Engineers who only understand the technology, and never the business it serves, hit a ceiling early. The best ones develop commercial awareness — a real sense of how value is created, funded, and sold. Two days at 21BY72 Season 4, one of Bharat's leading startup summits — eighty-five ventures on the floor and live pitches in front of six hundred investors — was a concentrated lesson in exactly that, and I wrote about it in this reflection.
Technology is a means; the business is the point
It's easy, as an engineer, to treat the product as the whole world and the commercial side as someone else's problem. Sitting in a room where eighty-five ventures pitched to investors makes the truth obvious: the technology is a means to a business end, and understanding that end makes you a better engineer, not a distracted one.
Watching founders pitch — being judged not on how clever the build was but on whether it solved a real problem people would pay for — reframes how you think about your own work. It pushes you to ask "who is this for and why does it matter" before "how do I build it."
What the summit floor teaches an engineer
