The Bengaluru Founder Building A Bridge To San Francisco

Walk into any technology, AI or startup conference in Bengaluru, and you may encounter a familiar scene. Long queues around stalls handing out caps, water bottles, and T-shirts. 

Or some may gather around a well-known founder, hoping for a selfie and a video for Instagram Reels. In the crowd, a founder might as well be pitching a startup idea to an investor who might not be keen to listen at that hour.  

And then, you'll find Suhas Motwani. He somehow makes it to every group picture at these events.

Since 2019, he has built a community connecting product managers, founders, and tech leaders across India and the San Francisco Bay Area.

In today's industry, access to the right network is paramount to shaping, funding, and scaling ideas. With that in mind, Motwani co-founded The Product Folks (TPF), a community of nearly 240,000 members, mostly product builders and managers worldwide. 

TPF partners with the leading product companies and startups of the world, and brings together founders and product builders across community meetups, workshops, dinners and mixers. 

It also offers education and mentorship from leading industry experts and product folks, including Shreyas Doshi, Lenny Rachitsky, Kunal Shah, and others who’ve made a significant impact in the sector. 

With 300+ community events and meetups a year across 35 cities, it brings together product leaders, managers, and founders under one roof. It also helps startups and companies hire product talent and helps Bay Area founders gauge India’s ecosystem, and vice versa. It has hosted community events around products and leaders from OpenAI, Replit, Lovable, Cursor and others. 

While it also offers paid courses and mentorship plans, most of its product guides, e-books, case studies, and teardowns are free, written by product leaders drawing on real-world experience. 

Paradoxically, as AI requires fewer humans, its advancement relies on them more than ever. Human ingenuity remains essential, with engineers refining AI safety, cost, and efficiency. Together, these talents drive Motwani’s mission.

How TPF Was Born

Over the past decade, India focused on building everyday apps, boasting developer talent but struggling with user acquisition and scaling. In simple terms, this is called ‘product management.’ 

Engineers struggled to scale when attempting to copy San Francisco's approach. Success required understanding user behaviour and designing engaging features.

In 2019, while working at PepsiCo across business, product, and data, Motwani posted on social media to connect with others interested in product management.

Expecting a small turnout at a Bengaluru WeWork room, sixty people attended. The response suggested demand for a space where people could learn from one another.

Motwani says that before TPF was founded around 2015–16, most Indian product builders relied on lessons from Silicon Valley because local product management insights were scarce.

The Bay Area’s product culture reached Bengaluru through Medium articles, Twitter posts, and Y Combinator lectures, but without human interaction, he says it still felt like a ‘black box.’ 

“We wanted to create a forum for people here who were interested in product management and needed a place to learn and share knowledge,” Motwani says.

He was inspired by a free ProductTank workshop in London. Workshops attract attendees, but connections bring them back. Online resources couldn't replace direct insights from experienced builders, highlighting gaps in India's emerging product ecosystem. At the time, IT services dominated, and despite a vast developer pool, India lacked local benchmarks for acquiring users and scaling digital products.

“We were fortunate to start when product management in India was still nascent. Companies such as Flipkart, Ola and Freecharge were growing, and their leaders had learned from people in the [Silicon] Valley before building their own organisations here,” says Motwani. 

Motwani realised that capital alone is insufficient for innovation. He felt experienced builders must collaborate.

“We run over 300 annual events to democratise access, education, and learning,” says Motwani, who co-founded the effort with Aditya Mohanty, Abhay Jani, and Parth Batra.

Nikhil Jois, growth lead at Bureau and an early TPF attendee, notes that events operate under ‘Chatham House’ rules. “Participants share candid experiences, mistakes, and lessons, offering a practical way to exchange notes among active builders.”

Jois says this offers a different kind of learning than what you find online, where blogs and podcasts often present polished accounts of success rather than the messy realities of building a business."You get to learn from people in the trenches," says Jois.

Over the years, TPF’s events and workshops have been made commercially viable through partnerships with companies.

For startups, TPF offers more than brand visibility. Its events connect them directly with product managers, founders, and engineers who could become users, giving them a chance to demo features, gather feedback, and answer technical questions. They can also help companies gain traction in India.

TPF recently hosted Café Cursor in Bengaluru, an informal meetup where developers bring their laptops and build alongside other Cursor users. After starting as pop-ups in San Francisco and New York, the format has expanded internationally, with TPF helping Cursor establish a presence in India. In another collaboration, TPF partnered with Replit for a hands-on build session where participants created applications using the platform.

These gatherings also serve as product showcases, giving startups access to practitioners and a space to discuss technical features that may not attract mainstream media attention but matter to developers.

what a banger week: 7 days. 20+ events with the top ai companies. - openai - anthropic - elevenlabs - cursor - replit - wispr & more thread ???? special thanks to basecamp team :)) https://t.co/tQmja2R3Rj

— jani (@abhayjani4) August 13, 2026

TPF is also preparing for its flagship Un-Conference, which brings together product leaders from across the world. Passes range from ₹4,500 to ₹12,000. Throughout the year, it hosts free community meetups, where applicants can request an invite by outlining what they hope to learn and how they can contribute.

As AI blurs the line between engineers, designers, and product managers, TPF is expanding its scope. As ChatGPT and Claude put a library of answers in front of people, people want to learn what someone learned the hard way more than ever.

Meanwhile, Motwani and his team are helping Silicon Valley startups establish a presence in India. As companies look beyond the Bay Area, he believes entering the Indian market requires more than a local office. It demands access to the right ecosystem.

“The Bay Area was dense and difficult to keep up with, so people were not thinking much about other places. That has begun to change as companies expand,” he says. “If companies lose market share in India now, catching up later may be difficult.”

TPF aims to help companies navigate that transition, from deciding to enter India to building a meaningful presence.

Recently, the community co-hosted a Bengaluru workshop for AI founders with OpenAI’s head of startups, Marc Manara, and others from the company. 

AIM attended the event, which focused on building AI products that can compete globally. Manara urged founders to maintain regular connections with the Bay Area, where much of the frontier AI research is taking place.

“You just have to find the connectivity to be able to be in the loop of what’s happening.”

That connectivity is now central to TPF’s next chapter: The Founder Folks (TFF), an initiative aimed at extending the community’s reach from product builders to founders.

Building a Founder Matchmaking Service

While TPF focuses on education and career development, The Founder Folks (TFF) helps people build companies. Motwani bets on a large pool of million-dollar businesses, not just a handful of billion-dollar startups.

TFF facilitates targeted introductions for Indian founders entering the US market, where customers may be more willing to pay for AI products. Motwani believes a sustained effort over five to seven years could build a stronger corridor connecting founders, investors, customers and AI infrastructure across both regions.

For some founders, these introductions have replaced months of cold outreach. Asad Abrar, founder of Drizz and a TFF member, says the community offers trusted advice on everything from product development to legal and taxation matters.

“Finding trusted answers to all the questions you have on a daily basis is super critical as a founder,” he tells AIM. “TFF has brought a good curation of people where you can go ahead and share these questions and get relevant advice.”

Chocolate Making Workshops for Series A Founders, and Golf Classes for CXOs

With TFF, Motwani hopes to build another community once it reaches sufficient founder density. But he believes sustaining one requires more than putting people in a room. Communities must keep adapting to members’ interests and make participation worthwhile.

“Communities need to keep listening to what people want. Many communities have disappeared; the hard part is adapting,” he says.

browse through & come grab your seats to the ones you fancy — see you there ⛳️????️ https://t.co/oCM6tql9dH https://t.co/ol76ALaXo6

— suhas motwani (@MotwaniSuhas) July 30, 2026

Rather than relying on the usual panels, keynotes, and networking sessions, Motwani experiments with unconventional formats, from pickleball and venture capital meetups to supper clubs, CXO golf sessions, and chocolate-making workshops for Series A founders. TPF has also partnered with Bolna AI for a voice-themed pub quiz and hosted board game nights for founders.

His larger ambition is to create a hundred communities like TPF to strengthen India's startup ecosystem. 

“India has built products in areas such as home services and ten-minute delivery, but we have not yet produced a consumer startup on the scale of Google or Meta. If even one such product came out of the TPF community, that would be a major achievement,” he says.