Career Lessons From Non-Traditional Founders | Job Strategy And Career Without Degrees | Simplilearn

be pretty late out there. Sorry, I lost you a little bit. No, I was saying we have someone from Japan, which is pretty cool. I feel like it's must be what? 9:30. Let me just see Japan time. Yeah, 11:35. Wow. Thank you for joining. It's a Saturday. Yes. Okay, great. We are live on LinkedIn and YouTube. Best well. Um and if you're watching us on our social platforms, uh a warm hello to you. Uh please drop a comment. Tell us where where you're joining us from. Uh we see you and we are very very glad to have you here. Um okay, so let's get started. Welcome everyone to today's session career learns lessons from founders who skip the traditional path. I am genuinely very very excited about uh this one because we have two genuinely fascinating guests who have done exactly that. Uh skipped the traditional path and build something remarkable on their own terms. Um so it's going to be a great session. Please do stay tuned. Uh a quick introduction. My name is Ananyan. I will be um hosting the session on behalf of simply learn. Let me just quickly read out um from some introductions. Okay. We have Prakash joining us from Japan. Uh this is Sham from Delhi. Hi Sham. Um hi Sandal from Pune. Hi Sharon. You're joining us from Germany. Um hi Arada. Um hi there's someone from Japur. Bara from India. Hey Nigeria. Bumi from Karnataka. Great. Okay. It's it's lovely to have such a lively bunch of audience this year. I'm sure that like you know more of you will be joining in as we go further. So please do keep um you know dropping your introductions as you join us. Uh before we begin a couple of very very quick uh ground rules that we request everyone to follow. Uh number one please drop any questions that you have in the Q&A box and not in the chat box. Uh we keep getting a lot of messages in the chat box like as you can see uh already. Uh so we might end up missing yours. Uh so please use the Q&A box effectively. Um and please do give us some time to get back to you with an answer. Do not keep posting repeat questions as we're going to try to address all your queries. Uh secondly, avoid sharing any external links or personal details in the chat box and keep conversations only relevant to the topic. We'll be strictly monitoring this and removing any irrelevant messages. And finally, for those who participate in the session till the end and give us your full name in the poll that we will be launching at the end of the webinar, we will provide an attending certificate that you can share on your social media, at your LinkedIn, uh at your resume even. Um so yes please do stay tuned till the end. A very quick introduction uh about simply learn and what we do before uh we get on to the main uh segments. Uh we provide certifications in career aligned learning paths in various categories like a IML geni data science project management business analytics leadership and a lot more. Uh we have helped 8 million plus people in their career growth across 150 plus countries with more than 50 partnerships. And speaking of partners uh partnerships, you can see the learning ecosystem that we've built over the years. Uh these are the institutions and companies helping us co-create and deliver programs that are genuinely relevant to the market. Uh these programs are not just academically sound but also professionally useful. But beyond this, what we're really proud of is how our programs have impacted our learners. We have more than 80% graduation rate with learners rating our programs 4.8 on five and reporting a 50% salary hike. Um this shows the kind of learning experience and dedicated guidance that we've been uh able to provide to millions. Um we'll come back to our programs a bit more in detail later. So uh let's get into today's session. Okay. Um most of us grew up with a very you know clear picture of what a good career looks like. Um study hard, get a degree, land a job, uh climb the ladder. That's how it goes. It was almost handed to us as the one true path. Um but here's the thing. that true paths might be quietly, you know, uh, disintegrating, might be falling apart. And in this segment, we're going to look at exactly why. So, the numbers here are pretty striking. Um, entry-level job postings are down 29% uh since January 2024. New grad tech hires at big tech companies are down 50% compared to prepandemic levels. And for the first time since the pandemic, uh there are actually fewer job openings uh than people looking for work. ratio of 0.98 to1. So the traditional path is getting harder and narrower. Um so this is what like you know we're going to uh talk about in the coming segments and um okay so this is something that I'm really excited about. Later in this uh webinar we're going to do a live career audit. One person from the audience will have their actual career path reframed in real time by our panel. So, if you want to be that person, drop your career story in the Q&A box right now. Um, tell us what path you're on, what decision you would make differently, and what a non-traditional version of your career might look like. Um, just to give an example, maybe I am a content marketer with 10 plus years of experience. Um, I aspire to have a restaurant of my own someday and I wish I had taken say proper culinary training by this time now. So, maybe like you know that example gives you an idea. Take your time. Let us know your journey in the Q&A box, how far you've come and where you want to go. We will pick one um uh to work through live with our guests towards the end of the webinar. Uh this is a great opportunity to get personalized guidance from our experts. So don't miss it. Okay. So let's meet the people behind today's conversation. Uh this segment is about the founders uh themselves. Two builders who didn't follow the traditional path like we mentioned before. uh one went from marketing and life skills to AI. The other went from running an emergency department to building AI products. Uh both of them uh took some unconventional uh parts and both of them are here to tell us what they have learned along the way. Okay. First we have Anerud Narayan. Anirut is the co-founder and CGO of Lizer and the founder of Everything AI. Um he's a serial founder if I can call it that way. uh who's built companies across multiple industries from performance marketing um performance marketing with growth spartan to life skills and master life um to AI he's into AI full-time now he's lived and worked across South America Southeast Asia Africa the US and Europe he's an author of uh scales smart an Olympic triathlete and he summited a 20 20,000 foot peak uh when I say nonlinear I think an's um bio uh defines nonlinear Anod, welcome. Really, really glad to have you here. Um, your bio, you know, reads like three different people's lives almost. So, how do you how do you explain your career to someone who asks what you do? I mean, first of all, thank you for having me and I guarantee you I didn't I didn't force anyone at Simply Learn to give me this uh intro. So, so thank you for that. U but cool. Yeah, Tim, I think we connected earlier. So, it's good to see you as well. And yeah, I mean it's I wish I could give you like hey here's the exact recipe on I mean I did my undergrad in biotech and then I mean I see also Tim's background he's done a lot on the in the medical side right but clearly both of us have gravitated towards AI so I feel like wherever the market is hot where the tide is high um I think a lot of it's about market timing it's about the right team it's right about the the right value you're creating and then you jump into that So, and I think has to marry maybe your strengths. I think it took took a while for me to actually figure out what my strengths were truly. Um, and and I and I think I'm still in that journey today, right? Like I think a lot of us are stacking skills and then maybe you're like eight or nine out of 10 in like three areas, but then there other areas where you can have a decent conversation and you want you kind of want to outsource that. You want to you want AI to do that, right? So um yeah, it's been crazy. It's been the last I think 17 18 years and and I think with Liza I think I've been lucky enough to partner with someone who's really technical. So I think that's another thing I realized like as part of this whole journey that it's not about me uh the whole business like it's a game at the end of the day and it's a team sport right so you can't play a one player game for too long I think u and I tried playing the one player game for a very long time and as much as people talk about oh you can build the one person billion dollar company I think in all likelihood I I see one edge case where that happened I don't know if Tim you saw that as well but you still a lot of people like with complimenting skills to come together. So yeah, so I don't I mean we can we can delve deeper into some of these things but some of it's also come from losing a job. I lost my job in 2015. Um I remember I was in the US and losing your job kind of switches inertia completely. I remember I was in the US and I I had 30 days to find another job. I couldn't. So I had to leave the US and come back to India. And in that journey I was like I have six months of savings let me do three months South America two three months Africa and back that was the goal. Uh but somehow 3 months since South America became seven months and consulting business picked up. It was great to be anonymous. I think like I mean to everybody I think it's a great time to be uncomfortable. I think you should absolutely focus on like getting out of your house like stop living with your parents. truly uh move to a new country like be old. I think 20 is a great time plus with AI my god like there's so much value to be created. So yeah that's about me. Perfect. Thank you Anidu. Thank you again for being here. I'll move on to the second expert that we have uh today uh Timothy Hines. Uh he went from being a director of operations at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, one of the top pediatric hospitals in the entire United States um to founding the AI Hangman LLC. He now builds human- centered AI tools, intelligent workflows, and adaptive systems. And here's the part I love. I think he taught himself a lot of uh uh tools um that he works with uh currently. So he's entirely self-directed um after making the pivot. Uh Tim uh brilliant to have you here and I'm really glad that uh this is a different introduction that I'm uh you know po to the introduction that I'm giving uh from our other sessions. Um so Tim my question to you is you went from managing you know clinical teams to building AI products most people would see those as completely different worlds right so how did you reframe your identity when you made that shift take us through your journey please yeah absolutely and it's great to be here with both of you as well I I echo that sentiment and and Arude you said so many things that I I identified with I didn't necessarily move to another country but part of my journey was moving across the country here in US So that did spark a lot of immediate change because I changed my surroundings, my job and a lot of things quickly. Um but yes, I worked in a pediatric hospital for almost 18 years. And so I started using AI tools on my own in order to solve real world problems. Um but especially in healthcare with HIPPA and privacy policies at least in the US and I'm sure the whole world has different privacy policies. Healthcare is a little slower on the uptake. So, I quickly found out that there was a there was only going to be so much that I could solve from uh an AI perspective, from what I was given as tools in my job there at the hospital. So, I set out to find my own tools, make my own tools, and I ended up founding the uh the AI handyman because I wanted to help other small businesses and entrepreneurs uh figure out AI, especially those that weren't part of a large company and couldn't afford a tech team and lots of AI tools. So where I fit into the market, I'm I am a solo entrepreneur currently, but it's definitely not a billion-dollar company. So I agree with you on that one, too. Uh much less, but maybe one day once I team up with other people and u grow the business, but for sure. So I do mostly consulting and sometimes I build a website for a client with AI chat bots and tools and then I hand it over to them. I teach them how to use it and I might be done with that client. And some other clients might hire me for anything from 40 to 50 hours a month for six months to a year in order to kind of become their one-man tech team. So I help a lot of people learn and use AI tools that wouldn't otherwise be able to afford a whole tech team. Um, so that's why I also get to learn a lot of new tools because I've I've taken over for people's social media accounts, creating AI generated content, videos, captions, things like that. I've built databases for aircraft listings. I've done all sorts of things because I get to meet the client, figure out what their needs are, how AI can help, and then I learn or fill in the blanks in my own personal knowledge in order to solve their problem, teach them how to do it, and then by learning it myself and then teaching it, I then have a really strong foundation to help the next person. So I just keep growing my stack and growing my stack and I get to just pull in all of these different people and it I I work with clients from around the world including SimplyLearn. So even teaching just with SimplyLearn has given me so much great experience and exposure to groups of developers that I've taught how to code AI tools to groups of more general learners that need to use it in different ways. Um so yes, I just and I I do I'm often uncomfortable. I I take on projects where I'm not sure if I know everything I need to know at the beginning and I learn it, but I I step into uncomfort all the time and then I add another tool to my stack and I get really good at it and then I'm able to share that wisdom and knowledge with other people. So that's that's how I've become successful so far with the AI handyman. And again, I'm just so thankful to be here and part of this conversation. Sweet. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much, Tim. Uh we see that a few of you have raised your hands. Um please use the chat box or the Q&A box to share anything that you want to share or if any questions that you have for our panel, please use the Q&A box. We will uh unfortunately not be able to um allow um anyone to um turn their audio on. Okay. So moving on uh now that we know about our founders uh let's get into their perspective on non-traditional nonlinear career paths because um you know the nonlinear path is right as easy and clean in the living of it as it looks in retrospective. So let's um you know hear the real stories the decisions the doubts and the moments that uh changed uh the trajectory. Okay. So this slide puts it pretty plainly. Um the conventional path um degree, internship, entry- level job, couple of years of experience and a promote promotion if you're lucky and then repeat. And then we have the founder path. Uh spot a problem, build a solution, learn from uses, pivot, grow or restart smarter. So our experts here have most probably live the right side of the table. Um Tim Mani, my question to both of you. Um at what point in your career did you realize, okay, I'm not doing this like the rest of the folks out there. Um I've built, you know, a path of my own like and what what what was the point that probably challenged you uh the most? Maybe, uh Tim, you could uh take this first and then we could have it. Yeah, absolutely. Happy to. So I I actually kind of did both of these pathways because I was in the the healthcare system for 18 years. So I I had a master's in healthcare administration and I I didn't necessarily do internships but I started at entry and it took a 18 years is a long time so it took me a long time to get from entry level to director of operations and it it plateaued quickly. Um so there wasn't a lot of room for me to learn new skills or grow once I got there. Um, so about two and a half, three years ago, that's when I started looking into AI. And so I was able to say, hey, you know what? This got me so far, but that's not the way the world's working anymore. So when I switched over to AI and started learning more, I started with machine learning. So I learned a lot of statistics and calculus before I started to learn how to use the generative AI tools. Um, but absolutely, I had to jump in quickly, learn new skills, figure out how they applied to the real world. I've pivoted even just with the way I market my own company probably every 3 to six months just because I realize that a different audience wants a different tool or everybody collectively has the ability to do something better because chat GPT5 came out or the new version of Gemini came out. So I frequently have to kind of dump what I was working on six months ago and completely re reimagine or reinvision what I'm doing next. And the building networks here I think is the one of the most important things for me on the founder path side. Uh talking to people because I don't know what I don't know until I talk to new people, talk to new startup founders, new teams. I have done a couple internships here and there just to kind of learn what people are talking about. I oftent times um I'll jump on to an NVIDIA conference or a Zapier conference and just figure out what tools people are using and what people are talking about. So, it's something that I have to spend an hour or two every day. Hey, what's everybody talking about in the news today because I might care about something completely new today that I didn't even know existed. And so, absolutely, it it it's much more interesting. I'm much happier in life not stuck in that career pathway, which I don't think exists for a lot of people anymore, that conventional pathway. Yeah. Uh, I mean I agree with you 100% and I and I think like with entrepreneurship I mean obviously it's never been a better time to like start something on your own because skills are accessible. getting from zero to one has never been more accessible. But I think uh like looking at Tim's speed is like he's he still spent 18 years let's say like owning that craft, right? So u I think the way to start off also like these two paths not like the founder path is for everyone. I don't think it makes sense for you to like if you if you're not like bought by a bug um there's no harm in actually doing traditional stuff early on. It's a great like there's a lot of people that do consulting initially banking go horn your skills are like talking to customers talking to clients right like making good decks uh getting good analytically so I think I've seen apparently I think the average entrepreneurial age is like 33 uh most YC folks obviously like that apply and get in are like super young they're in the 19 to 25 range um but I think the pivot has to happen when you truly are excited about 90 because this is a long game, right? Like you can't uh yeah, you can't be doing this because I want to make money. You'll most probably not make money initially and then mostly you'll have an outsized outcome later, right? So um and I think a lot of people also do a lot of like identity tying like I think there's positive identity tying which is good like oh I'm an athlete and then you do all your habits and your and and your mindset kind of like all tailor to that. But if you tie your identities to like oh I can't be an entrepreneur or I'm an employee like that can be like limiting beliefs I think. So I think it's important to like be loose with your own identity today like uh like a lot of people feel like oh I'm not a coder man what a time to like learn how to like use cloud code right or cursor. So u that's my suggestion like think lesser about yourself think more about uh what problems you can solve for people and think global like there's no limiting access to you building a great product from here whether it's in India or any part of the world for the world right so um and there's also no harm in like doing a lot of the self-esteem stuff early on in the conventional path chase the titles you know make the hit like when you want to hit self-actualization also you can go for the founder part. because there's a lot of psychological uh unsafety. I don't know if that's a word either, but like you can feel like things are not stable and you have to be okay with it, you know. So, I know a lot of people, one of my friends, I think he he ventured out at 39, but he built a two-year cushion for himself before venturing out. So, yeah, I wouldn't say it's like it's not like just don't feel a FOMO that you have to be an entrepreneur. I think like when you get something going as an idea then I think you should jump. I agree with that. A lot of Yes, that's a I was just sorry then what Oh, I was just going to say I agree with you completely. It is a lot of work and I don't think I was excited about um the work I was going to be doing and starting my own company until my mid30s. Exactly like you said. Uh and so I think the traditional pathway gave me the foundation and definitely a little bit of a savings account so that I could take that leap and into entrepreneurship in my early 30s late mid mid30s rather so that I could really dive deep into it. And there are there are challenges and all kinds of things that you just kind of have to keep your nose down, stick to it and keep going. Keep networking, keep working, keep taking little jobs or weird jobs or interesting jobs or hard jobs and you just keep growing and growing and growing from there. Yeah. If I could just add one more thing, Ana, like every age also has an advantage or a tradeoff. Like I we have at Lizo, we have a lot of folks in their 20s, man. They're willing to work 80 90 hours a week till like 4 5 a.m., right? Like for them working hard is not an issue. I feel like as we get older, like I'm almost 40 now, like you get uh you still have the energy to work hard, but then you start depending more on leverage in terms of maybe your network, maybe like you're able to fundraise better, like how do you move further as as part of the tip of the arrow. I think um I've seen entrepreneurs at 50 will bring so much capital leverage that they're able to be like hey here's I have a seed of 15 million or 50 mil that like you can just off the bat get your team going and experiment for two years. So u yeah so nobody should feel the fo is what is what I'm getting at with the age factor as well. Yes. Yes. Thank you and thank you Tim. Again like you know the point of this this uh session and this conversation is not to say that this is the right path. This is you know the wrong path. Um it is it is just to um you know try to hear uh successful stories from our founders from our founders journeys and see what can like you know what we can learn from and what we can apply in our uh journey as we go forward. Okay. Um I have a poll here. We would love to know like you know more from our audiences what um is actually holding you back from say a non-traditional path. Um I have a few um entries that have come in in the Q&A and um all of you are telling me what you are currently doing, what you're currently pursuing but there is not really a hint of what you want to do, what you want to be or build. So please like you know let us know about that as well so that like you know we can probably you know try to uh understand the full uh picture and uh you know give you our insights. Okay. So um let us know your answers in the chat. Um what is holding you back from a non-traditional path? A is a fear of failure or judgment. B is a financial risk. Uh C no network. D no clear idea yet. Or E is a family or social pressure. Um even if you have not even considered um you know a non-traditional career path uh let us know about that as well. Uh we'd like to know um where everyone is coming from. Okay. You can use the Q&A box or uh the chat box. I'll leave a few seconds for everyone to drop in their answers. Um meanwhile uh we can have um okay we have someone saying D okay not a clear idea yet some of you couple of you are saying be that it's about you know financial concerns lack of network okay so um anyway what we're trying to address um you know are are very very real very raw feelings and states of mind and emotions. Um, so I don't think it would be fair to have a slide or a content here, you know, to to offer solutions for this. We just want to try to make sure that our conversation addresses and eases some of these concerns. Um, so my expert uh my questions uh question to the experts is um have you faced any of these barriers um in uh your career and like you know what helped you move past it? Maybe you could come in first and then till Yeah. I think the idea or opportunity I think it also sometimes takes time to to figure uh so you have to be okay with like experimenting over the next three to six months. I know entrepreneur there's a there's a friend of mine she started something called growfitit she raised 10 mil and it was in the keto space. So one of the things that she did well was like hey there's this health revolution that's happening in India. I want to create products which are very like protein keto first. And one of the things that she said was I wish I had just spent six months creating a brand and creating distribution just putting content out and then interacting with the people and like trying to figure out what idea to pursue right so I think all of these we end up feeling at some point in time or the other obviously like there's always going to be financial risk at any point in time even now uh at 22 but like you can afford to lose a lot more I feel like in the initial years of your career. So like you have the energy to restart a lot which I think is great. Um lack of network I think the network trickles once you have the idea. I think you can you can figure out the network as well. Family social pressure you should just ignore. I think end to end unless you're married then then that's that's harder I think. But uh and then obviously fear of failure judgment like nobody cares about us. Absolutely. So, so yeah, all of us have gone through that and I think one I was I was thinking about this maybe just maybe as a side pieces like it actually just comes down to like there are three companies that I worked with. One was Rocket Internet, one was Lean Startup Machine, the other one was Crossover. They were all founders. When I was in my 20s, I worked with them. They were always younger than me, but they had great energy. They were super passionate about their idea. Rock Internet was a German founder. His name was Leonard Stler. I was 26. He was 23. This must have been 2012. And he was doing the fashion e-commerce equivalent of Jabong in Nigeria. And then Basu star crossover uh super passionate basketball. So you sometimes it's also like taking a leap of faith with like somebody that's very clear of an idea and then you're kind of like partnering with them. So that also works. Tim, if you could share your take on this. Yeah, absolutely. So I saw I saw a lot of D's here for no clear idea or opportunity yet. And so I I've definitely felt that for um quite some time. Sometimes I still feel like that because I feel like maybe what I'm offering to people all of a sudden I'll have a month where nobody seems to care about that anymore. Uh but what I did at the beginning especially I took little internships or coding jobs that I found through LinkedIn and I got it I started just participating and so I figured out okay this this company or this product is in the AI realm. I like to work with AI but it's a little too salesy for me. I'm not necessarily trying to sell this specific product or something. So it just I had to just jump in and work. I did some open source projects as well where a lot of things you can find on GitHub and things like that where you can just start teaming up with people that have really good ideas and sometimes those really good ideas are really really strange and you might even think like I don't know if this is going to go anywhere but then hearing somebody else talk about it and how they're going to format their their pathway to success you're like oh okay like I understand what they're going for here. So I just literally took so many different opportunities. I just sat in different meetings with different rooms and different teams until I tried to I started to figure out my niche my niche specifically for the AI handyman. I realized that ordinary small business owners don't have access to large tech teams and things like that. But it took me a long time to figure out that's where I could come in handy. I'm really good at teaching people. I'm I'm really good at making complex AI concepts a little more clear for people that don't have a lot of tech background. So, I'm really good at translating technical AI jargon into small business owner and operator worlds, whether that be an online business or an actual retail store somewhere near me. But I had to just start talking to people and doing it and being uncomfortable. And that might have even been on LinkedIn. Sometimes I'd make a post about how to upgrade your resume with AI and it seemed kind of rudimentary and it seemed like nobody cared. But then people start commenting and then it leads to side conversations and then people start telling you about projects they're working about that has nothing to do with résumés. But I just had to start putting myself out there whether a lot of it came from social media content. I I was basically like I don't know what people need me to do for them completely yet but I'm going to just start talking about it. I'm going to start giving people practical AI tips and then in the comments people start telling you what they're looking for, what they're missing in their life, how they wish they could use AI. And so essentially, I just had to keep making myself uncomfortable and talking to new people and about new projects. And then that idea slowly got more and more and more clear. And I I think especially with the fear of failure or judgment, you you have to stop caring about that. Every time you come into a room where somebody wants you to talk about AI or help solve their problem, I wonder, am I going to be able to solve their problem? Am I going to sound stupid if they know more than I do? You have to just get over that. And it it comes with time. the more times you do it, whether it's teaching somebody a new skill or just getting in front of a room and talking about AI ethics or how it's resource usage with AI, you just start talking about it and you pretty quickly realize that there are experts in certain realms of AI just like any other realm, but not everybody necessarily has the same clear picture or roadmap that you do. So, you still are bringing something to the table, whether it's your ideas or just your energy. So you you are valuable to the conversation. Even if you feel like you might fail or you might be judged for your opinions or your ideas, you got to just jump in there and start sharing those ideas and those opinions. 100% right. Okay. So I think like we're you know we are halfway through uh the the session and we already have like a lot of uh uh insights from uh both of them. So what we're going to attempt in this segment is try to put like you know a little um structure uh into into um you know what you into the guidance that we want to give and um you know uh extract the patterns because u you know we what what we're trying to say is you know not we are not trying to say go quit a job and start a company. Uh the goal here is to understand what worked for these successful founders what they bet on and whether those bets are transferable for everyone out here. Okay. So, um number one point that we have here is uh bet on the skill before everyone catches up. Um the idea is simple. The market always lacks um skill demand. So, if you can see what's coming and build the skill before it becomes obvious to everyone uh you are already ahead. Um Tim, my question for you. So, you started learning AI development while still in your healthcare role. So, how did you, you know, sort of identify um which specific skill to focus on and how do you go about balancing a full-time job and learn the ether side? Absolutely. Yeah. So, when I was still in the healthcare world, there was not there weren't a lot of options period. Uh there's a lot I think notetaking applications for AI was kind of the first thing we were allowed to use where essentially you could use AI to summarize your meeting, but not if you were talking about patient health information or things like that. So I first started uh I actually learned Python as a coding language first because in my head I was like well if if the product I'm looking for to help me engage with my healthcare operations work doesn't exist then I'm going to have to build it myself. So I started learning Python and then I started learning machine learning and um more about the actual calculus statistics almost how to build the nextGPT and then things quickly grew from there to where now we're using more generative AI tools. We don't necessarily we're not focused on us as a population a global population we're not trying to out outpace chat GPT or Gemini or any of those tools. So within the healthcare world, it definitely started because I was like, I don't have the tools that I need. They don't exist. I'm going to have to learn how to build them. So I just started learning coding first and machine learning. And that's where I started finding out like, okay, well, it took me a while, 6 months to a year to be like, okay, well, there are already a lot of generative AI tools that exist. And so now then I switched my focus over to connecting AI tools, creating pipelines and workflows and things like that. But essentially I was in the healthcare world said you know the thing I'm looking for doesn't exist so I'm going to have to learn how to program so that I can build it. Agreed. Okay. My question for you is um you moved into AI full-time after master life I believe. So what were the signals that you know that told you that this was a wave worth catching and how how do we you know see those um identifications? I mean charge GBD came out November 2022 I remember pretty clearly and I think it helps to be curious. I just started playing around with it and then I was like I was very bullish around because I just felt like obviously where technologies caught up today in the last three years is fascinating but I remember at that point itself in 2022 I was like man how do you automate social? How do you how do you create case studies? I was trying to like play around with it quite a bit. Um yeah I mean see pattern recognition and being curious I don't know I mean I I would like to say that's a skill that you can pick up and I think the way you pick up that skill is sometimes also about like following the right people um you know like for an hour or so I'll just give you some context with Lizo uh so Shiva who started the company one of the things that he does really well is he like literally like 150 people that he follows on Twitter and it's like as soon as he sees that oh what's the how does that apply to us given that we're trying to serve enterprises it's a lot about privacy and security we're trying to build agents for them and a lot of it just comes down to we passing it on to the team and like hey what do you think so there's some discussion around it and then from there it is hey this looks interesting can we build something out once we build something out talk to the build, put it out, see how they respond. And if it fails, it fails. But at least like the loop of I gathered information, I built something out, I taught the world, and there's uh or I told the world about it. And then there's the loop of either users or revenue. I think that's that's one thing to go after. Um but like it's so I feel like it's patterns also becoming very clear you know like open claw came out a month back actually maybe a couple of months back and one of the biggest I think turnounds of open club was first of all it felt like humans were beta and agents were alpha like it felt like agents were making the decisions and then telling you next steps versus with charge a lot of it felt like you went first and you asked AI to do something. So I think that was one. Second is with multimodal. It could just do a bunch of things on your local system. So that became really hot like in two weeks 43,000 GitHub stars. Then you're like okay people are using open cloud. How do I use that technology internally? Um so we built something called gitclaw which is like open cloud but for enterprise with all the kit uh with all the guardrails right because you don't know what's happening on the agent level which is which a black box. We built traceability. We built like oh each of these agents could could be imported as a git. So I mean I'm getting a little technical here but at at the core of it I think identifying patterns it can it can it can be very top down. I think it'll come down to how you want to use it. Okay great thank you for your insight. So we moving on. Um the point number two that we have here is that bet on a community over a company. So when you bet on a company, your network resets every time that you leave or get let go. Uh when you bet on a community, on people, mentors, relationships, uh that travels with you and it compounds over time. Uh quick uh you know insight from the Gen Z's playbook here. Um the average tenure in a company that a jinzy has is just 1.1 years u in their first five years. So that's uh you know pretty much like intentional networking intentional diversifying uh diversification of that experience whether people realize it or not. Um so my question here is um Tim like what is your take on this? Do you have um any one person or like you know a a collaborator someone in your community or like a mentor that um you know whose guidance that you take who changed the trajectory of your career? How important is it to build that network and build such relationships? An we can have you coming in first and then yeah I mean you brought two three points in there uh an I feel like you know when you talk about Gen Z we have a lot of folks in our team who are between 21 to 27. Okay. And like our social is done completely by Jenzi. I think it's a company if I think it's maybe the company's fault if Jenz's are quitting in a year or less than a year because suddenly there is this movement now where you can make money on your own brand and you can build distribution being an influencer and then once you do that once you build distribution you can create products around it. That's very promising as much as like it's a small percentage that's doing that. Um but they are they want to do multiple things. They are multi- potential. Um they also have a strong pulse on the ground. So I think companies have to figure out how do you bring that energy, how do you bring that kind of skill set into the into the company. U but I think to your point on in terms of betting on a company, betting on community like I mean sure your your network can also be built being at a company. uh as long as you have to also be smart about thinking of company like working for a company being like corporate is ruthless. I mean that the way to think about today especially there like corporate is ruthless like uh you could be at Oracle for 10 years and then like oh they've got 30,000 jobs and you're you're done like so you have to start thinking of companies as platforms like how do I maximize the juice out of this platform right you can build your personal like there's imagine you're at open AI okay or imagine you're AWS and you're there for two years who's who's saying like you got to put out content and like connect the connect with everybody at AWS right so you should I feel like in parallel keep building your brand irrespective whether you're in the company or not um and community can come from both places so that's that's where I would leave it at yeah I would strongly agree with both of those I think I built my community when I I was still betting on a community or I'm sorry I was betting on a company for sure when I worked in my healthcare job for 18 years but especially the last five or So, I was meeting people and building a community that does wasn't necessarily tied to just that one job anymore. Uh, and so now I benefit from that because I have a large social media community. A lot of people still from my previous role at the hospital that now know that I moved over to AI. I offer AI solutions for small businesses. So when people have side ideas pop up, if they want to start a side business or uh switch jobs themselves, then they reach out to me because they're part of that community even though I'm no longer tied to that company. So absolutely I still get I get random people reaching out to me that I may not have spoken to for a year, but a year ago we had a really interesting topic or a really interesting conversation about AI and they remembered that I was connected so they came back and found me. So I think I absolutely started my community while I was still betting on a company. Uh but I absolut I I now do feel like uh just that networking component is is where I I get the most value and so just not necessarily limiting myself to that company. I think I gained a lot from being in a company for so long. Uh, but I think I had to switch my own mindset that I wasn't limited by being by betting on that company and I was able to take a lot of those connections and learnings and findings with me when I moved on from that part of my life. Brilliant. Thank you, Tim. So, the number third uh point that we have here is probably the most uh important one. Uh, best on bet on yourself especially when no one else will. Um Tim we have excerpts from your journey here. Um you took a major pivot in your career. So uh what would you give as guidance to those who are hesitating to make that uh start to make that transition? Yeah absolutely. So to be quite honest when I was working in healthcare I was so burnt out that I it started because I said I told myself I want to learn how to code and hide in a basement and not talk to anybody anymore. So I'm going to learn how to code. I'm going to learn how to code Python. I'm going to build software and I'm just going to hide from the world. And and that worked for maybe a year or so. So while I was still at the hospital, I started taking courses here and there, various online courses to teach myself Python at first and then different web development tools from there. Uh but essentially once I figured out that okay, like I I can get this, I can understand this, I can see where my value is going to come even if it's one to two years down the road. That's when I was like actually uh willing to start making plans to leave that 18-year career and give myself permission. So, no one was giving me permission. My family absolutely did not want me to leave my 18-year job at Children's Hospital and uh switch completely, go back to school for anything. Um so, I had to give myself permission. No one was going to give me permission. So, I just started learning, starting to figure out uh what I thought was interesting. I even like bought a little kit with a oldfashioned breadboard where I was hooking in wires and learning how computers worked at their core without even just the programming. Uh I was buying little kits here and there just to start learning be I got interested. I was excited again. I was like you know what I I didn't realize that I wasn't learning new skills and uh enriching my brain in my life. So I had to give myself that permission. And then uh do you want me to talk about the other two or just start there with the permission one? Any anything's fine. Anything is fine too. Oh, I see now that that other one. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I'll pass it to you for the building in public because I have not done that nearly as much. Yeah. Uh anything specifically you want me to cover under this Arana? Yeah. So um I think like um you know your journey has um has quite a trajectory. So how do you you know sort of recognize and make peace with something that's not working? So how do you uh steer steer your career journey from that? So I would say actually master life is a good example. So masterclass had come out in 2015 which is very like celebrityled learning. So I was trying to take a spin on that and create something called master life in India. But that was imagine it is for you to have balance in your life. These are these eight areas and then you take an assessment. It tells you which area you need help. And then from there there is experts, psychologists, executive coaches that have created exclusive content for master life to help you kind of uh improvise on that skill. I remember this is 2019 to 2021 almost and uh as much as I think I mean we we raised around we I think we got we created a lot of good content uh I I just the market was too small and we hit a point where I was like man do I need to expand do I want to do and the other mistake that I feel like I made there was like I was doing it alone like we were a team of 15 but I was a solo founder and I would every time I had to deal with some form of failure. Like I would curl up in my bed and just like sleep like a good 12 hours if I could. So, uh but that's how that's how I dealt with it. But I think in all of that again maybe I'm maybe better at it today. Uh cuz it's like so important like not take yourself so seriously as well, right? I know people that that take this as I mean we control everything that we can from an input standpoint output we leave to how the world responds to it. So, so I think it was that but again not like this lull of oh this didn't work I'm going to sit for 6 months and like retrospect or introspect like why that didn't happen like let's get on with our life right like let's move on what's the next thing we can go after so I think it's maybe that um building public also like I I honestly don't think so much about what my next LinkedIn post is going to be I was talking to one of the founders he's like I haven't got he's finding it hard to like put stuff out on on LinkedIn and I was like, man, nobody cares about us. Nobody cares about us. We'll be dead and gone in like 40 years hopefully. And uh yeah, you should should just be bold as bold as possible. And if you don't feel bold, then just surround yourself with like four or five bold people. I think that also helps, right? I agree. Great. Amazing. Thank you. Um, okay. So, this segment is where uh, you know, we're going to move from these stories to strategy because, um, here's the thing. Every insight our guests have shared um, is only useful if you know what to do with it. Uh, so let's talk a little bit about building career capital, the right skills at the right time in 2026 and beyond. And that's where I'm going to introduce uh, um, Simply Learns programs also a bit more in detail. So I'm going to take the lead through this next segment. Um um I'll do the Tim but feel free to react, add to anything, disagree. We'll keep this conversation uh you know going as much as possible. Okay. Um so here's a you know almost like a paradox that I find genuinely fascinating. Um the same AI revolution that's shrinking traditional entry-level roles is simultaneously also creating massive demand for people who can work with AI tools, analyze data, manage cloud infrastructure and build digital products. Uh 30% surge has been in entry- levelvel jobs requiring AI skills in 2026. Um many of our own learners uh report a career benefit, a promotion or a new job after upskilling and people who upskill report career pivots that happen four times faster than those who don't. Um so at simply run we've built programs around exactly this idea. We have generative AI, machine learning, data science, cloud computing, cyber security, product and design, software development, project management, all of it role-based uh skill focused and industry recognized. uh we have training programs for certifications like PMP, CSM, ITIL, six sigma, C and a lot more. We also have post-graduate programs uh and certificate courses for those who want to upskill and stay relevant and at the same time we also have um executive uh programs for senior leaders and experienced professionals. Uh the programs vary in length uh from 2 days to two weeks uh to 6 months to 11 months. Um the program fee also varies ranging from uh $10,9.99 rupees or $699 for say a PMP certification training uh to14 $49,9.99 to $2,000 uh $9.99 for our applied AI programs. I'm actually giving like a very vague range here. You can explore um all uh the details um about our programs in the links that I'm going to share in the chat right now. Um yes. Um so whether you're making your first move into tech, pivoting midcareer or going deeper in a field that you're already in, um there is a path designed uh for you. And let us also tell you that this learning environment is built uh keeping working professionals in mind. Uh you have different cohorts giving you weekday and weekend options. You can choose based on what fits your schedule. uh you will always have access to recordings uh of the classes in case you miss any session and you will have an active pure community of professionals and experts that you can network with. Um and beyond the learning itself, SimplyLearn also supports you with the carrier side um technical capability assessments to sort of sharpen your core skills, interview prep and mock assessments, AI powered optimization of your resume and LinkedIn profile. um and handpicked job opportunities matched to your goals. So, this is uh pretty much the full picture. Um okay, so that's about it. Um this is the moment I think we've been building towards. Uh we have the segment where we're going to do a live uh career audit. Um the idea here is um that we didn't want to stop with just giving generic guidance. Uh we want to give you like personalized uh advice as well uh to whatever extent possible. um we've received multiple entries and since um you know since we asked you um to make entries at the beginning of the session so for what of time we will be able to um take only one or maximum two journeys today but I'm sure our experts guidance will be insightful to everyone so um let me start with one for an uh if you can uh take this it'll be great this is from um Ibrahim Denis from New Jersey I'm going to read his uh journey Um, after my MSE in data science from Pace University, I struggled to get interviews despite being overqualified. I was constantly rejected or ghosted by AI hiring systems. This led me to research a problem and publish a paper in January 2026 where I introduced artificial fictional unemployment. Uh from that research, I built Job OS, an AI career operating system that helps job seekers optimize résumés semantically, autofill ATS application smartly and track their pipeline. We focus on quality over mass auto applying. Um still very early stage, but this first test on my own resume got me an interview invite. I would love any advice from speakers and fellow founders on early user acquisition and building in public. H I mean first of all kudos to you for for flipping the script completely right you build something and then uh and that's actually that's the game today like the people want to see they don't want to see your resume they want to see what you've built how you can create value for the company right like and I think from a company perspective you get yeah 100 to 200 rums in but I know people that have gotten in have been like here's a video that I made here they've messaged the founders they've messaged a bunch of people it's like triangulate and be like oh four five people got my attention who is this person let's talk to him or her right so so I think kudos to you I think in terms of uh advice on user acquisition I mean one you want to be very clear about who's your persona um like you should almost want to find what's their facts pain behavior goals where do they hang out online offline look at their LinkedIn profile use claw and figure okay like can you reverse engineer what persona looks like use a lot of cloud actually for your thinking I mean outstanding uh today to use cloud so once you have that you will realize very quickly there is marketing today is a lot around doing hygiene heavy lifting and then there is are there experiments that can give you virality so if you kind of combine the two uh from a user acquisition standpoint that might be interesting Most probably it depends on your product. Uh I'm so sorry I forgot your name. But like if you want to get your first 10 50 customers, it'll mostly come from your network or your first degree. You don't have to go that far to get your first few customers. U but if you have a B2B agentic SAS kind of product today, you want to do two week sprints. What I've learned is um at Lizo we have released at least I would say 15 products over the last 24 months and we released them like almost like Thunderclap style which is how do you get everyone to push it out simultaneously at the same time to get the amplified effect. So I'd get like oh how do I get 25 I don't know the first few things like how do we get 50 people from our network to push it out? How do you get everyone in the company to push it out at the same time? Can we do a product hunt launch? Can we run ads at the same time? So, it's all like a two week movie sprint u and then you launch the product. Maybe you do the product more as like sign up for weight list and then you slowly trickle them into your product, right? Have as many user interviews and then from there and once you're very clear on okay, you've achieved product market fit, that's when I think you can do a lot of the scale stuff. Uh positioning is fundamentally an issue. I've seen a lot of companies uh and entrepreneurs also like oh there's a product that they built I'm going to build I'm going to build something similar you want to really get novel around positioning and that's a hard that's a hard one to do uh objectively I've tried to help a lot of founders with positioning but again you can use claude um you could prototype so much of this using lovable and replet as well today which is like you put out the positioning create a video see how whether people sign up and then see how they respond to your uh product. Right? So yeah, so if I had to summarize persona facts pain behavior goals whether you find them online offline second is talk to as many people most folks will come from your immediate network or your answer an answer network prototype as many things out put on LinkedIn and then the fourth one is thumbnail club I would say. Thank you so much Anirut and thank you Ibrahim for sharing us uh your journey. We wish you um you know the best of luck on uh your you know way forward. Um give us a thumbs up if you're here. Your question came in like you know much earlier in the session. So I hope you got uh something meaningful out of this. Uh Tim uh great thank you Ibrahim. Um so um Tim uh question for you. I know we have uh um you know uh reached the end of the webinar but maybe we can just take this take this one um u you know u uh journey and then like you know we can look into wrapping up. Um okay this so this part uh this question is in two parts so allow me a little bit of time to navigate that. So this is from uh Praash uh he is currently in Japan working as a mechanical engineer since 2023. Um he studied uh in Bangalore. He did a mechanical engineering degree in um Bangalore, India. um so he is uh wanting to build a service related product in the near future for developing countries like Nepal. Um what could be the best insight on it? He's seeking the best team who has work who has worked on similar service related products in any part of the world. Um so I think he's seeking a pretty generic uh um you know advice. uh but you know I'll leave it up to you. You can give him any guidance that you want to uh share or maybe specifically about like you know picking the right team uh because he's looking for the team to get started with um and learn from. So um you know any anything that you would like to share would be great. Yeah absolutely I can speak to that because as um my my business I'm essentially I am my product. So I sell my expertise. I help people make connections so that they don't feel left behind as the AI revolution continues forward. So I my bread and butter comes from talking to people and so as I in the near future I would like to start adding employees and growing as well. Um, and I will say that even a year ago, I was hoping that when I started this company, I would be able to maybe hire my nephews or something that were coming up through college learning about software development and coding and AI and generative AI. Um, but I wouldn't necessarily do that anymore. So the projects I have worked on uh whether it's somebody that is an expert in AI or an expert in marketing. I have met so many pe different people working on so many different projects. Some of those projects I wasn't getting paid to do. I was more of just a collaborator on those projects. But I've met so many intelligent, crazy smart people from all over the world uh that had skills that I didn't even know I was looking for until we worked on a project together. and maybe it was an open- source project and it wasn't necessarily getting a whole uh platform together or a whole product launch or anything like that. Uh but I have met so many people that are so passionate about what they're what they're interested in and what they're talking about. So whether it's fitness or engineering or AI or building actual software, um I what I do is I personally look for people that are very passionate and very enthusiastic. And the way I find those people is to spread my net as far as I can. LinkedIn, Tik Tok, social media, other social media platforms, and I'm willing to just sit down and have a conversation. The way my business works is I offer everybody a 45 minute discovery call. And I don't I would say maybe I get paid work from those discovery calls 10% of the time but almost 100% of those discovery calls I meet somebody really interesting whether it is a interior designer looking for ways to uh incorporate AI into their process and then I learn about new people and people that are amazing in their different realms that I wouldn't have even considered and that's just because I took 45 minutes to talk to that person figure out hey what do you know, what do I know? Um, so I know that's kind of u maybe a little bit too generic because I I personally haven't built a product from the ground up and then pushed that product. But what I do do professionally all day every day is talk to people, meet people, and what I did in my healthcare career was lead teams. I was a director over several supervisors and I I I'm I got to work with those people, learn about those people, learn their strengths, but I only figured out who those people were and what they were so good at by talking to them, spending time, whether that's virtually or more in a uh an official work capacity. But just talking to people and spreading my net as wide as I can on social media globally and locally when possible and meeting all these great minds. There are a lot of people who want to change the world and help humanity advance through AI. Just the the Artemis mission to the moon recently has has reinvigorated my whole outlook on how hopefully humanity can work together. So that's I would just say get out there, talk to people, find people, work in open source projects, and even if it's not necessarily the exact employee that you're looking for or the exact role that you're looking to fill, you're going to find amazing people. just you got to start talking to people, finding people, reading their papers, reading their posts, interacting with them virtually and things like that. Perfect. Thank you so much, Tim. I hope that answers your question. Uh Praash, um what you're seeking to build is uh really great for developing countries. So, we wish you the best of luck. Thank you for being here and sharing your journey. So, yes, um you know, for one of time, we are able to take only a couple of uh these journeys. we will not be able to cover them all but yes I like I said I hope that everyone got some takeaway from uh the guidance and insights that our experts have shared. So before we close I want to leave um everyone with something very concrete which are three things that you can do this coming week. Uh firstly is analyze and introspect one assumption behind your current career path. Ask yourself uh who decided this was the right step um and does it still hold. Uh secondly, reach out to one person at least one person whose skill you admire with a real question seeking guidance and um you know not just like a connection request. This is how you will start building your network. And thirdly, identify one uh skill um in the market that you will need next and take the first step towards learning it. Even if it is just like one hour per week, it's a start. Um so with that, I'm going to launch a quick poll to take any interest in enrolling in our programs. Um just give a second. Okay. So all you have to do is um you know click vote on yes or no. Um even if you're just curious about what might be right for you or if today has um you know sparked something, we'd love to help you take the next step. Uh please click on yes or no in the poll that is live right now. We will reach out to you personally to help you find your best fit learning opportunity and guide you further. Uh while that poll is on um I would love to hear from Anerud um any final remarks like any any um you know uh final guidance or like um advice to our learners to our participants. Closing remarks please. I would say if you can no matter what block it on your calendar for like block like 45 minutes to an hour every day on your calendar to just focus on upscaling especially with AI like you see something that's trending go check out the product play around with it maybe you'll pick up a skill and then it'll stack over the next three to six months um because most of your learning today is going to come from what you're seeing in the market. Uh and things are changing very quickly. Like I'm sure you create a course today, 6 months from now you'll have to like revamp the course and have something new completely. So um that's my suggestion like don't wait for anyone to come and teach you things like what if you could flip and become the teacher yourself, right? So that's where I'll leave it at. Thank you. Uh Tim, what about you? I agree with that 100%. So I guess my closing words would be try not to get overwhelmed. There's a lot of AI tools, a lot of AI uh just media period. So spending time looking at it every day, you'll start to notice patterns in the trends with the AI tools. Uh, so it's more about learning how to evaluate AI tools and processes as opposed to getting really good at one specific tool that might not be the the best tool in a month to 3 months. So try not to get overwhelmed. Just get into it. Start researching, start looking, start reading articles, start reading social media posts, and be willing to adapt to change quickly. So problem solving, I think, is the skill that people need to learn most as opposed to one specific AI tool or one specific AI platform. And you got to do that just by practicing, learning, and reading. But be open to change the whole time. Great. Thank you so much, Tim. And uh yes, with those wise words, I will uh end the poll as well. Um Anerud and Tim, if you want to take your leave, you can. I'm just going to like you know uh have one more segment where I launch a poll to take uh entries for certificates for those of them who want. Um so thank you so much uh for being here and to share you know and for sharing all your insights and your journeys. It's been uh truly honestly like you know one of the most enriching conversations I've had uh since uh you know I've been doing webinars with Simply Learn. So thank you so much for um everything. Awesome. Absolutely. Thank you as Thank you as well. Yeah. Good to see both of you. Thank you. Take care. Bye. Great. Okay. Um with that, um if you want your certificate of part partner, uh participation, enter your full name in the poll that I'm going to launch just now. Um we will uh be generating the certificate and sharing with you in the next 48 working hours. Uh thank you so much everyone for like you know being present and engaged throughout it. genuinely did uh make a difference and we apologize for all the questions that we were not able to get to. We will try to get back to you personally over email um or through our um experts. Yeah, I'm going to have that um live for a little bit more. And yes, so we have come to the um end of the session. Um this was generally one of the conversation that leaves you thinking differently. Um so um you know kudos to our experts to our panel for being so open and honest with this audience. I know a lot of people in this room are going to make um you know different decisions because of what they shared today. Uh for everyone watching on YouTube uh LinkedIn and here thank you once again. So if you want to reach out to the SimplyLearn team um you've got emails on the screen. We would love to hear from you if you have any feedback to share. If you have any questions for us further uh please do write to us at webinars simplearn.net. In case if you're not able to access this poll for certificates um um you know it might be because you're joining it from your phone or if you don't have the app if you've not logged in you might not be able to access the poll. Um in that case uh please do drop us a note at webinars.net we will be able to generate and share the certificate with you. Um take care everyone and um let's go make like one unconventional move this week. Thank you.