The middle is the hardest place to build

India’s entrepreneurship story is, by all measure, impressive. The country is now home to over 2 lakh recognised startups, making it the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world. MSMEs contribute to around 31% of the GDP and employ upwards of 300 million people. The numbers reflect genuine momentum, and the ecosystem that has grown around early-stage entrepreneurs, incubators, accelerators, seed funds, angel networks, and government schemes, has played a meaningful role in getting us here.

But there is a stage that this ecosystem has not yet learned to serve well. And it is arguably the most consequential one.

The Gap in the Middle

Look at where institutional attention and capital actually flow. At the early stage, the infrastructure is well developed. Seed funding, incubation programmes, mentorship networks and government initiatives have all matured considerably over the last decade. At the late stage, large established businesses have access to institutional capital, industry bodies and policy access that keeps them supported and connected.

The growth-stage founder sits between these two poles, largely on their own. This is the entrepreneur who has crossed the initial proof of concept, built a real team, found a market, and is generating meaningful revenue. They are past the point where a seed fund or incubator is relevant. They have not yet reached the scale where institutional support structures kick in. And the challenges they are navigating are, in many ways, the hardest they will face in the entire arc of building a business.

This is not a fringe population. It is the backbone of the Indian economy, and it is consistently underserved.

Why the Middle Chapter Is Structurally Different

The early stage has a clarity to it. The founder is close to every decision, every customer, every hire. The problems are hard, but they are visible. The late stage has its own kind of clarity, of systems, structure, and institutional muscle. The middle chapter has neither.

At this stage, the team has grown large enough that the founder can no longer be across everything, but not so large that proper processes have taken hold. The product has found a market, but scaling it requires a fundamentally different kind of thinking than building it did. The leadership challenges have shifted from hiring the first few people to building a culture that holds as the organisation grows. And the founder, who was once energised by the momentum of the early days, is now navigating a set of problems that are harder to articulate, harder to benchmark, and harder to find good counsel on.

What makes this stage particularly difficult is that most of the advice available to founders at this point was shaped by someone else’s context, someone who built at a different time, in a different market, at a different scale. That advice is not useless. But it rarely fits precisely enough to be actionable.

What Growth Stage Founders Actually Need

At ASCENT, one pattern stands out consistently across our community of entrepreneurs. The founders who navigate the middle chapter well are almost never the ones who had the most advice or the most capital. They are the ones who had the best conversations, at the right time, with people who understood the territory they were crossing.

There is a meaningful difference between the two. Perspective arrives from outside the problem, shaped by the member’s own experience and filtered through their own lens. A good conversation with a peer who is building through something similar arrives from inside the problem. It is specific, grounded, and offered without the distance that expertise can sometimes create.

This is the gap that ASCENT was built to address. Our community of over 1,300 entrepreneurs is built around peer learning, structured through Trust Groups of 8-10 founders who meet every month to work through real problems in a confidential setting. The peer table is not a networking forum. It is a thinking environment, designed specifically for the growth-stage founder who needs more than information and more than inspiration.

The Case for Peer Infrastructure

The business case for peer learning is often undersold. Founders and ecosystems alike tend to think of it as a support mechanism, something valuable but peripheral to the core work of building. The experiences from our community suggest otherwise.

Founders who engage consistently with a peer group course correct faster, because someone in the room has taken the longer route and can say so plainly. They make better hiring decisions, because they are drawing on the collective experience of people who have solved similar problems in different ways. They build more resilient organisations, because they are not carrying the weight of every uncertainty alone.

The next chapter of India’s growth will be written by its entrepreneurs. But no founder writes it alone. For over a decade, ASCENT has been building the peer infrastructure that makes the entrepreneurial journey less isolating and the decisions better. The entrepreneurs in our community are living proof of what becomes possible when founders learn from one another’s experiences.

If you’re an entrepreneur ready to grow alongside peers who challenge, support, and inspire you, we’d love to welcome you to the table.

Explore ASCENT membership here: https://ascentfoundation.in/apply-now/

The author, Sagar Gosalia, is the CEO of ASCENT Foundation

This opinion piece is part of a Mint series which is in partnership with the ASCENT Foundation.