For decades, Indian-origin entrepreneurs have been closely tied to some of America’s most recognizable franchise brands—from **7-Eleven and Dunkin’** to small motels, gas stations, and other steady, cash-flow-driven businesses that helped immigrant families establish their footing in a new country.

Those models offered stability and a reliable entry point into U.S. business ownership. They also shaped an entire generation of Indian-American entrepreneurs.

But a **notable shift is underway**.

Today’s Indian-origin business owners are stepping beyond the traditional “safe” categories their families once relied on. A growing number are investing in franchise sectors that reflect lifestyle goals, personal interests, and long-term plans for wealth and time freedom.

## A Move Toward Lifestyle-Driven Ownership

In recent years, interest has surged in industries such as **health and wellness, beauty and self-care, global food concepts, home services, and semi-absentee franchise models**. Many are also exploring multi-unit opportunities that offer stronger scalability.

The change signals a broader mindset evolution: entrepreneurship driven by vision, not survival.

Owners are placing greater value on quality of life, family time, and diversified portfolios, rather than operating businesses that require long hours of hands-on oversight.

## Why the Shift Is Happening

One major factor is the demand for **passive or semi-passive income**. Many entrepreneurs no longer want to spend 12 to 14 hours a day inside their stores. Sectors such as wellness and beauty, which provide flexible operating models, have become increasingly attractive.

Another driver is a growing willingness to seek expert guidance. As franchise systems have become more complex and specialized, Indian-origin investors are turning to consultants and industry professionals to help them choose concepts that fit their skills, goals, and lifestyles.

There is also a noticeable change in the next generation. During a recent franchise boot camp for Asian-origin students, hosted in partnership with Edison Care, participants expressed interest not in finding jobs but in building businesses that create opportunities for others. With strong social-media fluency, a global outlook, and an entrepreneurial mindset, many young people are thinking beyond traditional career paths.

## Expanding Into New Sectors

Categories once considered unconventional investments—including **stretch studios, lash salons, yoga concepts, solar energy, and eco-friendly services**—are gaining traction. These brands often offer modern consumer appeal, strong demand, and recession-resistant structures supported by professional management.

Indian-origin entrepreneurs are recognizing that the broader U.S. economy has evolved, and diversifying into contemporary franchise sectors can offer long-term advantages.

## A Defining Moment for the Community

The transition from traditional, labor-intensive businesses to lifestyle-oriented entrepreneurship marks more than a trend. It reflects a new chapter in the identity of Indian-American business owners.

They are increasingly stepping into roles as innovators, developers, multi-unit operators, and mentors for the next generation. This evolution is poised to influence the next several decades of Indian-American entrepreneurship.

As a franchise consultant, I’ve observed a growing confidence and curiosity among Indian-origin investors. Many are ready to diversify, embrace new industries, and pursue opportunities that align with purpose as much as profit.

With the next generation thinking like builders rather than job seekers, the future looks exceptionally bright.

![AI generated image.](https://newsindiatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ChatGPT-Image-Dec-9-2025-04_15_46-PM-1-1024x683.png)

![Pankaj Kumar, CFC Franchise Mentor | Founder, DNA Franchise & Bowl’d Masala Amazon Bestselling Author | Amazon Prime TV Reality Show Contestant](https://newsindiatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/profile-2-150x150.jpg)

Pankaj Kumar is a franchise consultant, entrepreneur, and founder of DNA Franchise Pro and Bowl’d Masala, a modern Indian-inspired fast-casual brand in the United States. A global hospitality veteran, he has worked across Asia, Europe, and the U.S. over a three-decade career. Kumar now lives in New Jersey, where he guides aspiring entrepreneurs through personalized franchise consulting. He specializes in franchise development, brand expansion, and multi-unit operations.

More information is available at DNAFranchisePro.com.

For decades, Indian-origin entrepreneurs have been closely tied to some of America’s most recognizable franchise brands — from 7-Eleven and Dunkin’ to small

Beyond 7-Eleven: How Indian-American Entrepreneurs Are Redefining Franchise Success with Lifestyle Businesses

## From Vision to Reality: Empromptu's AI-Powered App Builder

Shanea Leven learned two crucial lessons while building her first company, CodeSee. First, understanding the difference between what businesses actually need versus what merely sounds visionary. Second, **the fundamentals always apply**—even with groundbreaking technologies like AI.

"Security, compliance, reliability, quality—those things don't just go away for enterprise applications," Leven emphasized.

After CodeSee's acquisition in 2024, Leven partnered with AI researcher Sean Robinson to create something transformative. In October, they launched **Empromptu**, an AI service designed to help businesses build AI applications without requiring technical expertise.

### How Empromptu Works

Empromptu claims users simply need to describe what they want to the platform's AI chatbot—whether it's a new classification app, generative recommendation system, or custom HTML/JavaScript application—and the AI will build it automatically. The platform also provides **LLM tools** for fine-tuning results and allows companies to integrate AI features into their existing codebases.

### Beyond Vibe Coding

While some might compare Empromptu to "vibe coding" platforms like Replit and Lovable, Leven draws a clear distinction.

"Vibe coding is excellent for quick experiments, but Empromptu is what turns those experiments into real software," she explained. "Empromptu turns ideas into production features with built-in evaluation, governance, and self-improvement. You ship to real customers, with real data and complete control. If vibe coding is the brainstorm, Empromptu is the build."

### Funding and Future Plans

On Tuesday, the company announced it had raised **$2 million in pre-seed funding** led by Precursor Ventures, with participation from Zeal Capital, Alumni Ventures, FoundersEdge, and South Loop.

Leven revealed the fresh capital will be used for hiring staff and developing new proprietary technology. The company also announced three new features, including the ability to create **custom data models** and implement **infinite memory** capabilities.

### Target Market and Vision

Empromptu aims to serve businesses operating in regulated industries or "deeply complex" areas that involve data capture and application development—such as software for hotel management systems.

Leven's ultimate vision is empowering founders to transform their businesses without needing to master technical skills to leverage the AI revolution.

"It's just like any other skill," Leven said. "And the beauty of this skill is that AI can help you learn it along the way."

Empromptu claims all a user has to do is tell the platform's AI chatbot what they want — like a new HTML or JavaScript app — and the AI will go ahead and build it.

Empromptu's $2M Pre-Seed Funding: How This AI Platform Lets Anyone Build Enterprise Apps Without Coding

## The Hidden Startup Playbook: Why Profit and Focus Beat Venture Capital Hype Every Time

To grow your startup safely, always put **profit** and **customer needs** first instead of chasing venture capital hype.

### Key Takeaways
- **Growth without profit is just motion**; profit creates stability, leverage, and freedom.
- **Focus beats frenzy** — win one problem deeply before expanding into anything else.
- **People and discipline outperform capital**; great teams waste less and build faster.

The venture capital world operates on a specific, often unforgiving maxim: Grow at all costs.

Look, you see the problem, right? Every founder feels compelled to chase that massive Series A by adopting the Silicon Valley playbook: raise huge amounts of capital, accelerate hiring too quickly and obsess over user acquisition above everything else.

The thing is, we’ve seen too many brilliant ideas crash because of one fatal flaw: massive, undisciplined financial burn. When nearly **38% of all startups fail** primarily due to running out of cash, you have to admit the “grow-at-any-cost” model is simply unsustainable for most long-term scaling.

Sustainable growth, especially in a capital-intensive sector like real estate, demands a different approach, one built on **fiscal integration** and deep **technical discipline**.

### The Integration Philosophy for Sustainable Growth
A successful scaling strategy isn’t about finding one perfect method. It’s about combining three essentials. First is **profitability**. Profit keeps the business alive and funds future growth.

Second is **talent strategy**. Hiring remotely gives you access to the best people worldwide. But it only works if your team stays connected and aligned.

Third is **market focus**. Win one niche first. Build trust and expertise there before expanding into anything new. The foundation for this success remains empowered, disciplined teams solving verified industry problems.

### Phase #1: The Lean Startup Tech Core (Achieving Capital Efficiency)
A critical error for many tech ventures is over-engineering a solution before achieving verified **product-market fit (PMF)**. Capital efficiency, critical for lean startup tech operations, requires ruthless discipline in initial spending.

**Master the vertical niche first:** A high percentage of startups fail due to building products the market does not require. The mistake happens when founders rapidly expand their scope and spend all seed capital on unnecessary feature sprawl.

- **Actionable focus:** A scaling strategy must prioritize solving one pain point acutely, ensuring initial customers become the primary advocates.
- **Result:** This disciplined, narrow focus validates PMF and generates crucial early revenue. Prioritizing positive cash flow is the most stable form of financing you can have.

**Practice disciplined SaaS scaling.** Optimize your cloud costs. You see too many companies let their cloud infrastructure turn into a hidden budget killer. The thing is, it’s often easier for an engineer to throw more hardware at a performance issue than to optimize the code that created it.

Treat cloud spend like rent you have to justify every month. Implement strict **FinOps (Financial Operations)** practices to right-size resources aggressively. Why?

- Organizations globally estimate that a lot of their total cloud outlay is wasted on idle or over-provisioned resources. Aggressively eliminating this capital drain through effective optimization practices immediately recaptures that budget.
- Furthermore, if you get smart about commitments, leveraging reserved instances can save you a large amount of money compared to paying for on-demand pricing.

This discipline is non-negotiable for SaaS scaling.

### Phase 2: Strategic Scaling and Tech Debt Management
Once PMF and stable revenue are established, the strategic focus shifts to sustaining growth velocity while managing **technical debt**, which can quickly become an anchor.

**Treat tech debt as a financial liability:** Look at tech debt this way: it’s the interest payment you make for choosing speed over quality. While cutting corners is sometimes necessary early on, letting that debt pile up is what truly drains your cash, stealing resources that should be dedicated to future innovation.

- **The Cost of Inaction:** Globally, organizations dedicate a substantial portion of their IT budgets and personnel resources to the necessary task of managing existing technical debt. This critical capital is diverted directly from future-focused research and development (R&D).
- **Management Mandate:** To support sustainable agile proptech dev, a consistent percentage of every development sprint must be dedicated to technical debt remediation. Framing this as capital preservation ensures the codebase remains a low-risk asset that facilitates smoother future iteration.

Leverage distributed talent, but anchor with human connection: The establishment of a massive, centralized headquarters is often an expensive vanity metric. A smart SaaS scaling model utilizes specialized global talent pools to optimize cost and access expertise.

Distributed teams offer significant efficiency, but their success requires intentional cultural cohesion:

- **Hiring focus:** Recruit personnel who thrive on autonomy and operational ownership.
- **Cultural investment:** Invest heavily in focused, regular in-person off-sites and robust communication protocols to anchor human connection.
- This strategy lowers the burn rate dramatically while providing access to superior global talent.

### Phase 3: The Sustained Success Loop
A durable model, not a perpetual fundraiser: A durable business model is built on establishing a self-sustaining cycle anchored in product quality, talent and real profitability, not just on whether you can close the next funding round.

Chasing sky-high valuation metrics without a clear, self-sustaining path to cash flow creates an unstable enterprise, and you owe your shareholders and, more importantly, your team a business that can stand on its own two feet.

Strategic discipline means that every new product line or market expansion must be ruthlessly evaluated based on one question: Will this make us profitable? This discipline, where profitability is viewed as the mechanism that ensures the ability to serve clients and invest in personnel, is what separates a well-run tech company from a perpetual capital consumer.

Success means abandoning that old, reckless playbook. It means adopting a simple strategy: financial integration, technical discipline, and focusing on human efficiency. Empowered teams solving real problems profitably is the ultimate, enduring competitive advantage.

To grow your startup safely, always put profit and customer needs first instead of chasing venture capital hype.

The Hidden Startup Playbook: Why Profit and Focus Beat Venture Capital Hype Every Time

**Founder Institute**, the global business incubator and pre-seed startup accelerator, is making a comeback in Seattle with a renewed focus on in-person programs and community building.

Tech veteran **Aniket Naravanekar**, co-founder and CEO of Skillsheet, is leading the charge as one of the program directors. With over 11 years at Microsoft and experience at Seattle startups, Naravanekar is passionate about providing more opportunities for aspiring founders in the region.

![Seattle skyline](https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/46418526284_2dde15b25a_k-1260x842.jpg)
*The Seattle skyline. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)*

## The Leadership Team

Naravanekar is joined by a strong leadership team:
- **Nicole Doyle**, founder and CEO of Aspir
- **Jewel Atuel**, technical program manager at Averro
- **Angie Parker**, executive director of the Alliance of Angels

![Aniket Naravanekar](https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Aniket.jpeg)
*Aniket Naravanekar*

## Why Seattle Needs This Revival

"I think the Seattle ecosystem has such a large amount of talent that it deserves more opportunities for aspiring founders to turn their ideas into a real business," Naravanekar explained. "I've been going through this process as a founder myself and I want to provide more options to those that are still on the fence or want to build but not sure how."

Founded in Palo Alto in 2009, Founder Institute has expanded to six continents and more than 200 cities, with over 8,100 graduates worldwide. However, the Seattle program had shifted to remote/virtual cohorts starting around 2021 due to a lack of community and leadership.

## The New Approach

**The key change**: Seattle's leadership team now has more autonomy and decision-making power instead of being treated as a "satellite" location.

"We're now bringing back the local community — local mentors, local partners, sponsors, investors and in-person meetups and events," Naravanekar emphasized. "We're still using the same FI tooling and branding but have a lot more leeway in decision making to suit the unique needs of the Seattle ecosystem."

## Upcoming Events and First Cohort

The first Seattle cohort begins in March, but the official launch happens sooner. An open house on December 12 at AI House in Seattle will feature two panels:
1. **"Building in Seattle"**
2. **"Scaling & Leverage"**

Panelists include prominent figures from Venture Black, Loti, AI2 Incubator, Founders Live, Microsoft AI Ventures, Light Legal, and the University of Washington's Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship.

## Connection to Local Ecosystem

Interestingly, former Seattle Founder Institute managing director Levi Reed is now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Startup425, a non-profit funded by six Seattle-area city governments. Startup425 launched a new accelerator last year modeled after the Founder Institute curriculum, showing the program's lasting influence in the region.

Tech veteran Aniket Naravanekar is one of the directors working to bring back "local mentors, local partners, sponsors, investors and in-person meetups and events."

Founder Institute Returns to Seattle: In-Person Accelerator Revives Local Startup Ecosystem

A new cohort of small businesses has received a financial boost to power their business with **AI**.

### The Coramino Fund
Through **The Coramino Fund**, the investment arm of Kevin Hart and Juan Domingo Beckmann’s tequila company Gran Coramino, **$10,000 grants** have been allocated to small business owners over the past three years so they can utilize **AI training** provided by 1st Street Partnerships to improve their operations. The program was launched in partnership with Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC) and is part of a **$1.5 million commitment** to support more than 150 under-resourced entrepreneurs across the U.S. and Mexico as they compete with larger companies.

Michael Pugh, LISC President and CEO, emphasized the importance of support for entrepreneurs: "According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of new businesses fail within their first year, and nearly 50% fail by their fifth year. The most successful entrepreneurs — locally and nationally — are the ones that have support, whether from their networks, communities, or by leveraging new technologies like **AI**. Even incorporating AI for 'light' uses such as drafting emails, scheduling, bookkeeping, or conducting market research can make a meaningful difference by freeing up time and mental bandwidth to focus on growth. As entrepreneurs grow more confident, AI can also help them analyze trends, understand customer behavior, and make data-informed decisions that support growth and revenue."

Kevin Hart shared his vision: "Our vision with The Coramino Fund is to lift up the hard-working entrepreneurs who keep our communities strong. This next group of grantees is a perfect example — they’re building businesses with purpose and that’s the kind of leadership we want to celebrate and support."

### Impactful Recipients
Recipients among this year’s cohort include **Jessica Hunter**, founder of Journee’s Roses in Compton, CA. Through the training, she was able to build marketing strategies that may typically take weeks to complete. Monk Inyang, CEO of 1st Street Partnerships, noted that by Hunter’s second session, she had developed a positive attitude toward advanced AI techniques and had uncovered **revenue streams** she had not seen before.

**Daniel Paulsen**, grant recipient and founder of 4 Grands Piano in Fairfield, NJ, said the grant "came right on time." Paulsen intends to expand to a second location, including a new recording studio that will support the next generation of artists.

In total, there were **50 recipients** from The Coramino Fund in 2025, which also includes, but is not limited to:
- 7Studios
- About Town
- Beautiful Amore Skincare
- Friends and Family Circle of Love
- HelpMatch
- Make My Cake
- Mood Board Studios
- Niema Gallery
- Pretty Little Me Spa
- She-Pop Popcorn

Kristin Turner, Vice President at Gran Coramino Tequila, highlighted the impact: "Entrepreneurs like Daniel, who opened one of the first Black-owned piano stores in America, or Amerrah (founder of Beautiful Amore Skincare) who is expanding access to inclusive skincare, exemplify the kind of impact we aimed to create with The Coramino Fund."

A new cohort of small businesses has received a financial boost to power their business with AI.

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