Mumbai-based entrepreneur Yash Gawde says a chance encounter with Zerodha co-founder and billionaire Nikhil Kamath at a Bandra café has changed the trajectory of his fledgling startup.
“I had 45 days of runway left and a wave from Nikhil Kamath changed the whole trajectory of my startup,” Gawde shared via LinkedIn post. He revealed that his company, BeHooked, an AI venture that turns ideas into social-media-ready videos, was close to running out of cash when a casual handwritten note passed to Kamath set off a chain of events that made national headlines.
The viral moment
Earlier this month, Gawde spotted Kamath at Subko Café in Bandra while meeting a venture capitalist friend. Egged on by his companion, he quickly tore a page out of his diary, scribbled a note introducing himself and his startup, and asked the waitstaff to discreetly deliver it.
The note read: “Hi Nikhil, Big fan and huge respect for what you have built and achieved… I built an AI agent that turns your ideas into social media-ready videos… Would love to connect.”
Kamath, Gawde claims, read it, looked up, smiled and waved. That fleeting acknowledgement was enough for Gawde to post about it on LinkedIn, never expecting what would follow.
When the internet took over
“I thought I was just making another ‘build in public’ post. But that post broke the internet,” he wrote in his latest update. The story was soon picked up by major media outlets.
Gawde was at his native place for Ganesh Chaturthi, struggling with a patchy network, when he realised the scale of the attention. “My phone starts buzzing non-stop… WhatsApp is blowing up, 3 calls every minute… I Google myself, it takes 10 minutes for the page to load. And when it finally does… boom. I was literally everywhere.”
The founder, who admits BeHooked had just a month and a half of runway left, suddenly found himself at the centre of a flood of investor interest. “Investors started pouring in, so much that I lost track of it,” he wrote.
The wave of goodwill quickly translated into a business opportunity. Gawde says direct messages from potential users also poured in, with many asking why the platform didn’t offer a free trial. His candid answer: the company could not afford the burn of free plans without external funding.
Now, riding the visibility of the moment, Gawde has announced an open call for investors. “We’re opening the floor for you to invest in BeHooked. If you want to bet on a hustler building AI in India, this is your shot,” he wrote, linking to an interest form.
What began as a two-second wave inside a Bandra café has snowballed into the defining break for an entrepreneur on the brink. Commenters on LinkedIn called it “luck meeting preparation” and “a great example of turning a moment into an opportunity.” For Gawde, it is proof that sometimes all it takes is equal parts hustle and timing. “Looks like Bappa had other plans,” he signed off, crediting the Ganpati festival for the stroke of serendipity.