Westerwelle Young Founders Programme Fellow
Westerwelle Young Founders Programme
I joined the Westerwelle Young Founders Programme in 2019, a six-month fellowship for outstanding young entrepreneurs from emerging and developing economies. The programme brought together founders from a range of countries and connected the cohort with entrepreneurs and operators in Berlin’s startup ecosystem.
What the programme covered
The curriculum combined structured skill-building — pitching, financial modelling, leadership, and team management — with hands-on work applying each session to the fellows’ own companies rather than treating it as theory. One workshop on design thinking changed how I approach problem-solving in practice: it pushed me to empathise more deliberately with users, question my own assumptions, and iterate faster on feedback rather than on instinct.
Why the comparative view mattered
For me, its lasting value was comparative: seeing how founders working in different markets handled capital constraints, hiring, distribution, institutional differences, and the responsibility of building companies that had to work in their own local conditions. Being immersed in Berlin’s startup scene for six months — visiting other founders’ companies and hearing how they solved adjacent problems — was as valuable as the formal curriculum. One visit that stuck with me was to a startup building sustainable urban-mobility solutions; watching them treat an environmental constraint as a design input rather than a compliance cost shifted how I thought about constraint-driven product design more generally, well beyond mobility or Berlin.
Building outside a single market
The fellowship’s cohort structure meant the comparative lesson was not abstract. Entrepreneurs from other emerging and developing economies were solving versions of the same problems I was working on in India, under different regulatory regimes, capital markets, and cultural expectations around risk. That exposure made clear that “best practice” in one market is frequently just local practice — a pattern with an unstated set of local assumptions baked in. Seeing which parts of a company’s approach were genuinely portable and which were specific to one market’s conditions became a recurring question in later company-building and advisory work.
What carried forward
The Berlin network built through the programme continued to matter after the fellowship ended: peer founders became collaborators, and programme mentors were a resource during later decision points. It also left a lasting emphasis on work-life balance as a deliberate part of company culture, not an afterthought — something I carried back into how I ran my own teams. One connection made through the programme opened a route into the European market for a company I was building at the time, a move that had looked daunting before the fellowship made the relevant contacts and context available.
FAQ
What is the Westerwelle Young Founders Programme? A fellowship for young entrepreneurs from emerging and developing economies, run in Berlin and built around structured training and immersion in the local startup ecosystem.
How long was Dipankar Sarkar’s fellowship? Six months, in 2019.
What is the lasting effect of the programme? A comparative view of how founders in different markets handle the same constraints, a design-thinking approach to problem-solving, and a European-market connection made through the fellowship, all carried into later product and company-building work.