MAITRO GLOSSARY
Glossary · Every Maitro term, defined
The vocabulary — precisely what each word means.
Maitro uses a small number of specific terms — “named ideator”, “capped royalty”, “Spotlight”, “Build Lab” — that are load-bearing for the model. This page defines each one without marketing varnish, links to the canonical long-form page, and groups them so a senior leader who arrived from a podcast can orient in two minutes.
The model
What we mean when we say 'named ideator' and the surfaces around it.
- Named ideator
- The senior leader whose name and pattern recognition is the public face of a Maitro venture. Lends idea + brand; takes no equity; receives a capped, time-bound royalty. Stays at their day job.
- The Arrangement
- The whole structural deal between named ideator, Maitro studio, and the resulting operating company. The arrangement is what the contract codifies — not a transaction.
- Build Lab
- Maitro's twelve-week venture build. Starts with the named ideator's brief; ends with a launched product, a brand-amplified founder, and an operating company spun out under Maitro/Talpro ownership.
- Spotlight
- The twelve-month brand-amplification programme that runs alongside and after the Build Lab. Podcasts, keynotes, ghost-drafted bylined essays, IIM/ISB lectures, awards entries, managed LinkedIn editorial. Run by SocialIQ.
- Society
- The broader membership universe that keeps senior leaders in the orbit between (or before) cohorts — Boardroom, Council, the Society Letter, Letters, the Almanac.
- Boardroom
- Curated peer-room of senior leaders meeting privately under Chatham House rules. A live working forum, not a pitch contest.
- The Council
- Honorary group of past Maitro ideators and senior advisors who jury cohorts, host Spotlight moments, and review sensitive cases. Council membership begins after a venture's royalty cap closes.
- Crew
- The internal Talpro/Maitro team — designers, engineers, PMs, brand operators — who execute a Build Lab. Salaried operators, not freelancers; institutional context cannot be rented.
Commercial
How the money flows. Royalty, cap, term, and the documents that govern them.
- Royalty
- The payment Maitro makes to the named ideator. A small single-digit percentage of net revenue, paid quarterly in INR. Treated as ordinary income on Form 16 / ITR — not equity.
- Lifetime cap
- The hard maximum total payout the royalty can reach, denominated in INR. Once paid out, the obligation closes. Both sides can compute the maximum payout precisely. The cap is the same protection in both directions.
- Term
- A defined number of years from product launch. Whichever closes first — cap or term — terminates the royalty. After that the operating company runs unencumbered and the relationship transitions into Council.
- Net revenue
- Royalty base. Excludes GST, refunds, chargebacks, and any pass-through cost. Calculated quarterly and audited by an independent CA before remittance.
- Brand Amplification SLA
- Companion document to the Royalty Agreement. Twelve months of measurable, multi-channel personal-brand work delivered to the named ideator with named cadences (one podcast per six weeks, one keynote per year, etc.).
Program
How the Build Lab and the cohorts are organised in calendar time.
- Cohort
- A batch of named ideators running through the Build Lab in parallel. Two cohorts per year (Summer / Winter). Cohort 01 = S26.
- Demo Day
- Public launch event at the end of each cohort. Each named ideator presents their venture to invited press, customers, and Maitro Society members.
- Build themes
- The six pillar themes Maitro accepts ideas under. Themes are not constraints on what the senior leader can build — they're a way to focus crew capacity and customer-discovery work.
- 100-pt investability gate
- The written scorecard every Build Lab application is run through. Public, uniform, applied identically to every applicant. Acceptance rate hovers near 3%; tightness is the product.
Trust & gates
How we protect the senior leader, the studio, and the ventures we ship.
- IP-conflict underwriting
- Before any contract is exchanged, Maitro counsel runs an IP-conflict review against the senior leader's current employment terms. We never ask the leader to assign anything that belongs to their employer.
- Conflict-of-interest disclosure
- Written conflict scan against every active and historical Maitro engagement before an application is reviewed. If we find a competitive collision we either decline the application or recuse the relevant crew members and disclose the recusal in writing.
- Gatekeeper 80-pt gate
- The internal pre-launch quality gate every Maitro release passes through. Build, security, compliance, performance, and monitoring — each scored, each documented. Gatekeeper is to releases what the investability gate is to applications.