Not a restaurant, not a food-tech startup. Just a balcony, four aunties, and the world's highest-rated cooking experience.

What do you do when a startup folds, immigration botches your paperwork, and you find yourself locked out of Singapore for five months — no job, no income, and a lease you can't escape?

For Dhruv Shanker — former Alibaba exec (Lazada, Daraaz), Groupon marketer, and obsessive home cook — the answer was to open a cooking class on his balcony. A deliberately, defiantly "boring" cooking class that Airbnb literally tried to reject.

In this episode, we unpack how Dhruv runs two wildly different businesses — CashCounter (e-commerce enablement for brands entering Southeast Asia) and Boring Indian Food (private dining, cooking classes, catering). We get into the AI playbook he uses on Lazada and Shopee, the K-pop hot sauce story that explains Asian e-commerce, and the guests who've walked through his door: a drug lord's private chef, a blind guest who cooked an entire meal unaided, and a nine-months pregnant woman who just needed Gongura chicken.

The first half is for anyone building a business on marketplaces — Dhruv draws on years inside Alibaba, Lazada, Groupon and Google to break down what separates great e-commerce sellers from everyone else. If food, people, and what happens when real passion meets a real crisis is more your thing, jump straight to [40:37] — that's where the story gets personal.

The anti-restaurant story that hit 10,000 guests without a single table.

𝗗𝗵𝗿𝘂𝘃'𝘀 𝗛𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀:
→ Airbnb's highest-rated culinary experience in the world — perfect 5.0 stars, 100+ reviews
→ 10,000+ guests hosted across 8 years of private dining in Singapore
→ Featured in SG60 — one of 60 remarkable people in Singapore
→ 2 years of forward bookings filled in a single night after Airbnb's global campaign

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🔗 Connect with Our Guest
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Dhruv Shanker (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/madonionslicer/
Mad Onion Slicer: https://www.madonionslicer.com
Instagram / All platforms: @madonionslicer

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Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas

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#ecommerce #privatedining #singaporefounder #founderjourney #airbnb #boringindianfood #ecommerceasia #marketplaces #startuplife #buildingrealpodcast

Not another AI startup — this is deep tech that runs on bacteria.

What do you do when your apartment's "sewage treatment plant" overflows and you discover it's just a fake tank dumping raw waste into a lake? For former Aadhaar IT architect Tharun Kumar, that crisis turned into EcoSTP — a sewage treatment system inspired by a cow's stomach that runs with zero power, zero chemicals, and almost no human intervention.

In this conversation, we get into how Tharun went from corporate IT to spending a decade "in deep shit," why 100-year-old STP technology never evolved, and how EcoSTP uses anaerobic bacteria and biomimicry to let some clients reuse the same water more than 1,000 times. We talk about embedding STPs into building basements, turning them into "living buildings," and what it took to scale a licensing model across 24 Indian states plus Bangladesh and the Maldives while keeping quality control from Bangalore.

A cleantech and circular economy story that started with a real crisis — not a pitch deck.

EcoSTP's impact:

• 8 billion litres of water reclaimed
• 12,000 tons of coal avoided
• Startup India's "Most Circular Innovator" — pitched to the Prime Minister of India.

Topics: wastewater treatment, deep tech startup, anaerobic bacteria, biomimicry, zero-energy sanitation, circular economy, cleantech India, founder journey, startup scaling

Connect:

Tharun Kumar: linkedin.com/in/tharun/

EcoSTP: ecostp.com/