Startup Leadership Program Fellow
Fellow and programme leader
In 2011, I was both a Fellow and Joint Program Leader in the New Delhi chapter of the Startup Leadership Program (SLP) — a selective, cohort-based training programme for founders, leaders, and innovators who aspire to run startups, built around a global network of alumni leaders who continue supporting each other after the cohort ends.
The dual role combined structured founder learning with the practical work of running a cohort: organising sessions, bringing practitioners into the room, helping founders examine decisions, and building a peer network around the companies they were creating. I had to move between facilitating a session and learning from it, sometimes within the same hour.
What the Program Leader role involved
Running the New Delhi chapter alongside a co-leader meant owning the parts of the programme that a Fellow never sees:
- Content curation. Choosing topics, speakers, and formats that would add real value across a group of founders with different stages, sectors, and experience levels — balancing theory with material a founder could act on the same week.
- Network orchestration. Connecting the right people at the right moment: a Fellow working on a hiring problem with an alumnus who had solved it, a specific technical question with a practitioner who had shipped that system.
- Adaptive leadership. Adjusting facilitation style across a cohort of opinionated, driven founders with different backgrounds and working styles, rather than running one format for everyone.
- Staying a learner. Leading a programme that teaches founders to keep learning only works if the leader keeps doing the same — tracking what was changing in the startup and technology landscape well enough to keep the curriculum current.
What the Fellow experience involved
As a Fellow in the same cohort, the value ran the other way: exposure to founders, operators, and investors working on different problems, in different markets, and under different constraints than my own. Peer sessions surfaced the same lesson from multiple angles — fundraising, pitching, scaling a team — in a way that a single mentor conversation rarely does. Several of those peer relationships turned into working collaborations well after the cohort ended.
Why it still matters
That dual vantage point — teaching and learning at once — still shapes how I run a workshop today. A useful founder or technical session should leave people with a decision, an artefact, or a system they can test, not only a set of slides, and it should treat the room as a source of insight rather than an audience for one.
FAQ
What is the Startup Leadership Program? A global, cohort-based leadership training programme for founders and startup operators, run in city chapters with a peer network that continues after each cohort concludes.
What was Dipankar Sarkar’s role in SLP New Delhi? Joint Program Leader and Fellow in the 2011 New Delhi chapter — leading programme design and facilitation while participating as a Fellow in the same cohort.
What is the lasting effect of that dual role? It shaped an approach to teaching that favours artefacts and testable outcomes over passive instruction, carried forward into current speaking and workshop delivery.