Jungle Ventures founding partner Anurag Srivastava on conscious leadership and lasting impact

Anurag admits, though, that it has not been easy to watch his children pursue ambitions so different from his own upbringing . “Education was everything to me growing up and it has been a challenge to see my children view it as secondary to their passions,” he shares candidly.

At this year’s Singapore Grand Prix, an exchange with George Russell, the British driver for the Mercedes‐AMGPetronas F1Team and the race’s eventual winner, changed his perspective. “I asked him if he had advice for a father whose son is a motorsport racer,” Anurag shares. “He told me, ‘If you want your kids to pass in motorsport and in [their] exams, they’ll fail in both’. That was a wake‐up call.”

He pauses before adding: “Education isn’t just in school. It’s everywhere. In racing, for instance, it’s all mathematics and physics, like understanding tire pressure, speed, data and mechanics. My son’s learning more on the track than he ever could in a classroom.”

Parenthood, Anurag reflects, has fundamentally reshaped how he leads not just at home but also in his work with founders. “Parenting my children,” he says, “has helped me rethink how I advise founders.” He references the wisdom of Lebanese American writer and poet Kahlil Gibran, whose poem On Children beautifully captures the idea that children—and by extension, those we mentor—are ours not to control but to nurture. “We tend to limit our kids based on our own past experiences. At Jungle Ventures, we [have a tendency] to do the same to founders,” he reflects. “The lesson I’ve learnt from parenting is to imagine the possibilities of what the entrepreneur can achieve. Our advice shouldn’t limit how far they can grow, because they’ll accomplish much more than I ever did—and they should.”

This expansive mindset of imagining what others can achieve guides how he thinks about impact—and led to the 2013 founding of BillionBricks, a venture born from a simple yet profound question: If housing is a basic human need, why has there been so little innovation in that space? “My co‐founder, Prasoon Kumar, and I wanted to apply design and technology to create dignified, scalable housing solutions,” Anurag says. “We’ve taken more than 15,000 homeless people off the streets and today, BillionBricks has evolved into a sustainable housing company building carbon‐positive homes. It’s a good reminder that social impact and business viability can coexist.”

That pursuit of purpose has since expanded into a new frontier. Anurag is now collaborating with American psychotherapist Brian Bauerle, the founder of the professional training and coaching company Asian Leadership Institute, on the Ten Thousand Heroes initiative. At the heart of it is a framework Bauerle—who had studied for years under the Dalai Lama and then spent half a decade as a monk in Tibet and Thailand—developed for cultivating conscious leadership; one that drew on his past experiences, merging Western psychology with Asian spirituality. “He has coached family‐business owners, corporate executives, and more recently, tech founders,” Anurag shares. “I heard the same thing from all his clients: they’ve learnt how to live and how to love better. They said their self‐awareness had grown, that they were building better companies, becoming less judgemental, and improving their relationships with their co‐founders.”

Anurag himself experienced this shift first‐hand after meeting with Bauerle, laying the foundation for their professional partnership that was sparked by a candid conversation the two had. Bauerle, Anurag recounts, was telling him about the ripple effect of the framework. “He asked if, given the sort of impact it has, we could open source it to make it available to the world,” Anurag recalls. “And I remember thinking, yes—because why limit it to a few? Then Brian shared something that he said had been sitting with him for awhile: the phrase ‘10,000 Heroes’—the idea being that if 10,000 people could learn and teach this framework, the impact could reach millions.”

And so Ten Thousand Heroes brings together founders, venture capitalists and leaders who see business not just as enterprise but a path towards expanded consciousness, compassion and community. “When a company embraces this framework and operates with empathy and compassion, it transforms everything,” Anurag posits. “Some founders tell me they now have zero attrition, with higher productivity and profitability.”

“The world is contracting,” he adds. “Without this mindset, business becomes about politics and negativity—high attrition, conflicts between co‐founders and board members. It’s a reflection of the contracted world we’re living in.”

For him, this vision brings his journey full circle. “This is very close to my heart because it applies to everything I do,” he says. “It’s me. It’s how I parent. It’s how I show up in my community. But largely, it’s [the essence behind] the companies that we’re creating. That’s why we’re bringing this framework into general use; so we can be a conscious venture capital firm.”

His hope is that this practice will ripple outward, starting with Jungle Ventures. “I’d like to see every company that we invest in become a conscious company,” he expounds. It is an idea that captures his philosophy of legacy: to build not only enterprises but also environments. “It’s about whether the principles you’ve lived by continue to shape others’ decisions long after you’ve stepped away,” he says. “If the companies we’ve built continue to embody long‐term thinking, humility and purpose, then that’s legacy enough for me.”

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