From Idea to Crores: The Story Behind India’s PUBG Alternative | Vishal Gondal, GOQii

He has worn only red for sixteen years, and skips breakfast entirely

Vishal Gondal bet his company’s entire bank balance on a Spider-Man licence in 2001. Twenty-five years later he is running a clinical study against Stanford and Mayo Clinic. The through-line is the same trick both times.

Gondal lists failing his third year of B.Com on his LinkedIn profile, deliberately. He calls it a badge of honour, on the grounds that qualifications put you in a box, and the box would never have let him build video games in India in 1999.

He is careful with what he does spend decisions on. He has worn only red for sixteen years and has removed breakfast from his life as a category, both for the same reason: willpower is finite, and every trivial choice in the morning draws down the balance before the real work starts. By the time he reaches the office his brain hasn’t been spent deciding between parathas and omelettes.

"I have trained myself to be calm in chaos. In fact I am uncomfortable when things are going fine."

This article discusses general wellness and preventive-health concepts for education. Consumer wearables are not diagnostic devices. Symptoms, prescriptions and treatment changes should be discussed with a qualified healthcare professional.

Betting the bank balance on Spider-Man

In 2001, Indiagames was making games for mobile phones and nobody believed anyone would play them. The games sold, but they had no brands. They were called things like Tank Attack. So the team drew up a list of characters they would need to level up, and went to Marvel.

Marvel didn’t take them seriously, and quoted a licence fee of somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000, which they assumed would end the conversation. It was the entire amount Indiagames had in the bank. Gondal paid it, and didn’t negotiate.

The better part is what they did while negotiating. The licence ran only a year and the game would take four to six months to build, so they built it during the negotiation. They signed in two weeks, showed Marvel a finished game, and launched in around 50 countries. It made $2 million and changed the company’s trajectory. Gondal believes it was the first brand licensing deal done out of India, and it needed RBI permission to complete.

45 million downloads and a game people hated

FAU-G, developed by nCore Games and announced by Akshay Kumar, crossed 45 million downloads and was, in Gondal’s own words, completely bombed by reviewers. Players expected a multiplayer shooter. Version one was set around the Galwan Valley confrontation, where no firearms were used, so the game had no weapons in it. The team thought they were being faithful to the events. Players thought they had been shortchanged.

So they read the reviews. All of them, lakhs of comments. Then they unpublished version one from the app store entirely and rebuilt from scratch as FAU-G: Domination, which now sits around 4.3 to 4.4 out of five. His view is that a negative review is a gift, because writing one takes effort, and for a free game nobody had even lost money. They took the trouble because they cared.

He is also personally the first escalation point for user complaints on Twitter and Discord. Not the support team, not a bot. The reasoning is partly speed, since a problem that surfaces late has usually already gone out of proportion, but the bigger effect is internal. When the product manager knows the CEO hears about a bug first, what used to get buried as "that’s a feature, not a bug" surfaces immediately instead of climbing a hierarchy.

From 120 kilos to Everest Base Camp

GOQii came out of his own failure. After the gaming years he was around 120 kilos, and the gym didn’t work, and the diets didn’t work. What worked was a coach who messaged him and stayed in touch. He went on to run 13 half marathons and four ultramarathons, and trekked to Everest Base Camp.

The conclusion he drew reframed the business: the problem in healthcare is not information, it is motivation. Every Instagram reel already tells you what not to eat. It is written on the cigarette packet. People know. What was missing was the daily mechanism, which is exactly what games are good at.

More garages, or fewer crashes

His analogy is a highway where cars keep crashing and the response is to build more garages rather than fix the road, enforce seatbelts and stop people drinking and driving. Healthcare, he argues, is structurally incentivised to treat rather than prevent, because hospitals earn from surgeries, medicines and beds.

GOQii today is barely a device company. Hardware is under 10% of the business. The rest is a preventive-care platform sold to insurers managing risk, to employers managing team health, and through a UK joint venture working with the NHS on diabetes, cholesterol and hypertension. He describes the model as predict, personalise, prevent. The consumer-facing expression of it is a digital twin that gets younger as you get healthier, which he calls a digital Tamagotchi.

Competing with Mayo Clinic on evidence

GOQii’s longevity work runs under the name Sanjeevini, after the herb Hanuman was sent to find and couldn’t identify, which Gondal thinks describes the problem exactly: thousands of interventions exist and nobody knows which works for you.

It is a Top 40 semifinalist in the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, a seven-year, $101 million global challenge now in its third year, and the field includes Stanford, Cambridge and Mayo Clinic. The team is built with Ashoka University, IIT Bombay and the National Institute of Medical Sciences in Jaipur, and has completed a first clinical study across Mumbai, Jaipur and Delhi. As he puts it, you cannot just claim it. You have to prove it with data.

What he will and will not back

As an angel he backs people rather than ideas, and was the first cheque into both Leverage Edu and Headout. He is explicit that he is repaying something: somebody was stupid enough to fund a teenager making video games in the nineties. He also declines on principle, passing on alcohol businesses and on a biryani brand he genuinely liked, on the grounds that he cannot recommend people consume those daily while selling longevity. The deal-breaker is coachability. If a founder wants the money and not the feedback, he is out.

Spirituality as the operating system

His framing: the body is hardware, the brain is software, and spirituality is the operating system. Values, judgement, what you do when you have to choose between good and bad or fire someone competent, all of it runs at OS level.

Which is why, he says, people who train obsessively still collapse at fifty. They have overclocked the hardware without upgrading the operating system. Where technology ends, spirituality begins, because we are building systems we describe as conscious without agreeing what consciousness is.

Listen to the full conversation with Vishal Gondal on FyndOutWithRagini.