In this Greatest HIts episode of Getting to Aha!, Darshan Mehta is joined by Abhilasha Sinha, Chief Growth Officer at Open Secret, a food and beverages provider that believes un-junking your diet can be fun and eating healthy can be tasty! They delve into her widespread, diverse career journey in numerous industries (education, healthtech, consumer tech); the drive of innovation, curiosity and learning to be human; and what failure really looks like.

On top of that, Abhilasha is also a Mentor at the Founder Institute and was previously the Chief of Staff at Hike, the Vice President of Strategy and Operations at Elucidata Corporation, and an associate at Innosight. She’s been featured in various interviews and podcasts, including Women Who Build and Network Capital, where she discusses her career and journey to Harvard Business School and life after graduation.

Listen out for what this Harvard graduate has to say about the world of Insights!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

👉 Abhilasha has worked across numerous industries: education, healthtech, and consumer tech, and now she’s working in the ecommerce food and beverages space. She says the goal behind all of these careers is to look at how technology or business models can be delivered in a new way to the consumer. For example, education has been done for years upon years, but how do you scale it to the most remote parts of a country? How do you make it so your food and beverages brand reaches the right amount of people and appeal to the consumer? With each industry comes a different challenge, and that’s the connection between these industries.

👉 When asked whether it was innovation, curiosity, or learning what it means to be human that drove her in all of her roles, Abhilasha says that it’s likely a combination of all three. She says she enjoyed finding connections between the products and the consumer, and this, in turn, provides fascinating consumer insights which can lead to incredible, innovative things for a business. 

👉 Failure comes in many different forms. Some might say it’s not reaching your goals; some might say it’s not trying; and others may go as far as to say the real failure is not learning from your mistakes. Abhilasha agrees with this, for her motto is to learn from your failures. She recalls a time she built something that didn’t really solve a problem for a user, but she doesn’t think she failed because she learned from it and adapted!

👉 Open Secret started off as a brand that did everything: sweet, savory, beverages. Eventually, however, they realized they weren’t really competing with smaller niche brands, and were instead competing with the larger ones. Their aim is to give people the tools to make ‘better for you’ choices across the board so that they can stick out compared to the bigger companies. 

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