In 2009, when Indian startup culture still felt like a club meeting held in a corridor, Avijit Sharma was trying to persuade students to ask strangers for advice. His new company, MentorPolis, connected people facing academic or career decisions with mentors who had already navigated them. The mechanism was telephone calls, web seminars, forums, and links. The ambition was much larger: make hard-won judgment easier to find.
The venture had four founders and only a few serious months behind it when Sharma spoke publicly about the experiment. Five hundred mentees had registered in a month and a half. One had reached the Yale School of Management. Yet Sharma did not perform the usual founder trick of polishing uncertainty into destiny. He talked about doubts over pricing, audience behavior, and whether people would trust formal mentoring over advice from relatives and acquaintances.
His answer was steady movement. The team learned that a novel idea does not become less uncertain while its founders stare at it. You put it in front of people, watch what they do, and adjust. It is an operating principle hiding inside a young founder's candid confession.
“Do it because you love it.”Avijit Sharma on choosing entrepreneurship, 2009
Seventeen years later, Sharma is still arranging consequential conversations between strangers. The subject has changed from careers to capital. FrontPage, the Bengaluru company he founded in 2019, is a social platform for Indian stock-market traders and investors. It offers stock-specific forums, market news, heatmaps, an option chain, and the restless stream of ideas that appears wherever money and opinion occupy the same screen.
The same machine, tuned to a different frequency
MentorPolis and FrontPage are not obvious siblings. One was an education marketplace built around scheduled guidance. The other is a financial community operating at market speed. Look at the product physics, though, and a family resemblance appears. Someone has a decision. Someone else has experience. The software must help them find each other, add just enough structure, and resist pretending that conversation can erase responsibility.
That last part matters. FrontPage's own language is careful: content is user-generated and informational, not financial advice. Members are urged to do their own research, consider their circumstances, and approach spectacular promises with skepticism. A social market product cannot guarantee the wisdom of the crowd. It can make the crowd easier to inspect.
This distinction gives the product its tension. Traders arrive because other people are there. The platform becomes useful when those people produce signals, counterarguments, news, and the occasional warning that an individual might have missed. But markets are superb factories of confidence, and confidence travels quickly through a feed. FrontPage has to encourage expression while preserving the line between a discussion and an instruction.
An engineer who kept wandering off syllabus
Sharma's path into this work is agreeably untidy. He studied mechanical engineering at IIT Delhi from 2003 to 2007, but his own account spends as much time outside the classroom. He says he grew up reading history before being pushed toward engineering. At college, he built sports teams for Jwalamukhi hostel, became the institute badminton captain, served in sports and cultural roles, and competed in athletics and squash. He received the institute's outgoing sports award at convocation.
History, sport, and markets make an unusual product curriculum. History trains attention on patterns without promising exact repetition. Sport provides immediate, sometimes rude feedback. Markets turn psychology into a public scoreboard. Sharma's published interests include psychology, history, and philosophy, while his founder biography lists more than 15 years in product management and more than a decade participating in public markets.
The combination helps explain why FrontPage sits at the crossing of social psychology and financial markets. A conventional market terminal organizes data. A conventional social network organizes attention. FrontPage attempts both, placing heatmaps and option-chain analysis beside human interpretation. The interface does not merely answer, “What moved?” It opens the more social question: “What do people think happened?”
That question is compelling precisely because it is dangerous. People are susceptible to momentum, status, repetition, and the warm comfort of agreement. A founder interested in psychology gets an unusually vivid laboratory. Every feature can alter who speaks, what gets amplified, and which behaviors become normal. Community products are designed twice: once in code, and again through incentives.
Small team, large room
FrontPage entered Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch two years after its founding. The company's public description is direct: build a community for 100 million Indian traders and investors. Its backers named on the company website include founders and operators from CRED, BharatPe, CitrusPay, PayU, Raise, Zomato, and MakeMyTrip. The list suggests why social finance appealed. India had acquired the payment rails, consumer apps, and expanding market participation. What remained fragmented was the daily conversation around it.
An Amplitude report later listed FrontPage among seven growing products in Asia-Pacific and Japan, citing 359 percent growth. The number is less interesting as a trophy than as evidence that the social loop found traction. A community becomes more useful as relevant people and conversations accumulate. If the loop works, users supply both the reason to arrive and the reason to return.
The current company still presents itself as a compact, hands-on operation. Its engineering material describes community systems, live market-data ingestion, simulations, mobile and web clients, and cloud infrastructure carrying market-hour load. A recent internship brief favors people who investigate unfamiliar systems, challenge generated code, and learn quickly. The wording feels consistent with Sharma's older lesson: evidence comes from engagement, not from waiting for perfect instructions.
Scale changes the texture of that lesson. A mentoring call can be considered in private; a market community must learn in public, with thousands of judgments arriving at once. The operator's work becomes less about delivering a correct answer and more about keeping the system legible. Good tools reveal the market. Good norms reveal the limits of what anyone in the room can know.
The durable question
Founders are often encouraged to tell a clean story in which every earlier event points obediently toward the current company. Real careers are rarely so considerate. Sharma's includes an early mentoring startup, a long product career, public-market participation, and a later social-finance company. FrontPage is not the inevitable conclusion of MentorPolis. It is, however, another answer to a question that has held his attention: how can software turn scattered experience into usable context?
The answer has matured. MentorPolis relied on distinguished mentors, scheduled consultation, and the authority of someone who had already made the journey. FrontPage distributes authority across a community. A participant can offer an idea, receive disagreement, watch the market respond, and return with a revised view. Knowledge becomes less like a lecture and more like a continuously edited argument.
There is something fitting about a history reader building a live record of market sentiment. History is the archive of what people did after making decisions with incomplete information. A trading community shows that process before the ending is known. The feed is full of hypotheses, nerves, conviction, and correction. Tomorrow's neat chart begins as today's untidy conversation.
Sharma once framed entrepreneurship as a route to continuous learning and the satisfaction of creating value for others. He also wanted enterprise to produce institutional change. Those words came from a different company and a younger founder, but they fit the present work without much tailoring. FrontPage is an institution in miniature: a place with rules, rituals, regulars, and a shared object of attention.
The product is partly interface, partly incentives, and partly the behavior people carry through the door.A lesson from Sharma's two community businesses
A useful thing to steal from Sharma's story is not a feature or a market prediction. It is the patience to notice your durable question. Companies change. Technology changes. The people on the other side of the screen continue to seek context from one another, especially when the decision matters and certainty is unavailable.
In 2009, that person was a student wondering what to study or where to work. On FrontPage, it may be a trader watching a bank stock move before lunch. In each case, software cannot make the choice painless. It can make the room less lonely, the evidence easier to inspect, and the next question slightly sharper. Sharma has spent much of his career building that room.