Meet a Milestone Maker featuring Anjali Menon
Every week we’ll feature the Spring 2017 Milestone Makers cohort. The following interview is with Anjali Menon, co-founder, Sextant Travel.
Tell me your name and about your company in ten words.
My name is Anjali Menon and I’m the co-founder of Sextant Travel, an app that allows you to discover, save, and ultimately plan trips
How did your business come to be?
Sextant Travel actually started as a passion project. My co-founders and I love to travel. Every time that we go on Facebook we typically see somebody who says, “hey, I’m going to Japan, any recommendations?” We want to live in a world where we never see that again. We want to make trip planning easy and this is our avenue to do that.
What’s the dream for your business?
The ultimate vision for the business is to help folks build trips easily — taking the pain out of trip planning, but even higher level than that I think that travel in and of itself is something that allows borders to be broken, and in today’s environment, travel is sort of the great equalizer. You can’t have ignorance if you’ve gone to travel somewhere else and know how somebody else lives. As they say, “travel is fatal to prejudice.” I think in that sense travel is something that I hope will expand minds. And being able to do that easier will help.
Where do you find inspiration when faced with challenges?
The great thing about building a project that’s your passion is that you find inspiration in that project. That is very much the case for me with Sextant Travel. I love to travel, I love to hike, and when I have problems I literally just go out into nature. I also have very strong mentors in my life including Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit, who is a source of inspiration for me.
What is the biggest learning from the journey so far?
The biggest learning is that attitude is everything. I think that when I met the inaugural class of Milestone Makers, everybody who had a seat at the table was there because they had persisted and pursued their dreams and they hadn’t given up.
What does the term milestone mean signify to you?
It signifies an incredible accomplishment, something that you persisted at to achieve.
What milestone are you committed to accomplishing by the end of the Milestone Makers Program?
I’m committed to taking Sextant from an alpha product to a beta product and getting it into the iTunes store so that it can be accessible to users. The real goal here is to take something that was originally a passion project, to something real that has tangible benefit. I really hope to use the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center resources to take it from the side project to something real and meaningful.
The Milestone Makers program is designed to help early-to-mid-stage founders set, hit, and celebrate milestones critical to company growth over 12 weeks. Each of our 14 Milestone Makers selected into the Spring 2017 cohort receive the support of a personal business coach, a team of mentors, peer cohort work sessions, as well as curated classes to help them succeed with their individual learning paths to help them reach their goals.
