As part of our constant endeavour to identify and share some of the unique and compelling stories from the ecosystem, we invited yet another passionate entrepreneur Priyansh Shah for an interview with BrilliantRead Media. He is a change enabler, social entrepreneur, and Founder & President of World Youth Heart Federation. Let’s learn more about his background, his journey and his advice for our growing community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Priyansh:
We are aware of your contribution to the ecosystem, talk us through your background and your journey as an entrepreneur, please;
The work of any entrepreneur is the reflection of their experiences along their journey. I have been brought up in a family of business leaders and most of my work and experiences have been in the healthcare sector being a medical student. I had started creating business canvasses and pitches since I was 16 years old, and was able to work in a couple of startups that didn’t cross the beta testing phase. Luckily, I have had the honour to take up various leadership positions at a number of national and international NGOs as well. This brought me to the crossroads of whether I wish to pursue my millennial childhood dream to be an entrepreneur or continue voluntary work at NGOs which brought a sense of fulfilment to me.
Recently, I realised that the term social entrepreneurship was the answer to all my dubiety. This led to the birth of World Youth Heart Federation, which is the first organisation in the world, working on a targeted healthcare disease spectrum with an inter-sectoral or ecosystem approach.
You are always positive and motivated, what keeps you going?
It is impossible to remain invariably positive and motivated, especially when you are starting something new. How quickly you accept your setbacks and move on, is the only thing that matters. I would recommend three simple rules to help you in the pursuit of positivity and motivation.
1 – The 24-hour rule is unquestionably the first and most important rule. No matter how big a victory or failure, we should not carry forward those feelings to the upcoming days. This does not mean that you should not celebrate or feel despondent at suitable times, but you should not let these feelings cloud your future actions.
2 – Self Reflection and introspection is the key to understanding yourself and your choices better. This helps you in appreciating your strengths and also helps you to build a roadmap to working on your weaknesses. This also helps in planning your days better.
3 – Feeling a deep sense of connection and attachment to your work. Remembering the reason why you started working on your project or some memories that you can associate with can help you tide over times of uncertainty.
What attracts you towards entrepreneurship instead of a corporate career?
I strongly believe that this choice is strongly associated with a person’s upbringing and their innate approach towards problems.
Building things has always attracted me, right from building blocks, as my mother says & science experiments in school to building a social enterprise today. The satisfaction gained after bringing your ideas and imagination to life is irreplaceable. Every day is a new adventure in this format, a journey which is a mocktail of stress, excitement and adrenaline. No entrepreneur can ever have a nine to five job and I am sure none of them wants it either. It is the constant churning of new ideas, methods and innovations attached in this playing arena that hooks in all the entrepreneurs and I am no exception.”
You are the Founder and President of ‘World Youth Heart Federation’ with such a great cause. Our audience would love to know what kind of problem are you solving with the help of your startup?
The World Youth Heart Federation is an International Social Enterprise registered as a Section 8 Company representing the youth around the world. The federation works improving the cardiovascular health of the world by promoting intersectoral collaboration. We are the first ones in the world to work on a targeted health care disease spectrum with an inter-sectoral or ecosystem approach.
The federation has five working committees which are represented by the acronym heart. The five working committees are Health Education Committee (HC), Entrepreneurship Committee (EC), Advocacy Committee (AC), Research Committee (RC), Technology Committee (TC).
HC works on creating quality content for knowledge dissemination to patients, medical students and the general population in all vernacular languages to reach out to the entire country.
The aim of the EC is to assist Startups and Health Entrepreneurs transform their ideas into reality, by providing mentorship and various other opportunities. AC advocates for improving cardiovascular health by a three-tier approach with a set of three target audiences including the entire population, the population affected by cardiovascular diseases and finally Government, NGOs and other stakeholders. RC wishes to improve the quality and quantity of research focussed on cardiovascular health. It conducts valuable pan India research studies to produce effective and important outcomes. Mentorship networks to promote internal research projects among the members is also an important aspect. TC helps innovators build upon their ideas by assisting with mentorship, workshops and hackathons in collaboration with EC.
All these working committees allow young individuals from diverse fields to come together on a common platform and learn from each other. We strongly believe in transformational leadership where we lift as we rise.
During this COVID-19 crisis, what are the measures you have undertaken to continue your business without disruption?
COVID-19 has shaken the world, but it is the very same reason that actually led to the birth of this social enterprise. Yes! We actually built the federation during the lockdown period. I would say that adversity is the mother of innovation. But looking at the journey in black and white, I had been thinking on these lines for the past two years but was never able to take action on those ideas and neither did I have a solid plan of action. The lockdown gave me a chance to revisit my ideas and make a plan of action to proceed with, which I pitched to my colleagues and friends. The pandemic has only affected some of our planned on-ground activities but team zoom calls have helped us plan ahead. We shifted most of our on-ground activities to online events, which actually helped us reach out to a larger audience. In fact, we recently concluded our first annual conference which entailed numerous events, workshops and competitions with a participation of more than 5,000 young individuals and an overall outreach of nearly 15,000 individuals. To conclude, I would say that the pandemic hardly affected our working as our team is spread across the country and most of our work takes place online. Thus it was like a blessing in disguise and helped us grow multifold.
What are the key ingredients of your startup?
Our social enterprise has three key ingredients:
1 – Heart health; Over 17.9 million people succumb to cardiovascular diseases every year and are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality globally. We strive towards improving the cardiovascular health of all individuals by a holistic approach. Our goal is to reduce mortality due to cardiovascular diseases by 30% by the year 2030.
2 – Youth makes up the majority of the global workforce currently, the collective power that the youth possess is still under harvested. We bring together young leaders from various sectors with a unified goal of improving the heart health of our world. Our goal is to mobilise 30,000 young individuals to work towards cardiovascular health by 2030.
3 – Intersectoral collaboration; The ecosystem approach towards narrow problems can often produce impeccable results. We believe that healthcare professionals alone can not tackle this massive spectrum of diseases but together we shall be able to tackle them more effectively.
Given the rapid pace at which the world is changing, what are the leadership traits that are necessary for success?
Just like no individual is perfect, no leader has all the constructive leadership traits perfected. All we could do is improve and work on a few traits. I am mentioning three of the most important yet simple leadership traits according to me.
1 – Empathy: The ability to understand your team members by putting yourself in their shoes is the most important trait according to me. Having a clear idea about their thoughts and emotions can improve your work dynamics substantially.
2 – Effective Communication: If you don’t speak they won’t know! It is a well-established fact that communication is the key to everything. Sometimes we don’t agree with people, sometimes we are on different pages while sometimes we have to break bad news, those are difficult conversations to have but they are also the ones that are beneficial in the long run.
3 – Passion: I believe that passion is contagious, if you are driven and excited for your work, your entire team will be. Unless you are passionate about your work, you won’t walk the extra mile, you won’t sacrifice anything for your work and you won’t inspire your colleagues to work harder.
Please share with us – what has worked well for you so far?
Just like one size never fits all, something that worked for one company might not work for another. But there are a few generic things that have worked phenomenally well for us.
Team and target audience identification, it is important who you pitch your idea to. If you try to sell a diesel sports car to an environmentalist, I am not sure how well that might go, similarly, it is important that you take time and identify the people who might be interested to work with you. We were lucky to start off with an amazing and motivated team.
Flexibility, if you don’t adapt, you shall perish. 10 months back a lot of things were different, including the name! Although our core idea and vision remains the same but a lot of variables changed along the way for the better and in fact are still constantly changing.
In your opinion – what is more necessary: Idea or a good team for a successful startup?
Everyone has an idea but not everyone has a good team. A brilliant team can even make a mediocre idea work wonders but a bad team can’t even make the best idea work. Team building and capacity building is one of the keystones of our organisation. One more important aspect of a team is the diversity, if you ask a team with people from varied backgrounds and education, they might produce better results than best brains in a single specialization working together. We wish to inculcate the idea of ecosystem approach or intersectoral collaboration in today’s world. We will also be providing networking and mentorship opportunities in the near future to promote collaboration among our members from various educational backgrounds. To conclude, if you have a strong team, you can overcome any obstacle together!
We would love to know your advice for all those starting out as an aspiring entrepreneur?
I would like to tell every aspiring entrepreneur just two simple things;
Asking the universe, whatever you wish to achieve, whatever you dream about, just ask the universe for it regularly. If you believe in god you could ask them, but you should ask a divine force to help you achieve your goals. Trust me sometimes unfathomable things happen, you might be heading towards one direction and unknowingly you end up reaching somewhere else, somewhere you wished to be. You just need to have faith that good things will happen and I’m reasonably sure that they will.
Delayed does not mean denied, the toughest thing for our generation is patience. We want everything at the click of our fingers, and when that does not happen we get frustrated. Sometimes it becomes hard to believe that you will ever achieve what you wished for, but as they say, good things take time and your time will come today or tomorrow. Just keep pushing yourself, keep working hard and one day you shall achieve all you had wished for!
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
