What does it take to build a national team that beats the best in the world -- with no government funding, no salary, and players who have never seen a football?

India had never fielded a blind football team that could trouble the world's powerhouses. Sunil Mathew built one anyway -- starting from a 20-minute demo game and turning it into teams now ranked in the global top five, on a fraction of the budget of the nations they beat.

In this conversation, we go inside a sport played entirely without sight -- four totally-blind outfield players, a sighted keeper, a ball with a bell inside, and three voices guiding play -- and the moments that made Sunil's mission: the player offered surgery to restore his sight who turned it down because he "cannot play football without this," the 13-year-old who promised "I will fight for you, I will die for you" before scoring at the World Cup, and the boy who fell from a jackfruit tree and now captains India with a road named after him in his village.

We also get a clear-eyed look at the work -- roughly 15 million visually impaired Indians, 75-80% of that blindness preventable, no government funding, and a coach who refuses a salary -- plus how India went from importing footballs from England to manufacturing them in Jalandhar, and the assistive-tech device Sunil is building to catch a fall within the golden hour.

This one is for anyone who's been told the odds, the budget, or the obstacles are too big to start.

Connect with Sunil & his work:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunil-j-mathew/

- India's blind football team: The Home of Blind Football in India - Home
- SRVC (Sunil's NGO for the visually challenged): SOCIETY FOR REHABILITATION OF THE VISUALLY CHALLENGED
- Heart2Heart Orchestra: SOCIETY FOR REHABILITATION OF THE VISUALLY CHALLENGED

Building something interesting?
- Reach out to Arjun: Arjun Thomas
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas

Building Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss.

Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks.

Startup education | social impact | founder incentives | Founders For Change | entrepreneurship beyond exits | next-gen founders

Supriya Panchangam has spent a decade in rooms full of young people and arrived at one uncomfortable conclusion: the biggest problem with the next generation of founders isn't their ambition — it's what they've been taught to aim for.

As co-founder of Founders For Change (FFC), she's building a different kind of startup education: one that teaches founders to build for impact and sustainability, not headlines and exits. We go deep on broken incentive structures in the startup ecosystem, why optimising for Forbes covers is failing a generation of builders, and what it actually takes to rewire how founders think about success.

Topics:

- Why the startup ecosystem's incentive structure is broken for most founders

- How FFC teaches mission-driven building to the next generation

- Why non-STEM students are being excluded from the innovation conversation

- What sustainable, community-driven company building looks like in practice

- Fixing the gap between startup culture and real-world impact

Guest: Supriya Panchangam, co-founder of Founders For Change (FFC)

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

Find us: buildingreal.com | @buildingrealpodcast on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

AI and creativity | children's books | illustration | human vs AI | creative career | author story | taste as competitive advantage

Vinayak Varma is an author and illustrator who has spent years building a creative career in children's books — a category that is, on paper, one of the most replaceable by AI. His answer to whether AI can kill human creativity is more nuanced, and more useful, than either camp usually admits.

The argument: AI can generate infinite content. It cannot develop taste. It cannot decide what is missing from the world and fill it with intention. And in a landscape of infinite generated content, curation and judgment become the only durable moats.

This is a conversation for anyone building a creative career in 2026, anyone asking whether their craft is worth protecting, and anyone curious about what "human" actually means in a world of AI-generated everything.

Topics:

- Why taste is the moat AI cannot replicate

- Building a sustainable creative career in children's books

- How AI changes (but does not end) illustration and storytelling

- What it means to build something durable when tools are commoditised

- Creativity as a discipline, not a talent

Guest: Vinayak Varma, author and illustrator

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

Find us: buildingreal.com | @buildingrealpodcast on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok