With more than two decades across entrepreneurship, technology, venture capital, and ecosystem building, Harshal Shah has seen startups rise, pivot, struggle, and scale. His journey, from building product-led ventures in Silicon Valley, leading teams across tech and healthcare, to serving as president of TiE Austin has given him a rare vantage point on how innovation, human capital, and resilience come together to create meaningful ventures.
What stood out during this exclusive interview with The American Bazaar was not just his experience, but his clarity of purpose. He speaks passionately about The Venture Build, his structured approach to entrepreneurship that focuses not just on ideas and funding, but on building sustainable, purpose-driven, and scalable companies. To him, venture building is not just about investing — it is about co-creation, mentorship, design thinking, scaling models, and enabling founders to build with purpose, resilience, and clarity.
He believes entrepreneurship is not a straight line, rather it’s a journey of persistence, evolution, and adaptation. Those who are equipped with the right mindset, mentorship, infrastructure, and access to a global network can truly build enterprises that matter.
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In this insightful conversation, Shah opens up about the ethos of TiE, the rise of AI across industries, the emergence of the global creator economy, and the one leadership principle he believes every entrepreneur must embody—persistence.
The American Bazaar: Within private equity, how does the scaling model work, and what led you to build your own company?
Harshal Shah: Within private equity, which actually is useful for scaling companies, private equity would go ahead, acquire a company, then hand it over to the operator arm. This arm would help scale these companies to 2X or 5X of EBITDA in 3 to 5 years. I figured that this operator model does not exist holistically in the venture capital world. That’s where The Venture Build, TVB, came into existence. TVB is a venture catalyst ecosystem, an operator ecosystem for venture capital companies. Apart from funding, there are a lot of other things that a scale-up would need, and that’s where The Venture Build comes in, helping with advisory, market access, and funding advisory access in a nutshell.
You’ve scaled multiple businesses to multi-million-dollar value. What would you say is your secret to driving that kind of growth?
I don’t think there is a secret recipe for growth. A McKinsey report says that 56% of scale-ups fail after receiving funding. They got the money, but they still can’t scale because there are multiple other things you need beyond capital.
Three or four things we zoomed out are:
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- One, you require guidance from somebody who has done that before. It’s easier to learn from someone else’s experiences than make your own mistakes.
Second, focusing early on real customers is very useful. Reaching your target market early and getting your customers is very important. - Third, your technology and product might be great, but there are other things you must start doing fast. For example, partnerships are a great way of go-to-market.
Also, how you scale your support functions with constrained revenues and cost models is important. It’s a fine balance. You have to be adaptive and flexible very fast, and at the same time, persistent. The fine judgment between where to be persistent and where to be flexible is what gets you to the next level.
- One, you require guidance from somebody who has done that before. It’s easier to learn from someone else’s experiences than make your own mistakes.
The American Bazaar: What led you to start The Venture Build, and how is it different from traditional VC firms, especially the operator arm you mentioned?
Traditional venture capital companies would typically give you funds and be hands-off. What we figured out was this operator ecosystem, helping founders and scale-ups in their execution cycle to get to the next level.
We help with the right support systems, great advisors, access to the market. We work more hands-on on execution: Is your go-to-market strategy, right? Is your pricing strategy, right?
Second, how do you do market access the right way? Are you leveraging channels, networks, event ecosystems?
Third, we provide a single pane of glass for everything outside your product—legal, finance, marketing, support. We help scale-ups reach vetted groups who work on a need basis or fractional basis to take away chaos so they can focus on what they need to.
Finally, funding advisory: If they are to get to Series A or Series B, how do you reflect what you need to do—right decks, right VCs, sector-focused investors. Not all VCs understand your problem, so connecting the right dots is useful.
We’ve created a pool of VCs and partners, making it a large ecosystem where the scaler comes in and gets help right away.
As a startup founder, advisor, and investor, do you have an investment philosophy? What makes you say, “This is a good startup” versus one you would not invest in?
In my opinion, every startup is a good startup because someone is putting in the effort to change something. But you can’t put money in all of them.
We see three or four core criteria:
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- One: Is there a real problem to be solved?
- Second: Are you focused enough to solve that problem? If you are a startup or scale-up, focus helps.
- Third: The founding team. Do they have the right passion? Are they moldable? At every stage—0 to 1, 1 to 10, 10 to 100 million—you need different skill sets. Leadership should either mold themselves or bring in the right talent.
These are the core elements we look at when gauging startups.
What are some things you would tell startups to avoid while pitching or building their business? What mistakes do you constantly see?
At different stages, people make different mistakes.
A big one is clearly identifying your ICP—Ideal Customer Profile—who you’re targeting and what problem you’re solving. People think they know, but when you dig deeper, they can’t articulate it clearly. Identifying exactly what you’re solving and for whom is critical. It seems easy, but it is not.
Many say, “We’ve developed this new AI tool which can solve world hunger.” No, it cannot. There are thousands doing that. Technology is never a startup; technology is a means to solve a business problem. Once you identify the problem, you can leverage technology to solve it better.
Another key aspect is vulnerability of founders. If someone is not ready to pivot quickly, it becomes extremely difficult. Pivoting is part of the job in startup and scale-up mode.
You have been associated with TiE Austin for quite some time. What would be some valuable lessons or experiences from there that shaped your perspective?
I was the President for TiE Austin for almost three years. I joined TiE in 2019, so it’s not like I’ve spent a huge amount of time, but TiE is a very interesting ecosystem.
If you start looking at the ethos of TiE, it goes back to the core philosophy on which TiE was established. It had five core founding principles: education, mentoring, network, investments, and incubation.
The inception of TiE was when successful VCs in the Bay Area figured that they turned out to be great and were able to scale, but what about the budding entrepreneurs? How would we help some of these budding scale-ups in terms of giving them the right advice and navigation to reach where they want to?
That’s how TiE was born. The non-profit organization was created with the focus of giving back—sharing what you’ve learned, the best practices you were able to learn. Is there a way by which we can share this so that the next generation does not have to go through the same mistakes and can do it a lot better? That’s the philosophy of TiE.
One of the big advantages is it’s a global network—30,000 plus members all across the globe. You see a TiE chapter in any big city in the world today. If you have to start connecting to these people for advice or for helping that ecosystem to grow and scale to the next level, TiE is extremely powerful.
We were doing some very interesting things in the TiE Austin ecosystem as well. The combination of people who do not have any other intent but to help, and this big network of ecosystem, actually makes TiE very, very unique.
What was the first instance that drew you to TiE? Was there a specific moment when you felt you should join, or did it just happen?
It’s interesting. I’ve lived in multiple cities in the U.S. I moved to Austin in 2019. So when I moved to Austin, my philosophy was: one, how do I start impacting the Austin ecosystem with the experience I bring in? And at the same time, how do I make good friends in this new city?
It was a combination—maybe a little selfish—of wanting to make good friends, and also seeing if I could start adding value to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, sharing what I had learned with Austin and the Central Texas region. That’s how I started exploring. I turned into TiE Austin, figured it could be an interesting way of getting in, started participating, saw a lot more value, and it aligned with what I was trying to do. That’s how my journey with TiE Austin started, and I’m grateful for what I was able to do during that period.
You mentioned there were things that inspired you. Can you talk about some of them?
One is the whole philosophy of giving back—it was very inspiring. There are not many organizations today that are pure giving-back organizations. That was extremely powerful.
Second, wherever you go, people are helpful. This is how Asif and I met. Someone connected me through the TiE ecosystem, he knew Asif well and we got connected here in Austin, started meeting, and here we are. It is so easy to start meeting and talking to the right people through TiE.
I was in India in June and attended three or four different TiE events in different cities. There was a TiE charter member from Australia who visited Austin, and we started connecting the dots—how do we collaborate and help? Same thing with Indian chapters. TiE allows people to connect so easily, which generally doesn’t happen in the corporate world easily.
It stays true to the ethos of TiE — how do you just help without expecting too much in return?
There are some inspiring stories. I knew a founder trying to reach a successful person to have him as an advisor. He struggled because there was no path. He came to one of our events, started talking, and then saw that this person was part of TiE in another chapter. He asked if I could help. I connected him to the president of that chapter, and in a matter of hours, he started getting responses.
Some of the core pillars of global TiE initiatives — TiE Women, TiE University — are impactful. A survey showed that TiE has impacted more than a trillion dollars’ worth of entrepreneurship ecosystem. I don’t think there is any other organization making such an impact without expecting anything. It’s truly fantastic to be associated with something like that.
You’ve been in Austin for around six years now. Many believe it has emerged as one of the biggest high-tech ecosystems in the United States, maybe even globally. Why has Austin attracted so many companies and grown so rapidly?
It’s not all of a sudden, as you can rightly imagine. The growth vibe that I see in Austin is amazing. Austin is getting to that bigger-city status with a smaller-city vibe. Not many cities in the U.S. have that philosophy. Bigger cities tend to become more transactional because people are juggling so many priorities. Whereas Austin still has the small-city vibe with the growth drive.
The second thing is all the right parameters—be it the government, the local ecosystem, or the community—everyone comes in with that passion and hunger for growth. That is phenomenal.
Combine that with interesting universities—UT Austin, of course, is awesome—and other tech hubs bringing in the right talent pool. The combination of the right government leadership, community leadership, access to talent, and growth vibe creates something special.
And I wouldn’t complain much about the weather. Many people say it’s too hot. I thought it was actually beautiful — sun almost all year round. It’s a combination of various factors. Texas as a whole is growing significantly. If you combine Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin, it could be the biggest hub for economic activity. It is fairly easy to get to any of these places — less than 2 to 3 hours. That gives you a core concentrated pool across that region.
I think it’s only going to grow. And the interesting part is there is still so much growth opportunity. If you look at New England, for example, where I used to live—I love Boston—but the challenge in those places is you are constrained. There is no space left to expand.
Whereas in Texas, even 30 miles from my place today, there is barren land. You can grow to whatever extent you want. So, the combination of being growth-hungry, availability, talent, and the growth vibe all combined makes Austin very unique, in my opinion.
Since you’ve worked across so many different sectors—healthcare, technology—are there any emerging sectors that you think are ripe for innovation beyond AI?
With this AI landscape, a lot of new things are going to come up, and a transformation across multiple domains is going to start happening. Healthcare was a very interesting example. It was very archaic in the technology landscape.
I was working with a lot of tech companies, which were foundational infra-tech companies, before looking at healthcare. When I started looking at it, I was like, what is wrong with this domain? People were using pagers. Who uses pagers these days? It is slowly changing, but they were using archaic stuff. I actually reached out to one of these payers, and he said the only way to get your claim is by fax. I’m like, who uses fax today?
The good part with AI now is they can pivot directly — just like in India, we skipped the PC era and jumped onto the mobile era. Healthcare will directly move to the AI era and skip intermediary stages. That shift is going to open up quite some interesting opportunities.
The second space that a lot of people don’t talk about is the small and medium ecosystem—the creator economy. With the AI boom, that can grow a whole lot faster. These niche areas—travel, creators, small businesses—are going to start coming up in a very interesting way. Globalization with AI means you can get things done a lot more easily. Travel, people-to-people connections, and creator-led businesses will become very interesting industries.
When you say creator economy, do you mean social media personas or small business owners in general?
Essentially, it’s the economy based on individuals’ creations. Whether it’s movie making, art and crafts, or other mom-and-pop shops—previously, because they did not have access or had constraints, their reach was limited. But now, with AI, they can do transactions faster and more efficiently. That will change the landscape.
New ecosystems are going to develop which will make this economy truly global. You’re already seeing this in India. The market for art and craft, movie-making, even leather and Kolhapuri chappals—these have been around for ages. But it’s only now that they’re getting global attention.
Creators in India, Italy, France—they can now reach the world much faster. That economy is going through a very interesting transformation.
You’ve spent more than 20 years in entrepreneurship and technology. What is one leadership principle you always go back to?
There is no one secret sauce, but if you ask me for one thing, it would be persistence. I was working with Persistent for a long period of time, and the name itself is that quality.
Whatever you do, you have to be persistent. You are never going to be successful overnight unless you get a lottery, and that is luck, not success.
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Being able to persist, being able to continue with that mindset that this is going to happen despite hurdles and challenges—that’s what matters. You might have to pivot and come back again. I did my entrepreneurship, and I failed miserably earlier on, but that did not stop me from doing it again.
It might take a whole lot more time than imagined—that’s fine. But you persist. If there is one keyword for leadership, it is persistence.