‍I've been building things since college. Not because I had a plan, but because I couldn't sit still watching a problem without trying to fix it. Fabrication for garment exporters. An export business. An advertising and events firm that worked with some of India's leading corporates and multiple Fortune 500 companies. Each chapter taught me something about how deals get made — and who gets left out.

Somewhere along the way I learned something more important than how to close a deal. I learned that the only ones worth closing are the ones where everyone at the table walks away genuinely better off. The moment a deal requires someone to hide something from someone else, it stops being a deal — it becomes a trap.

Indian real estate has been a trap for buyers for thirty years.

The idea for POBO first came to me in 2018. I built a Facebook page for it — Power of Being One — not a business yet, just a conviction I couldn't shake. The problem was so structurally obvious I couldn't understand why no one had fixed it: a homebuyer spending their life savings and committing to a 20-year loan walks into a negotiation completely alone, against a developer with lawyers, marketers, and a sales team of fifty. The developer wins every time. Not because they're smarter — because they're organised and the buyer isn't

I knew the idea was right. But I also knew the market needed to catch up to it. So I waited.

The moment it became impossible to wait any longer came on a drive back from a holiday.

I was explaining the concept to my friend Ashwin Mehta — who manages the Asia Pacific sales channel for Autodesk — and before I'd finished, he reached into his pocket, pulled out ₹1,000, and told me he was the first founding member.

No pitch deck. No website. No prototype. Just a problem he recognised immediately because he'd lived it, and a solution he trusted on the spot.

A sophisticated business professional who evaluates markets for a living paid before there was anything to pay for. That was the only validation I needed.

POBO is built on one principle that I've carried through every business I've ever run: your success must be structurally impossible without mine, and mine must be structurally impossible without yours. Not as a philosophy — as a business model.

Here is exactly how that works:

We charge developers a flat 1%conversion fee. That number is published on our website and never changes basedon the project or the relationship. Developers typically spend 8–20% of aproperty's value on brokers, marketing, and sales incentives. POBO replaces allof that for 1% — and the saving goes directly to your collective as a betterprice. You pay us nothing.

You pay the developer directly.Into their RERA escrow account. POBO never touches your property money.

You are not obligated to buyuntil your collective is full, confirmed, and you have said yes a second time.

And if a developer defaultsafter you've signed — you are already in a pre-organised legal group from Day1. You don't start the fight alone. You start it with everyone.

In my career I've walked away from situations that stopped being honest — even when walking away was expensive. I don't say this with pride; it cost me each time. But I've never regretted choosing integrity over convenience. I've built things, wound things down, made money and lost it. What I know with certainty after 34 years is this: the only businesses worth building are the ones where your success is impossible without the customer's success.

We haven't closed our first collective yet, and I want to be honest about that. We built the legal framework first. the vetting process second. the platform third. We are now forming our founding collectives across NCR — and we are looking for people who believe that buyers deserve better.

Ashwin paid ₹1,000 on a car journey before any of this existed.

If you've ever felt alone negotiating the biggest purchase of your life — you belong here.

— Faheem Khan, Founder, POBO (A unit of Vezza Ventures Private Limited, Noida)