Four Places Away 😢
What losing at Genesis 2026 taught me about business, confidence, and the gap between an engineer and a founder.
There are some days when winning feels normal.
And then there are days when losing teaches you more than winning ever could.
Today was one of those days.
We finished 4th among 40+ teams from across Bihar at a business idea competition at Alliance University.
Only a few places separated us from the top.
And the reward was not just a trophy or certificate.
A sponsored ticket to Bangalore was waiting for the top positions.
We were just three steps away.
And that hurts.
It started with confidence
Going into the competition, I was honestly very confident.
Not because I thought we were the smartest people in the room.
But because we had already worked on our idea, questioned it, refined it, tested different angles, prepared the pitch, and built a story around it.
I genuinely believed:
“We are making it to the top.”
That confidence wasn't fake.
But maybe, in some ways, it became a problem too.
Because somewhere along the way, we started believing that our 2-minute pitch was the competition.
And it wasn't.
Then we got the problem statement
Our challenge was related to makhana.
Honestly?
That wasn't our domain.
We are engineering students.
We are comfortable talking about technology, systems, AI, products, software, prototypes and engineering problems.
But suddenly, we were sitting in a business competition discussing:
farmers, processing, pricing, distribution, urban demand, customers, margins, branding and market behaviour.
And yet, we did what we had learned to do.
We started thinking.
We broke the problem down.
We questioned assumptions.
We tried to find a gap.
And eventually, we came up with Mithila Makhana.
A campus-first makhana snack brand designed around college students.
The idea wasn't simply:
“Let's sell makhana.”
The idea was:
“Can we turn makhana into an everyday campus snack and build a student community around it?”
That became our direction.
The idea started becoming something bigger
We didn't stop at the product.
We thought about the customer.
The college canteen.
The hostel shop.
The ₹20 price point.
Flavours.
Packaging.
Farmer groups.
Processing partners.
Distribution.
Repeat purchases.
Campus ambassadors.
Rewards.
QR-based engagement.
Student communities.
Suddenly, this wasn't just a snack.
It was becoming a business model.
And honestly, that was the part I enjoyed the most.
Taking something as simple as makhana and asking:
“Why can't this become a student habit?”
Then came the pitch
The format was intense.
We had only two minutes.
So we did what engineers often do when time is limited:
We optimized.
We made the pitch shorter.
Cleaner.
Faster.
More structured.
We focused on:
Problem → Customer → Solution → Business → Growth → Closing.
We practiced the timing.
We wanted to finish within the limit.
And we did.
But looking back, I think we optimized for the wrong thing.
We optimized the pitch instead of optimizing the business case.
That's the biggest lesson I am taking home.
We knew the management concepts.
This is probably what hurts the most.
The funny part?
We weren't completely unaware of business.
We already knew many of the concepts.
Customer segments.
Pricing.
Margins.
Distribution.
Unit economics.
Customer acquisition.
Market validation.
Competitive positioning.
Growth.
But knowing something and using it under pressure are two completely different things.
The management students around us were naturally thinking from the business side.
We were thinking:
“How do we make the idea better?”
They were also thinking:
“How does this business work?”
And that difference matters.
A good idea can get attention.
But a strong business model gets confidence.
We made another mistake
We became too attached to our idea.
We believed in it so much that we spent more energy proving why it could work than proving what could make it fail.
A stronger approach would have been:
What assumption are we making?
What evidence do we have?
What is still unknown?
What will we test first?
What happens if students don't buy again?
What is our actual margin?
Why will a canteen owner stock this?
Why will a student choose this over the snack already in their hand?
These are not “presentation questions.”
These are business questions.
And that's where we needed to think harder.
[IMAGE: Team presenting in front of the expert panel]
Then the room changed
Standing in front of an expert panel is completely different from practicing in your room.
Your heartbeat increases.
You know your content.
You know your idea.
But suddenly you become hyper-aware of the judges sitting in front of you.
The clock is running.
You know there are only two minutes.
You are trying to remember what comes next.
You are trying to speak clearly.
And at the same time, your brain is thinking:
“Are they convinced?”
That hesitation is real.
Anyone who has stood in front of an expert panel knows what I mean.
You can prepare for hours.
But pressure exposes the gaps that preparation sometimes hides.
And then… 4th place.
We didn't win.
We finished 4th.
When the result came, there was a strange feeling.
Part of me was disappointed.
Another part was proud.
And another part was simply asking:
“What exactly were we missing?”
Because we weren't eliminated in the first round.
We didn't completely fail.
We didn't come last.
We came very close.
And sometimes being close hurts more than being far away.
Because you start replaying every small decision.
The journey back to Buxar
This is probably the part I will remember most.
While returning to Buxar, my mind wouldn't stop.
I kept asking myself:
Why didn't we make it?
What was the missing piece?
Where did we lose marks?
Was the idea not strong enough?
Was the business model weak?
Did we explain it badly?
Did we focus too much on pitching?
Could we have answered one question better?
Could we have thought one level deeper?
There wasn't one dramatic mistake.
There were small mistakes stacked together.
And sometimes that's enough.
But something else happened today
We met Dr. Kavita from Alliance University.
She was genuinely impressed by one particular part of our idea:
The promotional and student-community side.
The idea of getting students to become customers, participants and eventually part of the brand itself.
That conversation mattered to me.
Because it reminded me that even though we didn't win, there was something in the idea that people could see.
And that matters.
A competition result is one judgment at one moment.
It is not the final validation of a business.
[IMAGE: With Dr. Kavita / conversation / feedback moment]
Maybe 4th place was exactly what we needed
For the last few competitions, I had started getting used to winning.
And that creates a dangerous feeling.
You start expecting the result before you've earned it.
You start thinking:
“We'll probably get selected.”
Today reminded me that confidence is useful, but certainty is dangerous.
Losing after being confident hurts.
But it also resets you.
Engineering vs Management
Being surrounded by management students today made one thing very clear to me.
As engineers, we naturally ask:
“Can we build it?”
Management thinkers often ask:
“Who will buy it?”
But a founder needs to ask both.
Engineering asks:
Can we build it?
Product asks:
Do people need it?
Business asks:
Will they pay for it?
Finance asks:
Does the unit economics work?
Marketing asks:
Why will they choose us?
Strategy asks:
Why can we win?
And entrepreneurship sits somewhere in the middle of all of them.
That's probably the biggest lesson I got today.
Finance + Tech
I've said this before, and today made me believe it even more:
The combination of Finance + Technology is extremely powerful.
Not because every successful company is simply “Finance + Tech.”
But because technology gives you the ability to build, while financial and business thinking forces you to understand whether building is actually worth it.
I already enjoy the technology side.
Today reminded me that I need to become much stronger on the business side.
Unit economics.
Pricing.
Financial modelling.
Go-to-market.
Customer acquisition.
Market sizing.
Distribution.
Retention.
Capital efficiency.
And most importantly:
Knowing what numbers actually matter.
Mithila Makhana is not over
We lost the competition.
But the idea isn't dead.
Actually, I'm more interested in it now than I was before.
Because now we know the weakness.
The next version of Mithila Makhana shouldn't just have a better pitch.
It should have:
better validation.
better numbers.
better customer interviews.
better unit economics.
better distribution strategy.
better understanding of student behaviour.
And maybe most importantly—
real students buying the product.
Because eventually, no judge will matter more than the customer.
What I would tell my younger self tonight
Don't walk into a business competition thinking:
“Our idea is good, so we will win.”
Walk in thinking:
“Let's find out whether our business is actually good.”
Don't spend all your preparation making the pitch sound impressive.
Spend enough time understanding the business that even if the pitch disappears, you still know exactly why the company should exist.
Don't try to appear certain about every number.
Know which numbers are facts.
Know which numbers are assumptions.
And know exactly how you will test those assumptions.
We came fourth.
Three places away from the sponsored Bangalore ticket.
Forty-plus teams.
Mostly management backgrounds.
An engineering team standing in a room where business was the language.
And we still made it to 4th place.
So yes, I'm disappointed.
I won't pretend I'm not.
It hurts.
But maybe this loss is more valuable than another easy win would have been.
Because today we discovered something uncomfortable:
We don't need only better ideas.
We need better business thinking.
And now we know what we need to work on.
[IMAGE: Team photo / certificate / journey back]
This wasn't the end.
It was feedback.
The competition ended today.
The learning didn't.
And Mithila Makhana?
That story is still being written.
Maybe someday, when we look back at this competition, we won't remember it as:
“The day we lost by three places.”
Maybe we'll remember it as:
“The day we finally understood what we were missing.”
Today, we came fourth.
Next time, we come prepared for all nine boxes—not just the two-minute pitch.
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