https://youtu.be/c3tjtSVUn2g
Saleema Vellani is an award-winning innovation strategist, serial entrepreneur, professor, and author of the book Innovation Starts With ‘I.’ She is also the Founder and CEO of Ripple Impact, an accelerator and community that helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses. We talk about innovation in today’s business environment, how to future-proof your business, and the benefits of adopting a hybrid-preneurship lifestyle.
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Position Your Business with Saleema Vellani
Our guest is Saleema Vellani, the founder and CEO of Ripple Impact, an accelerator and community that helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses and platforms. Saleema is a serial entrepreneur, a joint professor of social entrepreneurship at the Johns Hopkins University, and the best-selling author of Innovation Starts With I. Saleema, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here.
Well, it's great to have you, and I'm glad you made it back from your trip to the Middle East just in time for our podcast recording. So as always, my first question is about about your entrepreneurial journey. So, how did you become one yourself and what has been your journey to ripple impact?
The full story is in the book. So if you want to know all the details, it's all in the book. But how I got into entrepreneurship was complete lack of awareness that I was becoming an entrepreneur. I wasn't trying at all to become an entrepreneur. And I don't know if I should say it was totally by accident, but it was essentially out of necessity. It was when I had graduated during the financial crisis in 2009, I graduated from McGill University, I'm Canadian. I couldn't get a job in North America. I tried my best and I realized, you know, maybe I need to just go get some international experience, go live abroad some more.
I had already lived in the Dominican Republic, but I wanted to learn a new language. So I went to Brazil where I could learn Portuguese and decided to do some work at a volunteer at an orphanage. And when I got to Brazil, the founder of the orphanage was like, well, why don't you start a language school in Rio de Janeiro to help finance us at the orphanage, because we're having some serious challenges. And I was like, whoa, I thought I was going to work with kids. And now I'm being sent to start a school in such a complex country where you don't even speak the language. But I took on the challenge and got a team together, volunteers.
We started building the school from the ground up, teaching all these different languages because we were volunteering, a bunch of volunteers from different parts of Europe. And yeah, it was interesting, but we were failing pretty quickly when we realized that a lot of our classes for Brazilians were either, they were pretty much group classes, but they were private lessons because only one student would show up at most. And so we realized very quickly we had to change our business model and realize that the interest was more, the demand was more, you know, the foreign students interested in learning Portuguese and we hired some Portuguese teachers to test that out.
And that was very successful because those students, the foreigners, were coming from, you know, from other countries. They were interested in doing something with social, like social impact in Brazil and contributing to a good cause while learning Portuguese. And we would take them to the orphanage and build a community, take them to samba classes or capoeira. And that was very successful. Today, it's one of the top rated schools in Brazil. And many other schools and organizations have sort of replicated this model of social innovation. And that's how I got started, was really co-founding something.
I was pretty much an intrapreneur first, really innovating with some direction, with the resources and all of this. But it was that experience that gave me the skills, the resilience,