Priya Mohan,
Co-founder and Executive Director, Vidyartha
From having no idea about what she wanted to do or what she was suited for, to becoming a founder of a successful business venture, Priya Mohan, narrates her journey of discovery to Jonathan Ananda and how she found her penchant for entrepreneurship.
Priya Mohan has a no-nonsense way of narrating how she became an entrepreneur. “There is no way I can romanticise it. I did not want to become an entrepreneur from day one,” she points out.
The product of a typical middle-class upbringing, grades were the priority in school. “It wasn’t until the 11th grade that I took a decision that was truly my own,” she recalls. That decision was to prove the first step. “Despite topping in science, I chose the commerce stream. I thought it would give me the time that I needed to shine in other things.”
The process saw her go on to finish her certificate in Chartered Accountancy. “But sometime after finishing it, I realised it wasn’t what I was best suited for. I didn’t want to track debits and credits. I was more interested in the shop floor and the way a company operated,” she admits.
The realisation spurred her to try other avenues. After coming across an advertisement for a job working with the promoter of a company, she wrote to them. “I have never been afraid of rejection. What is the most that someone could tell me? No? When I went for the interview, they told me they were looking for 10 years of experience. I told them they were lucky, because they wouldn’t have to pay me as much as someone like that. I was hired,” she smiles.
The job gave her exposure in how a promoter differed fundamentally from others. The promoter wrote the script.
“The others only executed. I wanted to be the person who wrote the script,” she points out. But the next few years saw her branch out into investment banking and stay in the field for seven years. “It wasn’t until I took a break after that, that I revisited the idea,” she says. “I remember how I did not have any guidance on what I wanted to do in school. I wanted to make that easier for students and present them with options,” she recalls.
In late 2011, after meeting her co-founder Navin Balan, Vidyartha was born — an education technology firm that helped students map out careers. By mid-August 2012, the first school had adopted a Vidyartha programme. “But it was not easy.
I buried myself in research. It was not something that I could just try out, it was an expensive proposition and I wanted to get a workable business model. Entrepreneurs have to realise that everyone has an idea, it is execution that matters,” she points out.