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This case delves into the entrepreneurial journey of Madhav Krishna and his company, Vahan. Initially focused on providing speech recognition tools for English learning in skilling centers, Vahan undergoes several pivots as a platform for blue-collar employment. The case underscores iterative venture development, learning and pivoting, user-data responsiveness, platform adoption (like WhatsApp), distribution partners for scaling, and the nuances of business-model fit in India's evolving internet landscape in a blue-collar space.

Anand Saboo Foundation (ASF) is a philanthropic organization set up by an industrialist, Anand Saboo, with the aim of transforming poor people into entrepreneurs. Saboo focused on helping women living below the poverty line to become independent and sustainable small business owners. Saboo is himself a self-made entrepreneur, currently in his 70s, who set up Saboo Foundation in 1991. After experimenting with several different philanthropic models, he settled on the "Saboo Foundation Model", which relies on multiple stakeholders, focuses on equipment rather than cash, and links participating women to a customer base and a supply chain. Initial results show that the 362 women who availed a loan during October 2018 to January 2019 had zero default-rate. Participating women reported an average income of Rs. 7000 (93.3 USD) to Rs. 24,000 (320 USD) per month (3 to 4 times higher than their previous earnings). Saboo Foundation's approach is novel and shares more similarities with a venture capital investment model rather than a traditional lending model. Multiple philanthropic, government, semi-government, and non-profit organizations have worked in this space for decades, and the Anand Saboo Foundation, a relative newcomer in this space, so far, has enjoyed extraordinary success. This case study helps students understand the key facets that make a successful philanthropic model, with a focus on how to develop and support micro-entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid.