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Building Real

Building Real

By: Arjun Thomas
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Building Real is about how things actually get built—companies, restaurants, labs, careers, and side projects—without the highlight reel gloss.

Each episode is a real, unscripted conversation with someone in the middle of building: founders, operators, educators, scientists, restaurateurs, investors, and people quietly doing important work.​

We talk through the doubts, trade‑offs, and decisions that never make it into funding announcements or LinkedIn posts. You’ll hear how guests find problems worth working on, test ideas, hire (or don’t), manage money and time, and deal with failure, burnout, and luck along the way.

If you’re building something yourself—or thinking about it—you’ll get practical insight into product, markets, teams, and personal resilience, told through specific stories rather than generic advice. No scripts, no manufactured drama, no “five hacks”; just the process of how it actually happens, one builder at a time.

2026 Arjun Thomas Economics Leadership Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Episode 1 : The Dirtiest Problem No One Wanted to Solve (with Tharun Kumar, EcoSTP)

    Episode 1 : The Dirtiest Problem No One Wanted to Solve (with Tharun Kumar, EcoSTP)
    Mar 24 2026

    What do you do when your apartment's "sewage treatment plant" overflows and you discover it's just a fake tank dumping raw waste into a lake? For former Aadhaar IT architect Tharun Kumar, that crisis turned into EcoSTP — a sewage treatment system inspired by a cow's stomach that runs with zero power, zero chemicals, and almost no human intervention.

    In this conversation, we get into how Tharun went from corporate IT to spending a decade "in deep shit," why 100-year-old STP technology never evolved, and how EcoSTP uses anaerobic bacteria and biomimicry to let some clients reuse the same water more than 1,000 times for flushing and non-potable use. We talk about embedding STPs into building basements, turning them into "living buildings," and what it took to scale a licensing model across 24 Indian states plus projects in Bangladesh and the Maldives while keeping quality under control from Bangalore.

    EcoSTP's impact so far:

    • 8 billion litres of water reclaimed
    • ~12,000 tons of coal avoided (no energy-hungry aeration)
    • Startup India's "Most Circular Innovator" — pitched to the Prime Minister of India.

    Along the way, we touch on regulators who first banned his tech and now use it, why developers still ignore STPs in their brochures, and the thousand-day rule he believes every founder should live by.

    Connect:
    Tharun Kumar: linkedin.com/in/tharun/
    EcoSTP: ecostp.com/
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    1 hr and 10 mins
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