Yuval Noah Harari, author of the book Sapiens, sold over twenty million copies of his book.

Harari once said about writing Sapiens: "This is so banal!..There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I'm not an archeologist. Im not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research. It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way."

Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. His research, synthesis, and writing. it was all really exceptional.

There are two kinds of Non-Fiction authors. One, like Harari, who take existing knowledge and operationalise it. And one, like Carl Sagan, who add to the existing knowledge.

We are the first kind. Our goal is to surface the most consequential ideas and present them in forms people can actually absorb, remember, and carry with them.

The world already has so many ideas. So much great research exists. But the problem is how it is presented. How it is absorbed (or rather not absorbed) by the readers. We want to work towards that.

We want to hunt for good existing ideas, and write them from a point of view that is new, interesting, and impactful in someone’s life.

When we say take existing ideas and bring it to you, it does not mean that we summarise the existing ideas. We want to bring interesting synthesis to it. New perspectives to it. Abstract more out of it. This is our intent.

Like Visa founder Dee Hock once said, "New ways of looking at things create much greater innovation than new ways of doing them."

We are not trying to become the definitive authority on every domain we publish in. We are not claiming to invent entirely new ideas.

We are claiming the craft: research depth, synthesis, interpretation, and the ability to present them in a way that's both fun and useful for the reader.

Hi, I'm Rachna Sekhrajka.

Before building Inkubator, I worked in consulting firms, startups, and corporates across Germany, the United States, and India. My career taught me many things. But one of those lessons is that the best ideas don't win. The best story wins.

I saw it in consulting, where clients chose ideas they could understand over the best ideas. I saw it with investors when they chose the best storytellers over the best founders (I also think I got my first funding because of my storytelling, cos there were so many better companies in my accelerator). Communication is one of the most underrated drivers of impact. I was convinced of this.

With that conviction in mind, whenever I would read Non-fiction books (especially self-help), it really bothered me that some great and important ideas are always narrated in the most boring way (sorry, but this is true for many non-fiction books). The way they write hurts the reading experience, but also the impact. Great ideas stayed in the head of the readers, and rarely showed in their behaviour.

I built on that thought, and slowly, eventually, it evolved into Inkubator.

Narrative Non-Fiction, our genre, is a tough craft. You need the rigorous research, accuracy, and factual grounding of a traditional non-fiction, plus the storytelling craft of a fiction. But we have taken upon ourselves to learn the craft, and keep getting better.

My goal with Inkubator is to make great ideas more accessible and fun to learn. I am excited to see how this goal evolves and what it leads to.

There is a lot of conversation right now about the use AI in publishing. We want to address it directly.

A lot goes into building a single book. We divide this into two kinds of work. 

There is technical work. Things like research, fact-checking, formatting, consistency checks. 

There is creative work. Things like coming up with ideas, the narratives, the prose styles.

We use AI for the first kind of work. And a human team for the second kind of work. AI handles what is technical and repeatable. Humans handle what requires perspective, craft, and instinct. 

That said, right now, our design language is built with AI tools. We are a young company, and for now, our resources go where they matter most: the thinking, the writing, the production. Design is one area where we work with AI, guided by our vision, taste, and personality. As we grow, we want to add more human powers into this area too.