I have always wanted to change the world. And I am doing it, with millions of other entrepreneurs, everyday.
“I started working when I was 17. It wasn’t because I had to, but because I didn’t want to study further. I have never believed in college education, and never will either”.
In the present day cut throat competition, when a 23 year old makes a statement of this sort, you stop for a moment and wonder if he is kidding. But Arun Pattnaik puts your doubts to rest. He quips in convincingly, “I believe in learning by doing. Albert Einstein once quoted, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution”. I am diagnosed with what I call a ‘low latent inhibition’ and that has kept my thought process the same, scarily, exactly the same”.
Born and brought up in Khariar, a small town in western Orissa, he is an User Experience(UX) web designer and specifically works with startups. Wikipedia defines UX as “How a person feels about using a product, system or service”. He is as fascinated by design and aesthetics as he is by entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts.
“Web design came as an accident to me. The most popular sites on the internet looked ugly. Yet they performed well. I wanted to design websites, people use, not websites people looked at. And that’s how it all began”, says the co-founder of Bidray, the largest penny auction site in North America. That being his first independent venture, he was excited as well as amazed to see over 10,000 paying customers flocking to his site in less than three months.
He absolutely loves the work he does. It is visible in the manner he talks; about the scores of interesting people he meets and the umpteen out of the box projects he gets to work on. His most exciting stint till date has been that of PicTiger.com. With over 1,40,000 registered members, it was making losses in hundreds of dollars every month. “I helped them make money off it, without actually charging the members. And it was successful. We sold the project in less than 6 weeks”.
He talks about the fantastic work culture at SlideShare, the world’s largest presentation sharing community. “I helped them with the launch of paid accounts. It’s only at SlideShare that I learnt the magical impact of metrics and numbers”.
He met the German folks who started Supercoolschool.com, purely by chance. It is an online school platform that empowers everyone to create customised education environments for live online learning. “The concept was amazing, something I truly believed in. Democratising education, that’s like doing to education exactly what blogspot had done to blogging”.
Currently a curator at Triggr, an event where geeks, entrepreneurs & startup enthusiasts meet and talk about their experiences and their approach in solving real life problems, this enterprising and passionate young designer is sure to go places in life.
s.parija88@gmail.com