4 years and counting

I completed 4 years at Josh Talks this month. 4 years can be a long time.

It’s enough to make a management graduate become a data analyst, make a non-techie learn to lead a tech product. It was enough to learn how YouTube works and certainly was long enough to make me a 20x better version of myself.

Standing at a crossroads

When I graduated from college in 2018, I had two options —

Option #1: Join a big corporate firm where I’d get the chance to be with all my college friends

Option #2: Join Josh Talks where I had applied for 3 positions: Speaker Researcher, BD Executive and Data Analyst.

On 19 April 2018, I was called for the Data Analyst interview. At that point in time, I was so determined to get selected that I’d memorized the exact number of views of the top 30 Talks. It happened in the middle of the interview when this question came up and I immediately responded. Cut to 28 May ‒ I joined Josh Talks full-time as a Data Analyst.

Nothing at Josh is someone else’s problem

Of all the ~1500 days that I’ve spent here, I have had 2 things going for me: challenging tasks and infinite opportunities to learn. And these are the two factors that motivated me throughout. Not one day has gone by when I haven’t learnt something new. With each passing day, I raised the bar for myself. The biggest reason why this was possible — it was never about ‘ye mera kaam nahi hai’ (this is not my responsibility).

Whatever we do at Josh, we do it to optimise our work and not to checkbox Job Descriptions. This is also one of our core values — Nothing at Josh is someone else’s problem.

I have done every kind of work in these 4 years — from learning how YouTube algorithm works to growing it, hiring people smarter and 4x more expensive than me, figuring out tech & product to build Josh Skills app from scratch and now taking it to a level where our users tell us -

Together, we grew Josh Talks’ YouTube to 10 regional languages. I have seen the team grow from 10 to 120+. Josh Skills has now over 3.2 million downloads and 200,000 paid subscribers where they spend 50 minutes daily. We recently sent out the 300th version of the app to the play store. The last few years have come together like a perfect story.

What Josh did for me

What Josh has done for me and something that’s extremely important to me — it has made me do things that were always out of my ‘aukaat’ (league). Coming from a background where becoming an analyst was a dream to leading a tech product, it couldn’t have happened anywhere else no matter what I’d done. The sheer amount of trust that the people have put in me and the number of opportunities I got as a result is something I am and will always be grateful for. 💙

The one thing this 20 year old kid couldn’t have 4 years ago was ‘theraav’ (patience). I was too excited about things. While I still have that childlike excitement, Josh has given me a sense of composure to couple it with. No matter how big the problem is, I know I can face it.

The success of Josh Talks is very personal to me, something that I REALLY care about & something that I’m going to give my all to ensure that we truly unlock human potential. As we take har ghar mein Josh, I feel like the next 4 years are going to be more exciting than the last 4! :))

Huge shoutout to the people who put their faith in me! Thank you for always having my back — Supriya Paul, Shobhit Banga, Lakshay Pandey, Siddharth Gupta, Dev Chaudhary, Sheenabh Dhar, Vedant Maheshwari, Rachit Bhatia, Manish Pandey, Varun Khera, Mitul Lall, Aparna Bansal, Gopal Agarwal, Manjul Kadyan, Bhaskar Singh, Shashwat Yadav, Sagar Jain, Atisaya Jain, Vishesh Yadav, Harish Kumar, Mohit Kumar, Arjun Gupta, Suresh Prajapat and the entire Josh Talks’ team! ❤