The live Twitter session of Leadership talk by Ms. Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory was conducted on 15th April 2020. Dr. Abhay Jere, Chief Innovation Officer, MHRD Innovation Cell, talked with Ms. Shradha Sharma. The session was organized by MHRD Innovation Cell. Faculty members and Students of Manav Rachna University attended the session. The session was very much inspiring and motivational for the young students who aspire to choose entrepreneurship as career and establish their startups.

Ms. Shradha Sharma’s entrepreneurial journey is very encouraging which she narrated in this session. She started YourStory in 2008 and prior to that, she served as an Assistant Vice President at CNBC TV18 and also as a brand advisor at The Times of India. She left the high-salaried stable job to start YourStory.com and now it is India’s biggest and definitive digital media platform for startups and entrepreneurs related stories, resources, research reports and analysis of the startup. Her motivation was to bring out the positive stories onto this platform which she felt people would be interested to hear.

YourStory has established Covid-2019 helpdesk with a motivation to create an environment of positivity around. After starting YourStory.com in 2008, initial 4-5 years was lot of struggle but there were two things which kept her going: the encouragement young entrepreneurs were getting after coming to her platform, telling their stories and also her adamant attitude of not giving up, not to fail and to be successful. She wants to convey to students that there will be stress, failures, struggle, criticism and hardships but they shouldn’t give up, need to be committed to succeed.

She shared that she encountered lot of rejections and failures but she came out stronger from experiencing failures and she is now proud of her failures. She got into depression, consulted psychiatrist and to come out of depression she started mediation, exercises in Gym, reading books on spirituality, listening to music, and expanded networking and took advice from lot of people. All these helped her to come out stronger. Finally her concluding message to young entrepreneurs was that every entrepreneur’s journey has failures, stress, hardship etc but one has to be strong, committed and adamant to reach to the height of success and one needs to love oneself and self awareness is important.