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, the experience on how to really start something and all the, you know, going through a pivot and all the different things that a new business does that I was able to then move to Italy from Brazil. There's a whole love story in there, that's in my book. But essentially, you know, same thing, crisis, Euro crisis, couldn't get a job in the South of Italy in Reggio di Calabria across from Sicily. I didn't speak British English. I was cooking Italian-American food that didn't meet the expectations there in Italy.
So I ended up doing some translation work online and quickly realized the demand was from English into other languages. So instead of doing all the freelance translation myself, realized the demand was into other languages. And that's when my translation business was able to scale up, which I exited from in 2012. So yeah, it was really out of crisis, out of necessity, not planned, not trying to be an entrepreneur. In fact, I was quite embarrassed about being an entrepreneur and nobody really knew. I was very quiet about it on social media, didn't have a website. I was very, very careful because my whole dream was to get a job in my career.
And when I actually got that job, when I moved to Washington, D.C. and finishing up my grad school at Hopkins. I realized that being an entrepreneur was cool and that's what everyone wanted to do around me and when I had moved to the States and I was like, oh, I didn't know about these communities and ecosystems and VCs and mentors and all this stuff. I was really doing it a lot on my own. And so it was then that I was aware that I had been an entrepreneur before after I had been there and done it.
So that's great. So, you know, you're not the only one who becomes an entrepreneur because of not having a job and being forced into it, but definitely a very inspiring story of how you did that in Brazil and in Italy and then came back to have a job. And then now you're back being an entrepreneur again with Ripple Impact. So what is Ripple Impact trying to do?
So Ripple Impact, we basically have accelerators. So we help entrepreneurs who are trying to grow and scale their businesses. We help them, you know, essentially we're the team behind the scenes for them. So we partner with them, where we help accelerate them closer to the vision. We help them build their teams or grow their teams. We help them, you know, create or improve their brands. We help them with their marketing and their business strategy, as well as some execution.
So Ripple Impact, we basically have accelerators. So we help entrepreneurs who are trying to grow and scale their businesses.Share on X
So we're essentially, you know, they're the visionaries, you know, an innovative team, or CP has a visionary, a strategist, executors, and designers. And so we're essentially their designers, their strategists, their executors, to some extent, while helping them build their own executors and their team, but they're the visionaries. And so we take off a lot of the overwhelm, a lot of the, you know, the stuff that really makes them burn out and get really frustrated when they feel like they're not growing or it's a lot more work than they envisioned and we help accelerate them so they can then grow faster and eventually be better off on their own once they have all the right pieces and the strategy flowing.
Because they tend to have a lot of drive and not enough direction. They're sort of all over it because they're so passionate about so many things and especially visionaries tend to have a lot of ideas, we want to do a lot of things, but it's not great when we're the visionary and executing and strategizing and designing.
You have them focus on where they're going and you also give them some tools, especially in the marketing and design area where you have them ramp up their sales.
Yeah.
That sounds pretty exciting. So let's switch the conversation a little bit to the business frameworks, which is the main kind of theme of this podcast. And in our previous call, we talked about different frameworks that you use and one of them struck a chord with me, which you call the business positioning canvas. Can you tell us a little bit about what this is about and how it works?
So the business positioning framework, it's essentially, you know, that canvas is really an iteration of Alex Osterwalder's business model canvas. I had actually interviewed Alex Osterwalder, who created it a couple of years ago, actually was one of my first interviewees for the book. I interviewed 100 people, Ariana Huffington, Ina Ansari, a lot of people, and he was one of them, one of my favorite ones, actually, because I learned a lot from the 30 minutes we shared.
And I'd used the business model canvas as a tool for over a decade now, not even when I started my first businesses, but when I came to learn and I was studying entrepreneurship and realized I was an entrepreneur before, when I came to the States, the business model canvas was like the standard tool that was used. But I realized that, you know, like most tools, we have to iterate, we have to improve, we have to sort of make things more relevant to the times.
And so I found that there were some gaps I wanted to address in the business model canvas, like I felt like there should be, you know, some analyzing of success, you know, success stories, and there should be some other parts in there, more emphasis on the team and some other pieces in there. Also because I found that when working with startups and entrepreneurs, sometimes there's too much focus on what problem we should solve. And maybe that was the case maybe a decade ago.
But now it's tricky because we have a lot of things out there. We have a lot of problems that are already solved. So it's not necessarily finding a problem, but you can start with an idea. In my experience, the language school that I was at, co-founded in Brazil was an idea. Sure, there was a problem with the orphanage,
