Building Real

Where are India’s children?Somewhere between 22 and 32 million children in India are orphaned, abandoned, surrendered or runaways. Pavitra Chalam set out to find where they actually live. The answer is I Am Home, her five-part documentary series, now in post-production. It was filmed across specialised adoption agencies, childcare institutions, railway stations and the railway police who meet children there. It’s made for viewers aged eight and up, because she believes children need to see where their peers live.It started with a personal question. Pavitra always thought she would adopt, and five or six years ago she set out to understand the stories of the adopted children in her own life. Then she came across that number. In a childcare institution in Chhattisgarh she met an older girl who had survived unspeakable violence and is now the mother figure to almost a hundred girls. “For that one small story alone, we realized ... this series has to be made.”I Am Home is the latest chapter in twenty years of films about what most people look away from: more than 300 short films, Indelible, India’s first feature documentary on Down syndrome, and Rooting for Roona, a story she stayed with for seven years that went to Netflix in 190 countries. She runs CurleyStreet Media, a 14-year-old studio, with a team she has worked with for up to twenty years.We get into:how I Am Home grew from one film into a five-part series once the footage proved “so much and so deep”choosing a story by falling in love with it, and the rule that the person always comes first, never the shotcrowdfunding a documentary by asking 300 people for ₹1,000 each, and hundreds of no’s before one yeshow ad and corporate films for brands like Flipkart, Shell and Meta keep the studio runningthe emotional cost that never shows up in a grant budget, and why the team throws dance parties mid-editThis one is for anyone building something that takes years to pay off, and wondering how to stay with it.Connect with Pavitra & CurleyStreet:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavitra-chalam-7802913/CurleyStreet: https://curleystreet.com/CurleyStreet on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curleystreet/Find Building Real:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@buildingrealpodcastWebsite: https://buildingreal.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RZ2toxpA0ITJrZgWiCHdHApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1884485435Building something interesting?Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomasBuilding Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss.Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks.#BuildingReal #Podcast #Documentary #Filmmaking #India #FounderJourney

What does it cost when a new parcel lands on your doorstep every week?In her early twenties, Priyanka Shahra had an ASOS parcel at her door every week and wore it like a badge of honour. She never stopped to ask how it could be that cheap. A few years later, studying sustainability, she found out. Fashion is one of the most polluting industries on the planet. Around 100 billion garments are made every year, and most of them end up burnt or buried. So the woman who swore she would never work in fashion built Swapaholic, a Singapore community closet where you swap in clothes you no longer wear for points and swap out something you will, and later DinoStaury, a values brand for children.We get into what ten years of trying to change consumer behaviour has taught her: people say they care, but they act on convenience, value and what feels cool, and fashion has no loyalty. We follow a garment from cotton field or petrochemical lab to the incinerator, and talk about why returns and recycling cost more than making a new shirt, certificates that can be bought, 52 micro-seasons a year, and why sustainable brands lose on price before they start.And the founder's half: biodegradable packaging that fell apart on the clothes, a cassava-starch bag too small for a gown that ended in a shouting match and a run of angry Google reviews, years of undervaluing the profit leg of the triple bottom line, and why it is easier to never learn a bad habit than to unlearn one.This one is for anyone building something good for the planet who has been told the customer will come because the cause is right.Connect with Priyanka & Swapaholic:- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyanka-shahra-637450123/- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/priyankashahra/- Swapaholic: https://swapaholic.com- Swapaholic on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swapaholicyou/Find Building Real:- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@buildingrealpodcast-- Website: https://buildingreal.com- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RZ2toxpA0ITJrZgWiCHdH- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1884485435Building something interesting?Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomasBuilding Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss.Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks.#BuildingReal #Podcast #CircularFashion #Sustainability #Singapore #FounderJourney

Why would you walk away from something a million people love?Claudiu Petria was born at home in a Romanian village of four houses. At eight, he told his father to choose between school and the goats. His father sold the goats. Claudiu went to high school in "Hackerville", turned down a crew of scammers, and talked his way into advertising by asking too many questions. Then he co-founded Questo, a platform for story-led city games that got more than a million people playing in the real world across 1,000+ cities, with 35,000 local creators writing the quests. After ten years, he chose to walk away.In this conversation we get into why Questo deliberately has no AR or VR, how the first MVP was a PowerPoint sent over Facebook Messenger, and how the first outside creator, a legal advisor at a petroleum company, wrote a haunted-Bucharest game that drew 1,000 players while the founders were at a barbecue in the mountains. Then a Halloween night across 10 cities with 20,000 players, when Cluj gridlocked and the police asked them to switch the app off. And the harder half: ten years in survival mode, why "the failure of the company is the failure of the leadership," why money doesn't solve a startup's problems but scales them, and why leaving the company you built doesn't mean starting from zero.This one is for any founder who has wondered whether it is time to let go.Connect with Claudiu & Questo:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudiupetria/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/claudiupetria/Questo: https://questoapp.comQuesto on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/questoapp/Find Building Real:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@buildingrealpodcastWebsite: https://buildingreal.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RZ2toxpA0ITJrZgWiCHdHApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1884485435Building something interesting?Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomasBuilding Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss.Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks.#BuildingReal #Podcast #CityGames #Romania #Startups #FounderJourney

Why would someone who builds startups for corporates open a single coffee bar in one of the most crowded markets in Singapore?Ivan Chandra Suriady spent years building ventures inside large companies: market maps, white-space analysis, concepts that had to make sense to a board 20 years out. Then he picked a market everyone warns you away from. He co-founded Paco Coffee, opened one bar at The Sail @ Marina Bay at the end of January 2026, and within five months its Madame Parodox blend won Gold at the Global Coffee Awards Asia, judged double-blind.In this conversation we get into why chain coffee and specialty coffee are converging, and why Ivan believes "coffee is 50% storytelling and 50% product." Paco sells specialty-grade beans through illustrated characters instead of tasting notes. It releases new coffees in seasons that double as A/B tests, and it logs every espresso shot so a problem in one store can be traced, which is the kind of system you build when you plan to run hundreds. We also talk about building your own software with AI instead of buying SaaS, the difference between corporate venture building and founding in the wild, and the 1am Biscoff thief who inspired a coffee that sold out in three days.This one is for anyone who's been told a market is too competitive to enter.Connect with Ivan & Paco Coffee:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivansuriady/Paco Coffee: https://letspaco.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/letspacoVisit: 2 Marina Boulevard, The Sail @ Marina Bay, #B1-08C, Singapore (weekdays)Find Building Real:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@buildingrealpodcastWebsite: https://buildingreal.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RZ2toxpA0ITJrZgWiCHdHApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1884485435Building something interesting?Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomasBuilding Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss.Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks.#BuildingReal #Podcast #SpecialtyCoffee #Singapore #Startups #FnB

Food waste generates 2.6 times the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire global airline industry — and yet only 5-6% of it ever gets composted. Tobias Wilson calls that number "the gold we're throwing away."Tobias spent nearly two decades in Singapore's advertising, marketing and digital-tech world before something started to feel missing. He began doing beach and river cleanups in Bali with his kids — "go and break a sweat for somebody else," he says, "it's incredible what that time does to you, and it's not for the benefit of you." That instinct led him to aerobic digestion, and eventually to founding Shiva Industries: a Bali-based team building on-site rapid composters that turn food and organic waste into nutrient-dense soil in 24 hours, not the 3-9 months traditional composting takes.We go deep on why most "composters" on the market are really just mechanical dehydrators wearing a green label — no live microbes in, no microbes out, and pathogens that can go dormant and reactivate once they hit soil — versus Shiva's proprietary strain of thermophilic microbes doing real aerobic digestion. Tobias walks through "Will It Digest," the series where his team stress-tests the machine on the strangest inputs they can find: 13 hours on elephant dung from Mason Elephant Park, a river-cleanup haul with Sungai Watch that included a dead duck, a chicken, a koi and a rat, even an accidental mop-bucket chemical dump.We talk unit economics — a two-year payback period and roughly 500 million rupiah in annual savings at just one ton of throughput a day — and the four forces (payback, regulation, brand, staff morale) that are finally turning holdout hotel owners into buyers now that Bali's landfills are closing. This one is for anyone who has ever looked at an "unglamorous" industry and wondered if the real opportunity was hiding in what everyone else calls trash.SHIVA INDUSTRIES & TOBIAS — HIGHLIGHTS & IMPACTTurns food and organic waste into nutrient-dense soil in 24 hours, versus 3-9 months for traditional composting26 machines live across 4 Indonesian islands, diverting 2,000,000+ kg of waste from landfill every yearNew factory opened in Denpasar, Bali in July 2025 to scale production, quality control and delivery~2-year payback period and ~500M rupiah in annual savings for a business running one ton of waste a dayUsed by hotels, resorts, restaurants, food processors, mining operations, schools and local government programs across Bali and IndonesiaABOUT TOBIAS WILSON Founder of Shiva Industries, a Bali-based green-tech company engineering on-site aerobic composting machines that convert organic waste into nutrient-dense soil in 24 hours. Tobias grew up on a farm in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, spent nearly 20 years in Singapore's advertising, marketing and digital-technology industries, then pivoted into sustainability after a series of beach and river cleanups in Bali turned into a mission to solve Southeast Asia's most overlooked waste problem.Connect with Tobias & Shiva Industries: Tobias Wilson (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiasjwilson/ Shiva Industries: https://www.shivaindustries.techBuilding something interesting? Reach out to Arjun: http://calendly.com/arjun-arcshift/ · https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas