The biggest inspiration that the author has had while starting his journey of entrepreneurship was while writing a short biography of Swami Vivekananda. Taking inspiration from Swami Vivekananda’s life, the author believes in working on an idea to the expanse of his mind, living it, making it his own, and then pouring his all into making it a reality.
The second principle that the author diligently follows is “Fear the brutes.” Taking inspiration from Rober Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad, the author strives to make it into entrepreneurship by transcending his fears and greed; fear that doesn’t allow him to take a risk, and greed of living a stable job with fixed income. And the third factor that made the author make his venture into entrepreneurship was the acceptance of the three stages that encompass the journey of any entrepreneur when he /she decides to think something out of the box. The author believes that every success story begins with a number of failures and in retrospect, these failures become part of the story of a beautiful journey. The author lives by the mantra of working for the dream until it is achieved and not letting any distractions astray him from his goal.
The author started his entrepreneurial journey from the second year of his college when he started his company called O2SoftSolutions. Under this company, he built the first online role-playing replica of MafiaWars which he then sold to a US Company for only 50,000. This was in 2008 and that was the only push he needed to establish himself as an entrepreneur. This experience opened an arena of new knowledge for him in the field of entrepreneurship and from there he started learning more and more about startups and how they are built and sustained.
He hit a roadblock in most of his ventures in matters of raising funds because of not hailing from a pedigree institution like an IIM or MIT but that didn’t make him lose hope or his determination. He kept making new products and selling them but deep down even he knew that to be an established entrepreneur, he would have to get out of his comfort zone.
The next project that he took up was trying to solve the problem of construction vertical where both the demand and supply are completely scattered. He was in the third year of college then and after a lot of resistance from his father who was completely against his decision of the start-up living by his middle-class ideals, he finally started his own construction company to fight the problems prevalent in that sector. His company was going to act as a conduit between companies like L&T, HCC and blue-collar people like the labor force and binders. The companies could directly hire the labour force from his start up on a yearly contract basis and till the time they do not get any contracts, he had decided to put them on his organization’s payroll. He tried creating a healthy work environment in the workspace by providing all the basic amenities and his company won its first contract from L&T in Mumbai. But due to a lack of regular payments from the companies and unwilling investors in the market, he had to shut down his first start-up.
After this start-up failed, he never looked back. With much more enthusiasm he built an Android App game in December 2010. From there he moved on to developing an app called App Bazaar, with a group of people. This was the India-centric app store but it hit a snag when Google sued them for it. But what worked in his favor was that this helped them earn a huge amount of traction in the Valley and they became an offshore product building company called Webonise.
After spending 5 years with Webinose, he went on to co-found another company, YogurtLabs which was a platform for creating short video content accessible across all platforms. This app, being way ahead of its time, had to be shut down due to lack of serious funding and this was the time when the author met Himanshu Verma, the CTO of Yatra.com. The author was then opted for the challenge to make Yatra.com a mobile-first company. The author was the head of the Mobile Engineering Team at Yatra.com from 2016 and a lot of its achievements get credited to the author’s hard work. He has been successfully able to convert Yatra.com from a mobile platform to Mobile First.
The author also has many awards to his name. While working for Webinose, he was awarded the Thought Leadership Award at DevOps Summit Conference(2015). He has also been awarded the Best Young Entrepreneur of the Year by his College, and among many other such awards, he was also awarded the Best Student of The Year.
At present, the author is serving as a VP of Engineering and one of the business leaders at Xoxoday.com. He is a serial entrepreneur and a multi-talented polyglot engineer with expertise in Mobile, DevOps, Cloud Computing, etc. He can be reached on LinkedIn using the link given, https://www.linkedin.com/in/pariharvivek/
Being a product of an education system where marks are given a priority over everything else, the author has struggled all his academic years to live up to the par. But once his journey into entrepreneurship began and he could successfully get out of the rat race that he realized the main pivotal points of learning: being creative, making money and knowing how to handle it, being innovative and a risk-taker, planning every step you take and knowing how to put to use everything you learn.
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