What’s your relationship with uncertainty? I come from a part of the world where it’s good sense to cling to certainty.

For most of my life, I stuck to the safe road. By my early 30s, I’d built SEO Corporation, which grew into a solid digital marketing company with steady clients and decent margins.

But even comfort has a way of making you restless inside. So I’d often go hiking in the Himalayan hills just to clear my head. During one trek in Uttarakhand, something happened that’s stayed with me.

Our group stopped at a hillside hamlet outside Chamoli, where our local guide Vijendra pointed out bundles of dried stalks. “That’s hemp,” he said. “Strong fiber. But nobody wants the stalks. It mostly gets burned or left to rot.” I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a story in that waste pile. Even when back in my Delhi office, my mind kept drifting to those hemp stalks.

Even though I had zero background in materials science, but I knew two things:

• There was untapped value in those stalks.
• Farmers would co-operate with me if I could create a new income stream for them.

So I took the leap. I sold my stake, packed up and started spending time in village kitchens and open fields, asking naïve questions about drying, retting and bundling from anyone I could find.

Looking back, that leap into the unknown turned out to be the best business decision of my life. It forced me to learn the lessons that no MBA can teach.

Related: This Founder Makes Sure He Has One Life Changing Solo Trek Every Year

Lesson 1: Genuine curiosity is better than expertise

Of course, I was no scientist. So for months, I felt like an imposter in the world of agriculture. My first real exposure was at a workshop at IIT Guwahati, where I was surrounded by polymer experts. I had gone in with the hope to “absorb by osmosis,” but instead I found myself lost in technical jargon: chain scission, crystallinity, disintegration tests.

More than once, I was that man quietly googling terms during seminars. It was then that I realized I had leaned into the honesty of not knowing. So I asked, “Why?” Sometimes, I asked until I annoyed people, but my outsider’s eyes also helped spot what others missed.

For example, early on, we tried making a batch of hemp-based biopolymer (which we now call EcoGran™) that looked and felt right. But our first compostability test was a flop. Even after six months in a compost bin, our sample was almost unchanged. It was supposed to vanish in 180 days, but it didn’t. So we kept on asking questions and experimenting.

After plenty of trial and error (and pestering the scientists), we realized the blend’s pH was off, which prevented microbes from breaking it down. A small tweak in the formula fixed it, and the next batch passed the compostability test.

This “beginner’s mindset” became our secret weapon. I bounced ideas off anyone — researchers, farmers, even local schoolteachers. I remember once a women’s group in Pauri helped us test different hemp varieties for strength and flexibility. For them, the benefit was direct: one woman told me she’d made ₹12,000 extra that season (which is a handsome amount in the economic system of remote Himalayan villages), just selling hemp stalks she used to burn.

For me, it proved that “naïve” questions can lead to big breakthroughs.

Related: I Quit My Corporate Role to Work a ‘Lazy Girl Job’ Instead — Here’s How This Career Change Helped Me Earn 10 Times More

Lesson 2: The best teachers are on the ground

Innovation doesn’t always happen in labs. Some of the smartest fixes I’ve seen have come from farmers and fiber artisans during visits to their fields and workshops.

One day in a Chamoli village, we were running a workshop on drying hemp and nettle. Our team assumed that drying nettle in full sunshine was the fastest way. But an older woman watched us, then shook her head: “Too much sun, too fast. In our house, we dry nettle in the shade. It stays strong.”

I was curious. So, we split the batch — half sun, half shade. A week later, the sun-dried fibers snapped and splintered, while the shade-dried ones were tough and flexible.

That was a wake-up call. Traditional methods aren’t just “old ways.” They’re generations of R&D, learned on the ground. So we changed our process and began drying fibers in shaded sheds, and our quality jumped.

Lessons like these kept coming. Sitting on kitchen floors, sipping sweet chai, I’d learn things you never discover from spreadsheets. We made our bioplastic films sturdier because farmers said so, and we focused on compostability because villagers wanted bags that would disappear quickly.

The best business insights I got came not from boardrooms, but from moments spent cross-legged on mud floors.

Lesson 3: Integrity travels well

When you’re new to an industry, trust is everything. You have no track record, just your word.

Not long after we began scaling up EcoGran™, a supplier offered us a “magic” additive that would boost output. But it wasn’t certified for compostable plastics, and using it meant we would be cutting corners.

But I remembered something from my SEO Corporation days: Shortcuts always come back to bite you. I told my team, “Either we keep our promises, or we’re just another outfit chasing quick money.” So we turned down the deal.

Months later, that choice paid off when a major European buyer asked for proof of every ingredient. Because we had nothing to hide, the deal went through. The buyer told us, “We trusted you because your numbers matched your claims.”

Also, integrity isn’t just about clients; it’s about partners, too. From day one, we published our price per kilo for hemp and nettle. If prices dropped, we didn’t squeeze farmers. Over time, our supply chain ran on relationships, not contracts.

Many founders talk about “brand values.” For us, integrity is what keeps a business alive when things get tough.

Related: How to Succeed in an Industry You Know Nothing About

Today, as I look at what UKHI has become, I’m grateful I didn’t let my lack of credentials hold me back. We’ve secured funding, partnered with leading institutes like ICAR, Pusa, IIT Guwahati and the Indian Institute of Packaging. Most importantly, we built EcoGran™, a product that’s making a real difference.

A thousand farmers now supply crop waste to us, and earn income from material they once burned. Startups in India and abroad use our materials to package food and beauty products, knowing it will safely return to the earth. In an absolutely unplanned way, our supply chain is showing how rural India and high-tech manufacturing can work together for a circular economy.

Of course, there are still plenty of challenges:

• How do we scale up?
• How do we keep costs low?
• How do we stay ahead of regulations and away from greenwashing?

What’s changed most is my definition of success. It’s not contracts or quarterly numbers anymore. It’s cleaner rivers, farmers’ faces and hearing a child say, “We don’t burn the stalks now.”

If you’re on the edge of a leap into the unknown, my advice is: Don’t wait to be an expert. Stay curious, keep your integrity and remember that an outsider’s perspective is exactly what’s needed to build something better.