You know life is short and there is no time to leave important words unsaid, that is what inspired our protagonist Kopal Khanna who runs a startup aiming at offering a platform to the storytellers of the country and the creative people who possess an immense talent of putting their heart out in thought-provoking words.

Speaking of her childhood she was born and raised in the royal city Lucknow and moved out for further undergraduate, she pursued B.A History from St.Stephens, Delhi University and proceeded to study MSc Global Media and Communications from London School of Economics; afterwards did MA in the same field from the University of Southern California.

Being an inquisitive individual, she liked to learn new things and formulate art in various forms. She possesses an interest in writing, filming, and reading, and started with Tape A Tale with an eye to living her dream of becoming an entrepreneur and offering a platform for interesting and inspiring stories for the world to listen.

It was lucky for her that poetry had been on a rise over the years, and she identified the opportunity at a great time to start off with this venture. She is inspired by Adam Braun who is an American entrepreneur that believes in providing access to education to the children in the developing countries. She is also a very big fan of the poems written by Harivansh Rai Bachchan.

She holds immense pleasure if she is able to contribute even a little in the betterment of any individual who needs help. She shared an emotional story where she describes the joy she received when she had a girl who shared her healing from depression through the stories and poems shared on Tape A Tale. She believes in those little moments that are memorable and heart-warming.

Discussing the future entrepreneurs, she feels everybody suffer through a different journey and not one formula can fit everyone, Although her advice remains the same for everyone where she advises not to take failure or success too seriously and have fun with whatever they are pursuing.

You know how they say some of the best things come when you least expect them, Dropout Dude happened just like that. Two childhood friends, Divya and Anshumaan, very distinct from one another, but yet the same started this venture for the youth. 

Divya, a nerd, was very studious but extremely unclear with her goals for life. She studied Science but ended up doing business development for a renowned IT firm. Anshumaan, on the other hand, was very talented and full of life pursued Arts while being a computer and technology enthusiast. 

Anshumaan was well aware that 9-5 job isn’t made for him, he always knew he wanted to do something of his own, whereas, Divya had no idea what to do with her life, she was not happy with her job at all. After a while, she got to know about Anshumaan’s first venture that was DU Khabar and she began to help him when later on, they decided to form their own venture called as Dropout Dudes.

Divya, in order to perform well in the start-up, learned Digital Marketing, after which she realised this is what she loves and wants to pursue in life. Their motto behind Dropout Dudes was to provide motivation to the youth of the country through inspiring stories of real-life personals.

Their story had many ups and downs, they had worked really hard to make this work since the start-up was not the only thing to be worried upon, their parents were also to be convinced for allowing them to follow their dreams. It is never easy, it is even more difficult than a 9-5 job. You spend all your savings to make this happen and work all day and night for slightest amount of revenues.

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, people tend to start their own business when they become unhappy with their job. It is not always necessary to become an entrepreneur just because you think a 9-5 job isn’t made for you,  this is the reason that many start-ups fail after a point.

There can be various other reasons to start your own business but it need not be boredom from your current job.

Although, it worked well for Divya, and after earning enough revenue they managed to establish two more start-ups called Campus Media and Startup Style. Campus media primarily focusses on news and entertainment for university’s messages and information, Start-up Style is India’s first online merchandise store dedicated for Startups, Entrepreneurs, Organisations, Freelancers, etc.

They have managed to create their own mark in this industry and will continue to do so. There is so much to learn from these two, firstly being never to give up on your dreams for whatsoever reason. No reason is good enough to give up. You will face problems that might not have solutions to get out of but then again you need to remind yourself the initial inspiration that got you at the place you are at today.

Abhishek Gupta hails from Thawe in Gopalganj and has attained his primary education from Bihar and has pursued a Master’s in business administration in marketing. The quest for ‘innovation’ and perseverant endeavors of entrepreneurs like Ratan Tata, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs has always served as a source of inspiration. Since his days of pursuing an MBA, he used to observe the problematic parts and tried solving them himself. The motivation from success stories of different brand impelled him to understand the dire need of giving all the entrepreneurs and common ground. He formed his first startup Startup Delhi and we must appreciate his tenacity in bringing the startup enthusiasts together. With Arbab Usmani, co-founder, he started a digital marketing learning institute called UppSkill. Adding flavors to his achievements he formed HackerSpace in 2018, coworking in Noida which aimed at the collective upliftment of startups. In the succeeding year, he laid the foundations of the Next Big Brand and he says, “it was a passion project early but has now become a full-time brand-centric media portal.” Recently in the month of April, his website Next Big Brand crossed 1 million Google searches and we express our warm congratulations for the remarkable achievement.

Abhishek believes that struggles and achievements both constitute the recipe of life while we should celebrate the achievements and be motivated by them, we must learn from our struggles as well. Perhaps, this belief gave him the courage to leave his well-paid job and like a true traveler of life ventured into the darkness where he experienced both good and bad, in just hope of light. And indeed, he attained that and now the struggles seem all worth it.

He serves as an example of never giving up and following our dreams until the final battle and himself tags this spirit with #RuknaTohHaiHiNahi.

Inquisitive minds provide fertile grounds for ideation and innovation. Today, we bring you the story of Sayantan Chatterjee, the founder of Beatest. It is a Bengaluru-based startup, which brings AI-led transformation in the talent acquisition space and primarily deals with a data-driven approach in recognizing the behavioural traits of a candidate and their growth potential. 

Since his college days at Jadavpur University, Sayantan had a constant urge to innovate and build something from scratch. Despite his graduation in Power Engineering, he was completely inclined towards coding and instead of attending his course lectures, he tried his hands-on building applications and exploring the different probabilities of extending his passion into real-time creation. While working as an Ethical Hacker with Oracle in Bengaluru, Sayantan witnessed the evolution of tech in numerous areas, and his own personal experience led him to be extremely driven towards solving the mismatch of skills and potential. Giving in to his passion for creation, he quit his cushy job at Oracle and an MBA offer from IIM-Kozhikode to become an entrepreneur. With every measure of potential being dedicated to marks, Beatest was something he began to help students ‘Beat every Test’ and enhance their professional qualities and future endeavours accordingly. 

After running this model with around 10,000 students across the colleges in India, getting featured and showcased by Inc42 and AWS as one of the top 5 startups in Kolkata in their BigShift Event, Sayantan slowly started closing in on the final gap of the bias that would impact the hiring processes across organizations in India. It was included in the Nasscom’s Thrive 30 list of startups and was then incubated under Nasscom 10k startups.

Given its vision and viability, it was instantly valued in the startup ecosystem with Beatest winning the Original Startup Idea of the Year Award by Infocom. By mid-2019, Beatest found its ground with around 17,000 users on its platform across the top colleges like Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. 

However, Sayantan was looking to build a strong core team to drive it further. Early on in his journey, he understood that the “if you build it, they will come” maxim has been disproven over and over again. Instead, the truth is, if you build it, market it, and hustle like hell, then (with some luck) you’ll get traction and this requires enough pillars building the product today for the future. His core team consists of Gaurav Wadhwani (CTO) and Gitika Bhatia (CMO), who with their expertise and experience have created great value for the product.

Team The Talented Indian wishes Team Beatest good luck for the future endeavours!

India, the land of opportunities, has witnessed an exponential growth in the number of startups from young brilliant minds adding a good boost to the economy while fulfilling the gap for job vacancies. India ranks third worldwide for the highest number of unicorn companies. From a lot of startups, one that we should look out for this year is an Initiative of Creative Ideas, ‘The Sustainable’ which envisions to promote sustainable living in India.

This unique initiative is on a mission is to spread awareness about sustainable living. In an exchange with The Talented Indian, Jinal Ajmera & Vivek Ajmera, the co-founders of The Sustainable stated, “Let’s face it, we all need to do a lot more for the environment to make it more sustainable and quite frankly, it doesn’t require a lot of effort. A few small changes that we make in our day to day lives will go a long way in providing a sustainable environment for future generations. So, let’s join hands together to build a greener planet and build a sustainable lifestyle for the next billion users, one product at a time,”

Thesustainable.in is a green marketplace allowing access to fifty plus eco-friendly products from India to around two hundred countries. Some of their mean-green product is Organic Dates, an organic calendar with seeds in it and which once planted can grow into a beautiful tomato tree; Organic Pencils wrapped with seed paper on the other end, which can be planted once the pencil shrinks and the national flag made out of seed paper. For the special occasion to celebrate the 71st year of Republic India, they have created tri-coloured pencils.

“Although the startup ecosystem has been prevalent in the country for a while now, not many have managed to make some serious change in our environment. Sustainable living is definitely the way forward to a better and greener future and the more aware we are of or surroundings, the better it will be for future generations. I believe if you keep on innovating and give your 100% into it, the challenges seem very meager. It’s the simplest and smallest things that make the most impact and that’s what makes this challenge exciting,” Jinal says.

The team at Sustainable openly invites one and all to join them in spreading awareness about sustainable living for a better and cleaner future.