Dance, Video Games and IT Strategy: the Trials and Tribulations of the Entrepreneurial Spirit
In today’s article, we follow up with the stories and “edventures” of our team members. We want you to get to know our Chief Technology Officer, Anand Parashar, his entrepreneurial journey and how he became a part of our team.
Our CTO started out his professional life as a dancer. Having developed a passion for mentorship from a young age, he decided to use his dance training to become a teacher and choreographer. To this extent, he moved to Mumbai, India where he worked for several years, training young students in various forms of classical dance and even participating in a classical Indian dance (Kathak) program for 3 years.
After working on the fringes of the Bollywood industry for several years and realising a need for greater stability, Anand moved back to Canada with the aim to retrain and begin working in a more stable profession. While trying to come up with a solution, his friends and family pointed out his childhood love for video games and his passion for assembling his own computers. For that reason, he took the leap into a 180-degree career change and dived into the IT industry. Little did he know, that was his first step on the journey towards Edventures.
Anand started learning about software and took a year-long crash course in Web Development and Maintenance. After working for various “web shops” for several years, he decided to set up his own business online, a small web development company of his own that he ran for 2+ years. Owning and maintaining this business is what made him acutely aware of the difficulties and struggles that new business owners have; especially the need for them to be able to frame the context of their business clearly in order to fully realise their business’ potential.
Anand then transitioned out of his own business into the world of startups where he was able to continue growing and honing his business vision and strategic skills in the context of IT while working for a MedTech company. During his time there, he dived into the realm of Enterprise Architecture and the practice of Domain-Driven Design, both being complementary to each other. In learning these techniques, he developed the ability to use them to help the business gain a “macro-cosmic perspective” of its visions and values from which, he was able to formulate sound strategic paths to the concrete delivery of the organisation’s IT products.
Anand’s technical knowledge and his experience with being an entrepreneur have, in the long run, made him aware of sustainable ways to create and run successful businesses. Some twelve years into this second career, having grown from a junior and green web developer to a senior software engineer, and finally, a CTO, it is due to his own life experiences that he feels Edventures captured his attention and became his next step. “Edventures is focused on providing a solution that embodies so much of what I believe in; from mentorship to startup culture to the opportunity to bring a new vision to life that has the potential to be a platform from which new ideas and unlimited new visions can be brought to life.”
“The journey of an Entrepreneur is not unlike that of an enterprise architect, it’s gruelling, hard to wrap your head around and sometimes mind-boggling — but when you have finally visualised that macroscopic visual of your enterprise, the feeling of satisfaction one achieves is like having brought something beautiful to life.”
