When Manav Subodh first saw the mountain village in Uttarakhand as a teenager, it lodged in him the way some images do — small, stubborn and impossible to forget. He remembers it as “cut off from world,” a place with no road and no electricity.
The sight stayed with him.
Years later, after a corporate life that took him around the globe, he came back to that memory and a single, bold idea: make entrepreneurship possible where people already live.
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“I was lit up by the possibility to create 1 million entrepreneurs and leaders who will drive 1 billion people out of poverty (1M1B),” he told me in a 2018 email. It was not a slogan. It was his life’s compass.
He quit a comfortable job at Intel in January 2015 and began building something that blurred youth training, job-creation and grassroots diplomacy.
SMALL STARTS, BIG IDEAS
Manav Subodh’s method is deliberately modest. “Small is the new big,” he says — meaning start with tiny, local problems and teach young people enough practical skills to solve them.
The 1M1B curriculum is tight: around 45 hours, cases rooted in local life, and a push to turn passion into purpose.
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