Maitro does. Maitro & Talpro are the operating company — we put up the capital, raise from VC partners, build the product, run operations, and own 100% of the IP. You contribute the idea and your name; you do not become a founder of record and you do not become an equity holder. This is by design — see the next two answers.

Because almost every senior leader we serve is currently employed — and most employment contracts contain IP-assignment, moonlighting, and non-compete clauses that would make you holding equity in a parallel venture either a contractual breach or an immediate disclosure event with your board. Equity creates a problem you didn't ask for. A royalty paid to you doesn't. So we pay you a royalty instead.

A capped, time-bound royalty paid quarterly, in INR, to you personally — calculated on the venture's net revenue, audited by an independent CA, and remitted on a schedule defined in the Royalty Agreement. The exact percentage, cap, and term are released to verified senior-leader email addresses through the application form. Plus twelve months of measurable brand amplification with its own SLA.Verify & reveal economics →

Almost certainly not — but we underwrite the check. Before you sign, Maitro's counsel runs an IP-conflict review against your current employment terms (you share the relevant clauses; nothing else). If your contract contains a moonlighting prohibition or a broad IP claim that captures your "off-hours ideas," we either restructure the engagement or honestly tell you the deal isn't compatible. We never ask you to assign anything that belongs to your employer.

Yours, as the named ideator and public face. The company carries Maitro/Talpro as the operating entity (legally required), but every public surface — landing page, press, podcast bookings, NASSCOM keynote, IIM lecture, awards entries — names you as the originator and thought leader behind the venture. Think record label and named artist; the publishing rights sit with one party, the public brand sits with the other.

Roughly two hours a week during the 12-week build (one weekly call, occasional Slack), and roughly two to four hours a month after launch (one podcast every six weeks, one keynote a year, accept LinkedIn drafts SocialIQ writes for you, review one peer-intro request a month). The whole arrangement is engineered to fit inside a senior leader's existing calendar — not replace it.

Disclosure depends on your employment contract and your board's conflict-of-interest policy. Maitro's counsel will help you determine what's required during the IP-conflict review, and we'll provide a one-page disclosure brief you can hand to your CHRO or general counsel if you choose to disclose proactively. Most senior leaders we work with treat the named-ideator role like any other personal brand activity (book deal, podcast hosting, NED role) — meaningful enough to disclose, narrow enough not to require board approval. Your call, with our support.

You can step out of the named-ideator role at any time. Maitro continues to operate the venture (we own it). Your accrued royalty entitlements continue to vest under the terms in the Royalty Agreement; future amplification commitments end. There's no clawback, no exit penalty, no "earn-back" of build costs. The deal is asymmetric in your favour because we've already taken on all the operating and capital risk.

Application form is three minutes. Within 48 hours you get either a 30-minute Discovery call slot or an honest "not this cohort" with a reason. From the Discovery call: ~2 weeks for IP-conflict review, conflict-disclosure protocol, and contract negotiation. The 12-week build starts the Monday after both sides sign. Public launch lands at week 12. Spotlight amplification kicks off the same day the product goes live and runs for the next twelve months. So from "I'm interested" to "my product is live with my name on it" — typically 14 to 16 weeks.

A senior CTO (Bhaskar, hands-on) leads every Build Lab engagement personally. The build crew is two senior full-stack engineers, one product designer, and a roster of AI agents on the codebase — all internal to Talpro, no offshore subcontracting, no rotating freelancers. The Spotlight crew (podcast, LinkedIn, lectures) is run by SocialIQ's named editorial team. You meet every named human on the crew during onboarding; you can request a different engineer at any point during the 12 weeks if the fit isn't right.

Maitro carries the risk, you carry the reputational upside regardless. If the product fails to find product-market fit, Maitro absorbs the operating loss — you lose no capital, owe no clawback, take no public hit. The Brand Amplification SLA still runs its full twelve months: the podcast bookings, the IIM lecture, the bylined article, the managed LinkedIn — all still delivered, because your personal brand was always the bigger asset Maitro was building. Failures inside Maitro's portfolio happen with our name attached, not yours; we publish post-mortems under our brand, not yours.

We run a written conflict scan against every active and historical Maitro venture before accepting your application. If there's a competitive collision, we either decline your application or recuse the relevant crew and disclose in writing. We don't build two competing products in parallel — your idea isn't worth our brand if we did.

Tier 1. The free, application-only CXO-only community that sits underneath everything else Maitro does. Members get the monthly intelligence brief, weekly editorial threads, peer DMs (with employer-clash detection), and a roles-only directory that activates names with consent. The Society is the on-ramp; every other Maitro tier is selected from it.

Tier 2. Closed-room dinners, eight CXOs per dinner, four dinners per city per year (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi). Chatham House rules. No press, no cameras, no junior staff. Each dinner produces a post-event intelligence brief shared only with attendees. By invitation; Society members in good standing are fast-tracked.

Tier 3. Twelve months of brand amplification — without the Build Lab venture. One podcast every six weeks, one NASSCOM/CII-grade conference keynote a year, one IIM/ISB/IIT guest lecture a year, managed LinkedIn editorial drafted by SocialIQ, quarterly bylined article in a tier-1 outlet, quarterly awards entries. Application + 12-month retainer.

Tier 4 — the apex. Maitro funds, builds, and owns a real software venture under your name as the public ideator. Twelve weeks of build, twelve months of brand amplification, royalty paid quarterly to you personally. Four named ideators per cohort, two cohorts a year (Summer + Winter). Acceptance rate: ~3% of applications. Selection runs through the 100-point Investability Gate.

Tier 5 — the alumni ring for Build Lab graduates and long-tenured Society members (4+ years). Annual physical offsite (location rotates inside India, 2–3 day format), first refusal on advisor stakes in next-cohort ventures, lifetime Society + Boardroom access (waiver of city-rota cap), Council oath signed at induction. Earned, not bought.

A senior leader who has graduated from the Build Lab with a shipped venture under their name. They are not co-founders of record (the operating company is Maitro's), and they are not equity holders — they are the public face of the venture, the originator of the insight, and the recipient of the quarterly royalty + 12-month brand amplification SLA. Permanent attribution: their name stays on the venture even after the royalty term closes.

A six-dimension, 100-point public scorecard we run on every Build Lab application. Society engagement (24 pts) · domain depth (20) · idea originality (15) · market viability — TAM ≥ ₹500cr addressable in India (15) · build feasibility on our 12-week stack (10) · three peer CXO reference checks (16). Threshold to enter the build queue: 70/100. Fast-track at 80/100. Below 70 = polite rejection with a path back. Hard disqualifiers (regardless of score): unresolvable employer-IP claim, regulated infrastructure we cannot operate (banking / insurance / PHI), or reference checks that surface integrity concerns.

The technical gate every Maitro venture must clear before public launch. Zero TypeScript errors at build time, 100% security headers on every response, auth on every protected route, RFC 7807 problem-details on all API errors, structured (Pino) logging everywhere, 99.9% uptime SLA from launch + 30 days, Sentry on all client + server code, watchdog monitoring, quarterly DR drill scheduled. Mandatory minimum: gate ≥ 75/80. Maitro's CTO Constitution v8.1 governs the full audit.