Almost Every Hand Went Up: Notes from the Zero Point Five Meetup in Vadodara

Sunday morning, Karelibaug. More than sixty of us in one room for a Zero Point Five meetup. I went expecting a networking event and a cup of chai. I came home with a phone full of new numbers and the feeling you get after a really good family function, the kind where you keep finding reasons not to leave.

Saurabh and Deepak, thank you for putting this together. No stage, no sponsor slides, no agenda deck. Just a room, chai, and people who chose to spend a Sunday morning with strangers. I do not think you get told enough how much work that takes.

Gyanesh Soni, thank you for sponsoring the morning. Gyanesh is the founder of GoldNest, a Vadodara company that lets anyone start buying 24K gold from ₹99, and he sat in the room like everyone else, listening more than talking. The chai was on you, and so was the room.

And thank you to every single person who came. The student in the second row with an idea he had clearly been turning over for months. The exporter who has been in business longer than some of us have been alive. The woman who keeps the books for six local firms. The retired bank manager with the sharpest questions in the room. Each of you gave up a Sunday, and each of you made the room what it was.

My phone has a new list of names in it this week, and I want to say them out loud. Bhargav ji, Shashi ji, Komal, Faiza, Vinod ji, Parth, Falguni ji, Maitrya and Shubham, Shrey, Pankaj. Each of you gave me a conversation I am still thinking about. Some of you corrected me, some of you asked me something I could not answer on the spot, and a few of you simply listened while I talked too fast. And to everyone whose name I did not catch before the morning ran out, the fault is mine, not yours. Come find me at the next one and I will fix it.

Here is a confession. I have stage fright. Not the cute kind. The kind where I know exactly what I want to say and it leaves my head the moment people look at me. So the night before, I wrote a short speech. When my turn came, I told the room the truth: "I am afraid I might fumble, so I wrote down what I want to share with you, and I am going to read it from my phone." Nobody laughed. A few people nodded like they knew the feeling. That small kindness is the thing I remember most.

Then I started the speech the way I had written it, with a question. "How many of you want to earn in dollars?"

Almost every hand went up. The student. The exporter. The bookkeeper. The retired banker. I stood there holding my phone and could not stop grinning. I have been working on this idea for two years, mostly alone, mostly at a laptop, and that was the first time it felt like something other people wanted too.

People call Vadodara a quiet city. That room was not quiet. There was an electricity in it, the feeling of a lot of people quietly deciding the same thing at the same time. Nobody was asking "can I". Everyone was asking "how".

I do not want that feeling to end with the chai. So let us keep going. Let us keep building, keep solving each other's problems, and stay connected in the WhatsApp group. Ask the question you were too shy to ask on Sunday. Share the thing you are stuck on. Someone in that room has already solved it, and if nobody has, we will figure it out together. My door is open to every one of you, no agenda, no pitch.

A few seconds of the morning, for anyone who wants to see the room rather than read about it.

If you were not there, come to the next one. Follow Zero Point Five on LinkedIn for the next date, and tell Saurabh and Deepak I sent you.

Thank you, Vadodara. See you at the next one.