The Best Ideas Come From Broken Systems, Bad Timing and Hitting Rock Bottom - Tanishq Jain
We have been having some brilliant conversations on The Third Half recently.
This one with Tanishq Jain, founder of Dash, is one of the most honest conversations I have had with an early stage founder. No bravado. No pitch mode. Just someone building something real and telling you exactly what that feels like from the inside.
Tanishq is young, sharp and genuinely passionate about sustainability in a way that goes back generations in his family. This conversation has stayed with me.
1. The best business ideas come from spotting what everyone else is ignoring
Tanishq did not set out to start a business.
He was at the London Stock Exchange trying to help rate sustainability funds when he noticed something that stopped him cold. They were trying to rate funds on their sustainability credentials without actually knowing the sustainability characteristics of the companies inside them.
Top down. Full of assumptions. Layers of unverified information.
He called it an error 404 in his mind.
That moment of frustration became the foundation of Dash. Not a grand plan. Not a lightbulb moment over a flat white. Just someone spotting something obviously broken and deciding he could not leave it alone.
The best ideas usually start exactly like that.
2. Every founder hits a wall. The ones who make it learn to sit with it.
Q1 2025 was hard.
Tanishq is honest about it in a way that most founders are not. When the US administration changed and the macro environment shifted, he found himself asking questions he had not expected to be asking. Am I in the right industry. Is this industry ready. Is my business ready to be part of it.
He describes it as an existential moment. Not a crisis. A moment.
The shift he made was subtle but important. Instead of making decisions out of those moments, he learned to use them as brainstorming sessions. A conversation with himself rather than a verdict on the business.
That is not a small thing. That is the difference between founders who keep going and founders who do not.
3. Market timing is everything. Until you actually live it.
People told him this for years. He nodded along. He did not really get it.
Then he got it.
Market timing is not just about capturing customers at the right moment. It is about whether your investors still have runway to give you. Whether the market is open enough for people to try something new. Whether the world is in a mood to change or a mood to survive.
He came from a family business where you put in capital and got sales from day one. Tech is completely different. And the gap between what he expected and what he found taught him more about building a business than any accelerator programme ever did.
If this gave you something to think about, the full conversation is worth your time.
We go deeper into recycling ships, the circular economy, AI and sustainability, and what Dash is really trying to build.
Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/tth-blueprint-episode-22-tanishq
People. Planet. Progress.