finance. NexGear had solved the first problem. The second proved far harder. The orders were there. The money to manufacture them wasn't. Investor after investor passed. Without fresh capital, the product never reached mass production. So Singh did what founders often do when the original plan collapses. He pivoted. The hardware became software. The team built an AI-powered mobile application that automatically identified the best moments from long videos and turned them into short, shareable clips. Years before AI became mainstream, NexGear was solving a problem the market hadn't yet learned to value. The product was good. Apple featured it. Users downloaded it across countries. Once again, the technology seemed to validate itself. Except the business. People loved using the app. They just didn't want to pay for it. The company slowly ran out of money. A few companies explored acquiring the technology, but nothing materialised. One email from a large company sat unread for six months because, by then, Singh had stopped checking that inbox. The emotional battle had already been lost. Shutting down NexGear became one of the hardest moments of his entrepreneurial life. It wasn't just a company that ended. It was years of belief, years of work, and years spent chasing a future that never arrived. Yet even then, Singh never questioned whether he wanted to remain an entrepreneur. Only what he needed to become next. When NexGear folded, Singh was 33. For the first time since graduating from IIT Bombay, he found himself without a company, without a salary, and without an income. Around the same time, he got married. On paper, it looked like the worst possible moment to start over. Yet one thing never changed. Nobody asked him to get a job. Not his parents, wife or in-laws. "My parents have never pushed me to do anything that I didn't want to do," he says. "Even when things were really bad, they never asked me to take up a job." That faith became his runway. Instead of chasing investors, Singh decided to chase a skill: Coding. He had spent years working alongside software engineers. He could tweak code, fix bugs, and build on top of existing software. But writing a product from scratch? He couldn't. That bothered him. "So I started coding," he says. "I wanted to build something completely from zero." At 33, Singh became a student again. One line of code at a time. There were no employees. No fancy office. No venture capital. Just Singh and his longtime friend and co-founder, quietly building what would eventually become Vizard. The product found enterprise customers across retail and financial services. Businesses used it to generate personalised images and videos at scale. It wasn't a unicorn. It wasn't making headlines. But it worked. But it worked. Over time, his co-founder moved on. Singh stayed. For years, he ran the company almost entirely on his own. He built the product. Fixed bugs, shipped features, spoke to customers, kept the servers running. Then life slowed down. His daughter was born. Because the business had become stable enough to run in the background, Singh did something many founders never get the chance to do. He paused. For almost a year, he spent nearly all his time with his daughter. "I feel fortunate that I could do that," he says. During the pandemic, the family moved back to Muradnagar, a small industrial town on the outskirts of Delhi, where Singh found himself with something he hadn't had in years: time. For nearly two years, he worked from his hometown, close to the parents who had never once asked him to abandon his dream. He kept building, quietly and patiently, without chasing the next funding round. By almost every startup metric, life was finally comfortable. The business paid. The schedule was his own. He could build products from scratch. He had created the freedom he once wanted. And yet, somewhere deep inside, something still felt unfinished. The answer wasn't waiting in Silicon Valley. It was waiting inside him. **The Silicon Valley moment that brought him back to defence tech** In 2023, Singh attended SaaSBoomi's Caravan programme in Silicon Valley, spending two weeks with founders building global software companies. They spoke about scale, product-market fit, recurring revenue and the art of building SaaS businesses. It was exactly the kind of ecosystem every software entrepreneur dreams of being part of. Singh listened, learned, admired what they had built. But he couldn't ignore a growing discomfort. Every conversation pulled him in one direction. His memories pulled him in another. Back to the Pakistan border. Back to the forests of Chhattisgarh. Back to Uttarakhand. Back to the moments when technology wasn't merely creating convenience. It was making a difference where it mattered most. That's when the thought returned. Not as an idea but as a certainty. "I am not built for this." He wasn't talking about entrepreneurship. He wasn't talking about software. He was talking about himself. Singh realised he had spent years becoming good at building products. But not the products he truly wanted to spend his life building. The realisation was unsettling. He already had a stable company, customers, income, freedom. Walking away would mean starting from zero all over again. Most founders spend years searching for stability. Singh was preparing to leave it. He had an unusual clarity. If he was going to begin again, it had to be for something he believed in with every part of himself. He knew exactly where he wanted to go back: Defence. Why? Because, somewhere between the mountains of Uttarakhand and the conversations in Silicon Valley, he had finally understood the difference between what he was good at and what he was meant to build. For the fourth time in his life, Singh found himself starting over. Only this time, he knew exactly why. In 2024, he shut the chapter on SaaS and returned to defence. The timing couldn't have been more consequential. The war in Ukraine had changed how the world looked at drones. Cheap unmanned aircraft were destroying assets worth millions of dollars. Militaries everywhere were scrambling to find answers to a threat they had underestimated for years. Singh didn't see a trend. He saw unfinished work. He immersed himself in radio frequency systems. Digital signal processing. Counter-drone technology. Months disappeared into research, experimentation and prototypes. The company was called Armory. Its mission was simple to describe, but extraordinarily difficult to build: create indigenous AI-powered counter-drone systems capable of detecting, identifying and neutralising rogue drones before they became a threat. For the first time in years, he felt the same excitement he had experienced as a 25-year-old at IdeaForge. "The energy has not gone down," he says. "I feel as excited as I was back then." **Building Armory: From a funding setback to ₹100 crore in defence orders** That excitement didn't make entrepreneurship any easier. If anything, the hardest test arrived before Armory had properly begun. One of the first institutional funding rounds was all but complete. The conversations were done. The paperwork was moving. It felt settled. Then, almost overnight, it wasn't. The round fell apart. Until then, Singh had been funding the company himself. By now, he had hired a team. Salaries had to be paid. Research couldn't stop. The next funding round wouldn't materialise overnight. For a day or two, the uncertainty hit him. Then he did what he has quietly taught himself to do over two decades. He went for a walk. Not to escape the problem but to escape the panic. "When you're thinking about it all the time, everything becomes blurry," he says. Walking helped him clear his head. It reminded him that no crisis looked quite as terrifying after a little distance. Over the years, he had started writing these moments down. Whenever confidence disappeared, he would remind himself of something deceptively simple: The last time it felt impossible, it worked out. This time could too. Experience had taught him something younger founders often learn too late. Companies don't die the day funding falls through. "They die the day you decide they are dead," he says. "As long as you decide that today is not the day you quit, you keep going." The funding eventually came together. Armory kept building. Then the market began validating the decision Singh had made in Silicon Valley. Unlike the early days of drones, he no longer had to convince customers that the problem existed. The Indian armed forces already knew they needed counter-drone systems. The demand was real. This time, the market was waiting. Orders followed. Less than two years after it was founded, Armory secured around ₹100 crore worth of orders from the Ministry of Defence—a rare milestone for such a young Indian defence hardware company. To outsiders, those orders looked like success. Singh saw something else: Proof. It was a proof that returning to defence hadn't been nostalgia. It was conviction. Looking back, the pattern becomes impossible to miss. IdeaForge taught him why technology matters. NexGear taught him that great engineering alone doesn't build a company. Vizard taught him how to build software from scratch. Armory brought everything together. In the end, it wasn't about chasing the biggest opportunity. It was about finally building the one that felt true to him. The companies changed. So did the technology. Singh didn't. **The startup lessons Amardeep Singh learned over two decades** Over nearly two decades of entrepreneurship, he has learned that most startup lessons aren't found in pitch decks or boardrooms. They are earned in the quiet moments when things appear to be falling apart. He has lived through enough of those moments to know they rarely look as frightening in hindsight as they do in the present. "Nothing is as bad as it seems in that moment," he says. "If you survive that low moment, things start getting better." Experience has changed the way he responds to uncertainty. Earlier, every setback felt personal. Today, he recognises the cycle. A failed customer meeting. A delayed order. An investor walking away. None of them defines the company or the founder. When the noise becomes overwhelming, he does something remarkably ordinary. He walks. Somewhere along the way, he began writing these moments down. Every time a crisis passed, he made a note of it, so that the next time uncertainty arrived, he had evidence that he had survived before. His views on entrepreneurship have changed too. Funding, he says, is not success. It is simply someone else's belief that you might succeed. The real work begins after the money arrives. He has also become wary of another trap. Founders often spend too much time watching competitors. He would rather spend that time improving the product. If the product is good enough, he believes, opportunities eventually find their way to you. When asked what he would do differently if he were starting again in his twenties, Singh doesn't talk about raising more money or growing faster. He talks about people. The single greatest advantage a startup can have, he says, is an aligned team. Curious people. Hard-working people. People moving in the same direction. Talent matters but alignment matters more. He also speaks about timing. NexGear wasn't a bad idea. It was simply early. Armory, on the other hand, entered a world where customers already understood the problem. He no longer had to convince them that counter-drone systems mattered. They were already looking for solutions. If there is one piece of advice he offers aspiring founders, it has nothing to do with valuation, fundraising or growth hacks. "Plan for the next ten years of pain," he says. Because even when things go right, entrepreneurship remains a decade-long exercise in solving one problem after another. Perhaps that perspective explains why Singh has never thought of NexGear as a failure. Or Silicon Valley as a detour. Or even the darkest days as something to regret. Each company prepared him for the next. Each setback sharpened his instincts. Each restart brought him closer to the work he was meant to do. Years ago, sitting in Silicon Valley, Singh whispered to himself: "I am not built for this." He was only half right. He wasn't questioning whether he was built to be an entrepreneur. He was questioning what he was meant to build. It took four companies, nearly two decades, a flood in Uttarakhand, a startup that ran out of money, a 33-year-old teaching himself to code, a funding round that almost collapsed, and the courage to begin again. Again and again. Some people spend their lives searching for purpose. Singh realised he had been building towards it all along.