Not all heroes wear capes; some just have an excessive amount of bookmarks on weird topics.
My name is Ajay. I’m still on my quest for the big one. However, I’ve gone through a fair few work experiences and startups - so I’ve reached a point where I think I can help at least one person out there with my learnings and thoughts. Right now, I’m the Co-founder & CEO of 👨🏫 EntryLevel, which is a company that has trained over 40,000 people through automated cohort-based education in the tech sector. Think of fields like programming, product management, data, UX design and many others. I’ve been doing this for 3.5 years whilst also a founding partner at a micro fund called 🔴 Proximity Ventures that has invested in 25 companies with a focus on Africa. For fun, my friend Loong and I run a podcast called 🔬 Technocracy where we talk about the fusion between deep tech/science and business.
Before this, I had an extremely zigzagged path. He’s what I’ve done in reverse chronological order.
🏠 Head of Product at Draper Startup House: Named after Tim Draper, this is the home base for entrepreneurs with locations all of the world. I designed products and educational programs at a global level.
🛳️ Chief Product Officer at Tradeflow (Perl.eco): An enterprise SaaS company that built world-class blockchain software alongside companies such as the International Chamber of Commerce, the Indian Government (Niti Aayog), Asian Pacific Rayon and DBS Bank.
📦 Marketing & Community at REN Project: I helped build and maintain a 40,000+ person community for the REN Project team.
🍺 Co-founder & Tech Lead at Tailor Brews: A customisable brewing platform where you could drag’n’drop your ingredients and we would brew a custom 6-pack of beer for you backed by Lion Ventures (via Lion Unleashed Program).
🔵 Founder at Doppler Digital: A digital marketing agency that I ran whilst in University that had about 5-10 clients where we helped with website development, performance marketing and general business growth.
👨💻 Co-founder & President at Real Skills: I started a non-profit that helped over 5000 engineering students find meaningful employment in New South Wales. We found that there were way too many engineers in specific fields where there weren’t many jobs so we helped them become more versatile and find other opportunities.
As an educator, I’ve worked as a guest lecturer & educator for the University of New South Wales, Singapore Management University, the Dubai Government, the Italian Government, NewCampus, Real Skills and several other organisations.
I’ve also done many ‘schemes’ - which never really panned out into businesses but kept me entertained and financially afloat for months. These included things like selling anime apparel at universities until I received a cease, flipping Japanese products on Facebook marketplace, launching travel programs for university students and writing technical whitepapers.