Founder Mythos
The Engineer Who Left the Launchpad to Build His Own
Though being a scientist at ISRO was fulfilling, being an entrepreneur is far more fulfilling and challenging.
Chandana spent five years on one of India's largest launch vehicles, rising to deputy project manager, then left the national space agency in 2018 to build private rockets from a rented Hyderabad unit.
He did not leave because the work was bad. He left because the harder version of it did not exist yet, and he wanted to be the one who built it.
What if launching into space could be as accessible and routine as commercial air travel?
The founding question was not about a rocket. It was about access: whether getting to orbit could become as ordinary as boarding a flight, for anyone with a satellite and a reason.
The best deep-tech companies start from a customer sentence, not a spec sheet. The engineering follows the question, not the other way around.
That is exactly what entrepreneurs are about. They take bold risks, and that is when you get benefits out of it.
Founding a private launch company in a sector long reserved for the state meant building against the assumption that only governments send rockets up. Chandana treated that assumption as the opportunity.
In markets where the incumbent is the state itself, the risk is not a tax on the business. It is the business.
Don't let early failures define you. Let them fuel you.
India's first privately built rocket did not arrive fully formed. It came from iteration, from test articles and rebuilds inside a young company still proving the category was real.
The founder's relationship to failure is the whole culture. If the first miss is a verdict, the company stops. If it is fuel, the company launches.