Finding Direction Through Detours: Saikumar Bollapalli's 23PercentClub and VCPE Journey

"The more you learn, the more you earn.” This Warren Buffett philosophy is the thread running through Saikumar Bollapalli’s unlikely journey through entrepreneurship, investing, and venture capital.

Today, he is building 23PercentClub, pursuing a broader fintech vision, and learning the craft of venture capital and private equity through Bower LEAD's VCPE Program and the Bower Fellowship that followed. But the path to this point was anything but linear.

Growing up in a middle-class family in Andhra Pradesh, Saikumar followed the roadmap many aspiring professionals know well — engineering at IIT Madras, campus placements, and later, when those plans fell through, preparation for UPSC and SSC examinations. Then came the stock market, entrepreneurship, and venture capital — each one an unplanned detour that, looking back, compounded into the thing he'd wanted since childhood: to build something of his own.

A Childhood Dream That Never Changed

Born and raised in Chirala, a coastal town in Andhra Pradesh, Saikumar grew up in a middle-class household where education was the one reliable route to a secure future. Entrepreneurship wasn't part of the conversation. After his 10th grade, he'd actually wanted to become a chartered accountant. He was good with numbers and finance, but his parents, following the well-worn instinct of "typical Indian parents," pushed him toward the same path his cousins had taken.

"My cousin actually got into IIT. We didn't really know how prestigious these institutions were until he got in," he recalls. Following that path, he enrolled in the integrated program at IIT Madras. 

College didn't turn into the passion-versus-practicality tug-of-war it does in many entrepreneurial stories. Saikumar leaned into campus life instead with volleyball, cricket, and athletics. "I was more into sports and athletics. I never thought of learning more of core," he says. He went on to represent IIT and win a gold medal, and by his own account, spent most of his four years there fully checked out of career planning. It was only in his final year that the question of what came next started to feel urgent.

Then came the pandemic.

Placements slowed, and Saikumar returned home. In January 2021, he moved to Hyderabad to prepare for UPSC and SSC — India's central government exams. The reasoning wasn't really about job security. "If you join a Central Government job, you'll have plenty of time," he explains. "I thought, if I become an officer, I'll have the time to work on building something on the side. That's what I did."

He didn't clear UPSC and cleared only two stages in SSC. Looking back, he doesn't call it a failure. "I didn't study 12 or 14 hours like other aspirants. I put in maybe 5-6 hours," he says. "It was more of a reality check for me, on whether this really suited me. To be honest, I never liked history or civics."

Finding Direction Through the Stock Market

It was while preparing for these exams that Saikumar was first introduced to the stock market: primary and secondary markets, futures and options. Like many first-time investors, he lost money early on, in F&O trades. But instead of scaring him off, the losses pulled him in deeper.

"I was good at observing and asking questions and investigating things," he says. He began pulling apart the trading apps he used ike Zerodha and Groww, etc., looking for what was broken. "I started investigating how they worked, the interface, all of it. I realised some gaps needed to be fixed, built better."

The idea that eventually became 23PercentClub traces back to Warren Buffett. "23% is Warren Buffett's average return across his investing years,” Saikumar explains. That number, and the discipline behind it, became the name of his venture: 23PercentClub — a mentoring platform built around personalised, long-term engagement rather than one-size-fits-all courses.

Building 23PercentClub

"When it comes to investment and wealth management, most people don't lack information. They lack direction," Saikumar says. This insight has become something of a personal manifesto for him as he builds his first venture. 

23PercentClub is structured as a three-year mentoring program, not a course. New participants start by taking what he calls a financial diagnosis test. "I've prepared three levels of it, depending on where you're starting from. It is much like how a doctor asks about your symptoms before deciding on treatment," he says. From there, the program is built around the individual: a mix of personal finance, saving, and investing discipline aimed at making people independent investors rather than dependent on advisors.

The venture is already generating revenue;  around ₹3 lakh so far, by his account, with clients currently paying up to ₹1 lakh for mentoring. It's one piece of a larger ambition. "My target for the next two to five years is to build a fintech ecosystem," he says — something closer to how Zerodha's Kite and Coin are interconnected, except covering everything: investments, taxation, dividend income, all tracked in one place. "Until you're aware of your own financial situation, you can't build real financial discipline. That's the app I'm building."

Learning to Think Like an Investor

As his ambitions took shape, Saikumar realised that understanding finance from the inside wasn't enough; he also needed to understand how investors thought about founders and businesses. That curiosity led him to Bower LEAD's VCPE Program.

"The VCPE course gave me a shift: how to think as a founder, and how to think as an investor," he says. "Not just build the product, but how do I pitch it, how do I make investors believe in what I'm building. Because if they believe, they invest. If they don't, they won't, and that belief comes from how I structure my own answers."

Coming back to structured learning several years after his engineering degree wasn't easy, he admits. But he's clear about what makes the difference for someone entering from outside a finance background. "Either you love what you do, or you do what you love," he says. "I didn't have the luxury of only doing what I loved. So I made myself love what I was doing. If someone has real interest in finance, in the VC and startup space, it doesn't matter what background they come from. There's a lot of room to grow here. We're still way behind the top five countries in this space."

From Learning Venture Capital to Building It

The VCPE Program laid the groundwork. The real shift came when Saikumar joined the Bower Fellowship, working alongside the Bower Capital team on the firm's first accelerator cohort.

"Until you do it practically, you always lose sight of what you've learned," he says. In VCPE, he says, he learned half the circle with the concepts. The fellowship gave him the rest: founder conversations, research and analysis, sitting in on evaluation rounds, thinking through engagement plans as shortlisted startups moved through the pipeline. "I'm covering the whole circle now. With less time, I've learned a lot."

Every founder conversation has sharpened what he looks for as an investor-in-training. Every round of analysis has pushed him to think harder about product-market fit and scalability — lessons he's now folding back into how he thinks about his own startup.

Today, Saikumar continues to grow 23PercentClub while building toward the larger fintech ecosystem he has in mind. His goal, as he puts it, isn't just to help people invest better but to help them make informed financial decisions for the rest of their lives. Eventually, he wants to launch his own fintech app before turning a full-time investor – converging all that he learnt through this exciting decade-long journey into a final performance of discipline and perseverance.