From Trauma-Driven Hustle to Purpose-Driven Leadership - Saleema Vellani

Saleema Vellani shares the deeply personal story behind her entrepreneurial journey, from childhood trauma and feelings of rejection to building a life rooted in purpose, impact, and leadership.

Saleema reflects on losing her mother at 16, growing up constantly feeling “not enough,” and how those experiences unconsciously fueled her relentless drive as an entrepreneur. She opens up about building businesses across multiple countries, working with institutions like the World Bank, and realizing that external success alone did not create fulfillment.

The conversation explores the darker side of entrepreneurship: burnout, scaling too fast, emotional exhaustion, and the identity crises many founders silently carry. Saleema candidly shares how rapid growth nearly broke her company and how recovery required rebuilding not only the business, but herself.

She also discusses how Harvard Business School’s OPM program transformed her mindset, teaching her to embrace uncertainty, think beyond black-and-white decisions, and evolve from trauma-driven ambition into purpose-driven leadership.

At its core, this episode is about reinvention, healing, resilience, and learning how to lead from clarity rather than fear.

Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from the conversation:

1. Many entrepreneurs are unknowingly driven by unresolved trauma.
   Saleema shares how feelings of abandonment, rejection, and needing to prove herself fueled her ambition for years.
2. Pain can create resilience, but it can also create burnout.
   The same emotional drive that helped her succeed eventually pushed her toward exhaustion and imbalance.
3. Entrepreneurship is often an identity journey before it’s a business journey.
   Her story reveals how founders are constantly reinventing themselves alongside their companies.
4. External success does not guarantee internal fulfillment.
   Even after achieving prestigious goals like working with the World Bank, she still felt disconnected from meaningful impact.
5. Your greatest strengths may live in your blind spots.
   During the pandemic, feedback from others helped her realize her true gift was helping leaders build authority and trust.
6. Scaling too fast can quietly destroy a business.
   After rapidly growing her company into the seven figures, operations, culture, and her health began collapsing under pressure.
7. Healing personally is essential to leading effectively.
   Therapy, coaching, peer groups, and self-awareness became critical parts of her leadership evolution.
8. Harvard OPM changed the way she thinks about leadership.
   The program helped her move beyond rigid black-and-white thinking and embrace the “gray space” where innovation happens.
9. The best founders combine intuition with data.
   Some of her biggest wins came not from overanalysis, but from trusting her instincts and acting decisively.
10. Purpose-driven leadership creates sustainable success.
    Saleema’s evolution was ultimately about shifting from proving herself to genuinely serving others and creating meaningful impact.

Books: Give and Take

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey, welcome everyone to another episode of Beyond the Case, which is a podcast where global leaders from Howard Business School's OPM community join in a personal capacity and they share the real lessons, life principles, and mental models that go behind building enduring companies. My guest today is Salima Villani. She recently finished Unit 3 at the OPM program at Howard Business School. So congratulations, Salima, on being uh part of the HPS Alumni Network now.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Thank you so much, Sohan. I'm really excited to be part of the alumni community and to contribute to your show.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Yeah. Salina, Salima, do you just want to introduce yourself and your business for the listeners?

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Sure. So uh Sohan said, my name is Salima Vellani. I am based in Washington, D.C., originally from Toronto, Canada. I've lived around the world in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, and have traveled to over 100 countries, speak five languages. Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur pretty much since the age of 21, since I lived in Brazil and started, co-founded my, what was uh my, I guess, my first business at the time. Moved to Italy, started a translation business. So for me, entrepreneurship was very much it was really a process of reinvention, but it was almost accidental or spontaneous. It wasn't what I had planned. And so I'm excited to dive more into that. But essentially, what my current business does now is it's called Ripple Impact. And we're helping a lot of mid-sized company CEOs become recognized industry leaders, recognized trusted authorities in their industries so that they can scale their companies or plan for an exit, or they're at some sort of inflection point, whether they're trying to uh, you know, think about what's next in their next chapter, take the company to the next level, and they're at some sort of inflection point and they know that they're ready to be recognized and they need to be known and stand out in the market as the public voice of the company that's shaping the industry. So that's what I do today. And uh had different businesses across similar areas of marketing, translation, advertising, and uh this is what I do today, which is really my purpose. This is what I love doing.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Incredible. When you say you help small and mid-sized entrepreneurs identify the next chapter, does that include PR marketing, financing, um, or all of that? Could you could you share a little more?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yeah. Sure. So think of us as a combination, a team of experts between marketing, PR, branding, positioning, vision clarity. So we're basically starting with vision clarity, of course, is like, where are you going? Because CEOs, of course, as visionaries, as founders, it's like, where are we going? It's like the the thing that we love is actually when we feel really clear. We have those breakthroughs and insights. And so we're helping them get really clear on where they're going as a CEO, but also where is the company going? And then how do we communicate that to the market? Since a lot of times we build up our networks and we, you know, we work so hard on our companies, but who's the one that drives the biggest deals? It's the CEO, right? Who's the one who is the chief sales officer? Who's the one that shakes the hands with the top client accounts? It's the CEO. And so ultimately, especially at the small, upper small to mid-size, the CEO is still playing a very important role in driving the growth of the company. But as we learned, actually, Professor Dawes talked about that it's it's really, really important to strategically position the company, but also the CEO is the voice and the face of the company. And uh in a market like today, where trust is the most important business currency, it's the CEO that needs to double down on becoming that trusted voice for the company and in the industry. So, yeah, to answer your question, it's a combination of all those different things in a one-stop shop since our market is very fragmented and we realized there was a big, big uh hole, a big pain point that there's a lot of fragmented providers focusing on, hey, I'm gonna grow your LinkedIn, I'm gonna help you with PR, I'm gonna help you with building a brand, I'm gonna help you with speaking, and I'm gonna help you get into the media, I'll help you get on podcasts. But it wasn't really generating results for the CEOs of these businesses, and they were like, huh, something's missing, and they just didn't have a team that would bring it all together and help them with the clarity, the strategy, and the execution to get to where they wanted.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Amazing. Talk to us about your early childhood years. Um, what were they like? What did you think about the world around you? Did you always aspire to be an entrepreneur? What is the mindset like?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Yeah, I didn't really aspire. I didn't really think about entrepreneurship. It wasn't really even really available as an option. But reflecting back, my mom was an entrepreneur. She never called herself an entrepreneur. She had a business. She was a Montessori teacher and started her own business at home. She had a school at home where I grew up, and it was in just outside of Toronto, and she was doing really well. She was supposed to have like five students. She had like 13 students at a time, sometimes, and all, you know, preschool, pre-K, and they were, it was like her dream. It was her purpose. She loved teaching. Her name was Miss Tess as a teacher. Her name was actually Momta's. But anyway, so she was my inspiration and I actually lost my mom at the age of when I was 16. I turned 16, she passed away from cancer. And so for me, it was very much subconsciously part of my legacy to, you know, her legacy was for she wanted us to start a school together. And I was like, I don't want to, I didn't have that much patience for kids. I was like, I don't want to start a school in a venue and a like a local place. And I didn't have that same dream. But what I did take from her dream and legacy was the curiosity to help people grow, to help people connect more to themselves and the world around them to help people really unleash their best selves, which is what she did. So in a way, I'm extending what she did to, of course, grown-ups and CEOs very different. But yeah, that's that's that's a bit about my childhood. So I lost my mom. I grew up just outside Toronto. I have a brother who is 14, he's 14 years older than me, but lived most of his life in Asia. So, and my dad is still alive and and well, uh, who lives here in Virginia. So for me, it was really a lot of feeling abandoned, I would say, even though, of course, I mean, I was young and that's those are the feelings I had, or rejected sometimes. Socially, I was not, you know, I wasn't pop part of those popular groups. So I was I was a nerd. I wasn't a geek, but I was a nerd, and I really just loved to be the teacher's pet and get good grades. And if I had a 99, that was not good enough. My dad's like, nope, you can do better. But typical, my parents come from East Africa and my grandparents, my grandfathers come from India, Gujarat. So we're coming from a very entrepreneurial, nomadic community that is very familiar with reinventing ourselves. And uh a very closed-knit community, actually, as well, spiritually. So yeah, it's it's I grew up with that community, and those values of entrepreneurship were instilled in me, even though I didn't realize until I lost my mom and started going on on my own into the world and starting things by accident.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Great. Thank you for sharing that. It seems you've never found a spot of comfort through your growing years as well, right? And so you've always maybe felt displaced or the challenge to reinvent yourself, like you said. Do you think that has in some way made you comfortable with discomfort, which is so important to be an entrepreneur today, right? That's the biggest skill that every entrepreneur needs to stay focused and not lose perspective when the whole world is on fire and you're right in the middle of the fire. Do you think some somewhere your formative years prepared you for that in hindsight?

SPEAKER_01 7:23

But totally, yes. That's a story of I'm a very much a trauma-driven entrepreneur where like that trauma and that constant feeling like I'm not enough or I need to do more, I need to go higher. 99 is not enough of a grade to, you know, I need to achieve more. And uh it's had its downsides. It's definitely also hurt me in many ways, but overall, the net has been, yes, it's led to a lot of my career success. I've done a lot of things in my career, right? That that I didn't even talk about yet, that, you know, from hydroponics in the Middle East for refugees to all kinds of different things I've done in the international development space in my previous career. And it requires a lot of resilience to do that kind of work, to really go and help countries and communities reinvent themselves, to help people and companies go to the next level. And it requires a lot of resilience, which comes that resilience, in my opinion, comes from feeling rejected, feeling that, you know, you're you you have to get to that next step or you have to get to that next level. It it fuels that drive, uh, those feelings of abandonment and rejection from childhood, which I think are very important to work on. Like I work with, you know, have a self-care team of therapy, have, you know, coaches, I have different support and tools and mechanisms to to work on those things. However, I think it's about balancing, of course, like there it can actually help us in some ways to have that drive. There's something that's wired in us, especially entrepreneurs like myself that have experienced trauma, which is a lot of us, that drives us. There's something beautiful about that as well that keeps us wanting to wake up each day and work on our missions.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Very well said. And you've traveled over a hundred countries. You mentioned you've worked with governments, et cetera. Could you talk a little bit about your travels, how that shaped your view of the world, different personalities that you interact with, and how that plays into the different individuals that you either coach or conduct business with today?

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Yeah, thank you. So I started my career out in international development. I had a degree, a master's degree in international economics from Johns Hopkins. I my dream was to work for the World Bank. Did I check the box? Yes. I've worked, you know, 15 plus years between different economic development banks, international development banks, like the World Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank. So definitely worked a lot at the government level, definitely work with lots of heads of state, prime ministers, presidents, ministries. And my goal was to work at the macro level. I said, hey, if I can get a level of education and work at institutions where I can make a difference at the macro level, that's going to have a mass, massive impact on the world. However, what I felt was to be very honest, I felt very far from the impact when I worked at these institutions. Nothing against them, but they just were not the right place for me because I had a lot of creativity and drive and ideas and innovative. You know, there's lots of things I wanted to bring, but it was constantly being shut down. And not in a way that I felt rejected, that in a good way, it was like I really couldn't do much there. I try to bring ideas and some people would value them and then they would be shut down or not be sustainable. So I said, you know what? Maybe it's not about working at this macro level because of all the bureaucracy, because that's going to affect how I feel. And I was like, I want to feel excited to wake up every day. And I really missed being an entrepreneur. When I was finally made those dreams come true, I realized they were not really what made me happy. And so I went back into entrepreneurship. Again, I had a whole career prior to going into these institutions. I had a whole like a few years where I was an entrepreneur, but I didn't call myself an entrepreneur, right? Before I even did grad school, I had already started, co-founded Brazil's top language school, which is called Caminhos Languages in Rio de Janeiro. It was a nonprofit idea at the time to fund the orphanage, finance an orphanage. It was very, it's very successful. It's it's still the number one. It's still in Ipanema. I then started a translation business in Italy because I was rejected. I was on the streets of Italy walking around with my resume because that's what I was taught. Walk around with your resume, knock on doors. And I was like, well, this one's bombed. This one hasn't, there was mafia. It was the south of Italy. And it was also 2009. So whatever I learned wasn't going to get me where I wanted to go, just given the world and the crisis and everything going on back then, the recessions. So I decided, well, my brother actually said, Selima, why don't you just use your skills, forget your degrees, and just use your translation, your language skills. And I went online to elance.com, won my first translation project to translate a website and made 60 bucks. And from there, you know,$2,000. From there, that became a six-figure client, translate all these languages. And I was not the actually, I wasn't best in class at translating. I was, I realized much later that my strength in that translation business was to get the clients, sending the proposals, communicating, the client satisfaction, delivery quality, all those things. And and yeah, we had a way to get projects and we had a way to deliver the projects. And there was no marketing, there was no SEO, there was no website or social media. It was just a business that was running. And I, again, I did not consider myself an entrepreneur. Again, I was thinking, okay, I need to get a job, I need to go to the World Bank. And so I finally sold that business, took on a job to work at these institutions, and very quickly realized not for me. And then I started to get out of those institutions and go back into entrepreneurship. So it's to sum it up, it's kind of like, you know, we sometimes think as kids or early in our lives, okay, our dreams to do this. And we work so hard. And then we're on this journey. For me, that journey was discovering the entrepreneur in me, but not totally aware that that's where I was gonna land and stay. Uh, it was really, I need to go to the World Bank. I need to become an economist. I need to have a stable job. That's what my dad was like. Go get a stable job. And that does not exist in today's world. So, so yeah, in a way, those, those, that time of my life really prepared me for my future. And yeah, I think that's so important for anyone, not even people that are actually becoming entrepreneurs, but to have those entrepreneurial skills is super important in today's market.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Absolutely. Very well said. What along the way got you ideating this business for Ripple Effect? Um, could you talk us, talk to us about the origins of the business? What inspired you to get this started?

SPEAKER_01 13:43

Yeah, so the origins of Ripple Impact, uh, it was actually, again, crisis. It was 2020. I had a terrible car accident and a concussion, and I was home and I couldn't go out. I was actually writing a book, which uh was published about five years ago called Innovation Starts With I. And at the time I was still in the interview process, but my memory had been affected and I couldn't do it, I had to take a little pause on the book to recover my brain and just my my all my body injuries. And I was doing a lot of workshops and keynotes on design thinking and going out traveling in the world, and I couldn't do that anymore because of the concussion. Right after that happened, the pandemic started. Uh, this was again early 2020. Um, my car accident was December 2019, and it was uh it was a pretty large uh whole whole issue, settlement, whatever whole legal thing that happened with the car accident, uh, because I was not at fault, but it was a head-on collision. But that really, again, it was a big trauma, right? I had some PTSD coming out of that. And I just couldn't do the analytical work that I used to do with the World Bank. I couldn't do the level of research that I used to do. I just couldn't function the same way. And so I was just recovering, sitting in bed, and I was like, huh, what am I gonna do with my life? And I felt this intuition that it was time to reinvent myself, that this accident was kind of like when my house went on fire and then the building burned down and I had to reinvent myself 10 years ago. That's a whole nother story that's in my book. But in 2020, I had to figure out who am I gonna be in the world? What am I gonna do? Conferences are are shutting down and getting canceled, and the world's completely shut down. And so it was during the pandemic, during the lockdown, I started experimenting. And I started to really do a little bit of research on like, what do people want from me? What do they value in me? And so my assistant at the time, who was working on my personal brand and trying to help me with my book platform and all that stuff, I had her interview some of my friends and colleagues and ask them, what do you think Selima is really good at? What's her superpower? What would you hire her for? Like, what would you pay her for? And it was funny. It wasn't what I had been doing. It wasn't design thinking and innovation strategy and all that stuff I was doing at the corporate level. It was personal brand building, it was marketing, it was positioning, it was LinkedIn, it was TEDx, it was like, how did how did how did she network and build relationships and, you know, show up with confidence on stage and all these things? And it was like, that's not at all what I thought people valued in me. So it was if you know the Drajari window, think about the blind area. It was like that whole blind area that people saw me a certain way and I didn't see myself that way. So to sum it up, it was a combination of getting that insight and really looking at those blind areas. It was also experimenting. I was creating courses, I was talking to the market, I was just talking to people. A lot of people had a lot of time in the pandemic. And I just saw over the course of several years working in, I had a different marketing business, a HubSpot reseller business before that. And I saw that the world was shifting more towards trust, to the human side of it and not like who the being a strong face is important because if you can't be out there at conferences, your referrals are drying up. How do you really build that trust and authority? How do you really communicate that trust? And it came down to you could call it personal brand building, but I like to call it authority brand building because it's really about what do you have to offer to the world? What is your expertise or what is your unique perspective more than like lifestyle branding? And so we shifted towards that and we started to help just we we basically did a crowdfunding campaign for my book in August 2020. This was again not about the money. It was really about a marketing campaign to grow my author platform. And I did a lot of with the book interviews I was doing, I realized that there was a need in the market to help a lot of actually it was like coaches, consultants, a lot of experts, a lot of solo printers. I was like, these folks don't have teams and they're trying to get themselves out in the world. They're trying to get their books out in the world. They were CEOs of one, right? They were like one-person businesses. And we started to help that market. We started an accelerator program and started to become the team, helping them with business strategy, helping them with their marketing, helping them with their branding, building their assets, their keynotes, their speaker sheets, their media kits, their book covers, helping them launch their books. And that's where the business had originally started. It was a very different business. And it was actually iterations of that solopreneur became corporate executives at a point and more seasoned experts. When I started OPM, that was my business. I went to OPM and I told Daz, we're helping corporate exiters plan their transitions out of corporate and build their portfolio career. That's that's how I started OPM. It wasn't about CEOs of mid-sized companies. I mean, we had a couple of small business CEOs, but it was a very different business. And so, so yeah, the origins of the business started back in 2020 and the pandemic. Um, I would have to add, though, that there was a time of failure, since you want to hear the fuck ups. Uh it was before OPM, where I really fucked up. Didn't know how to do zero. Well, I knew zero to one. I struggled, but was able to do one to 10. I struggled, I broke somewhere along the lines of 10 to 50. Uh, it was probably around like employee number 30 something. Everything fell down in the business. Uh, we 5x'd our revenue. And, you know, we were in the early seven figures at the time. And basically the business broke. And I didn't know when we were making decisions about growth, I was like, yeah, let's just grow fast. You know, I'm a visionary. And we're like, well, why don't we grow slower? And I was like, no, let's just go, let's just go. There's demand. And everything broke. Uh, there was a whole crisis in the company. And I had to heal from burnout. It took six months to go into that situation, and it took years to recover from that, and not just, you know, not just financially and with all the culture and all the different issues that come along when you break because of fast growth. But it was the internal landscape, like my entire life. Like I lost, I was, you know, I had a lot of health issues. I was not sleeping well. I was just a different person. Even when I started Unit One, I felt I was still recovering from that mess at the end of it, but still it was not easy. And so, so yeah, basically my business was in a better place, but still in a very not not where it is today. And it's it's completely turned around. So I almost look at it to be very fair and honest, it's like a different business. OPM transformed me and it transformed my business in so many ways because it transformed my thinking. And so I gave you the origins, but I also gave you the the crisis and a bit of the transformation. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

Thank you. Thank you for that. In what way did OPM help with the transformation? Could you share some of your takeaways?

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Yeah. So how did OPM transform me? I look at it through the lens of the different ways that we grow capital, right? So there's social, emotional, intellectual, and financial. So I would start with uh emotionally, actually. OPM, I kept hearing from alumni that were raving fans. Oh, OPM is gonna change your life personally and not just in your business. And I was like, how? Like I'm learning from professors, I'm learning frameworks, like, how is this? I'm studying cases, how is this gonna change me personally? And I realized that I mean, it's the way they designed the program, right? Because there's a little bit of personal development, some of the coaching, but it more so than anything, it was going through the journey and changing my thinking. It was learning a lot from my peers and connecting with them personally in their journeys. I learned so much from my peer experiences that actually inspired me, that influenced me. And I also joined EO, which was very important as part of this journey that was also very highly transformative, very involved in entrepreneurs' organization. And that was thanks to Sudakar, thanks to some of the alumni and some of my peers at OPN that says Salima, just joined EO. And I said, Oh, I don't have time. I'm gonna do it after Harvard. They're like, No, no, no. Sudakhar was like, just do it now. And I joined EO and it started to. Change my life personally. And it gave me more of what OPM wasn't giving me was that local community and uh a forum experience, which also, um I mean, thanks to OPM, I started, I became an EO member, but it was really that forum experience, which is really group therapy for founders, is what some people call it, because you actually have a space to talk about your deepest stuff, your personal, your family, and your business. And I say that EO has been really, really transformative for me. And then to some extent, within OPM, I have a circle of, you know, five to 10 people I stay in touch with regularly. And they also have been very helpful to me personally. And so, so I think it's really much a pick your own adventure, your own journey with an OPM. And I would say that that emotional journey is very important as an entrepreneur. A lot of people think top line, business, business. But really, the personal growth does lead to business growth. I actually talk a little bit about this in my book, but uh essentially that that is true. And that's why you see a lot of entrepreneurs working on mindset, working on manifestation, working on uh, you know, just just really trying to be their best selves personally, health-wise, emotionally, mindset, all of it, because that impacts how we make decisions in our business. So that's the emotional. Socially, I learned a lot about myself. Also, sometimes, and this a lot of other people felt this way at OPM, it sometimes felt kind of small, where it was like, oh wow, there's all these incredible entrepreneurs. And I had never been in a community that was full of people that were wired this way, right? They're just completely very successful, very accomplished. But sometimes it can feel to some people intimidating. And I had to really work on some of those insecurities, work on some of that um stuff that was happening, the lack of confidence. I hadn't felt that way in a long time, but it triggered me in ways that I was like, wow, I need to work on some of this stuff. And uh, and it's really fascinating to see how we build confidence in OPM. This is something I learned actually from some alumni that they built confidence and that we're that there's other people just like us that think like us and have experienced a lot of, like you said, not just the success, but the fuck ups. And we've been in all kinds of places, so we understand each other. So it's really feeling heard, feeling understood, um, and and really having a social network of people that you can count on. You really, it really does feel like a family. You know, you've got the good things, you've also got some of the dysfunctional things. Like it's not perfect, right? And you have to pick and choose like what do you want from your experience? And for me, it was really who are the, who's my circle of five? Who are the people that I really want to stay in touch with? I also noticed socially that the people that I would attract were very different from unit one to unit two, and then a little bit, but not too much from unit two to unit three. I think the biggest transformation was from unit one to unit two, and then just after unit two. But yeah, the people that I attracted in unit one, most of them I didn't really talk to much after that. Like we were just cool, but like they were just, we're just different energy and just different dynamics, just different wavelengths, nothing against them. But I noticed that my relationships in unit two were the ones I mostly stayed with. Um, and then some of them came from unit one, but it was just interesting that I attracted and made friends with people in unit two that I never talked to in unit one. So that was fascinating socially. Intellectually, of course, I don't need to talk much about that, but intellectually I grew a lot. Of course, I learned a lot from the professors and learned even more from my classmates and how they applied the stuff we're learning in the classroom because the application is really hard. For me, at least, it's like you learn these things, you have all these ideas, and you come back, you're like, how the hell am I going to implement this? And so I've had to, yes, hire some certain consultants and experts to help me with implementation because I realized it's it's some of the stuff is hard. Uh, but then learning from my classmates who already were implementing some of these AI strategies, some of these different business structures and models that was like, wow, you can learn a lot. And so that, and then of course, if you work on socially, emotionally, and and intellectually, then financially you benefit as well. So that was obvious. And then my business definitely grew and became more profitable, especially between unit two and unit three.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Great. Thank you. What's one belief that you've changed your mind about over the last decade?

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Yeah, I would say one belief I used to see things in black and white. I used to say it has to be this way or this way. And I would say that that change in my belief changed drastically when I was at OPM because OPM taught me to look more at the gray space. And there's actually someone else, Pierce Cacalda, who influenced my thinking in this as well, who does a lot of work in spiritual mindfulness in that area. But, anyways, it was really about looking at the gray space. That's where the creativity is, that's where we can actually do different things. And before OPM, I used to think black and white, like this had to be this way or this way. And OPM really helped me to embrace the space, the beautiful big gray space in between black and white. And a lot of professors as well, Francis Frey, Daz, some of them, Jeff Pulzer, they really helped me understand and see what's the potentials and the possibilities in that gray space. And that's where innovation really happens. And that's where I started to make a lot of changes in my business. That's where I me started to make a lot of changes in myself. And so, so yeah, it's that how do we identify and play and stay and embrace in that gray space? Um, and and just see things differently and expand our minds. And that's something I have to thank OPM for.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Right. If you could think of a book that has influenced the way that you think, what would that book be?

SPEAKER_01 27:30

Yeah, I would say that I really like Give and Take by Adam Grant. That one is one of my, I mean, I have lots of books that I love reading, but that one really started to help me think about how I want to show up in communities with people socially, with myself. And I've always identified myself as a giver in certain ways, but I also see that sometimes as entrepreneurs, we can switch into being a taker. And I had to really think about, and Daws really influenced my thinking on this as well as how do we implement that in our businesses in terms of customer experience and giving an incredible experience to our wow experience to our customers. But that give and take concept really stuck with me because I always think about like, hey, how can I be a giver and a taker at the same time? You know, Daws talks about how do you create, communicate, deliver, and extract value at the same time. And for me, yeah, that book really influenced me, although I would say that before OPM, I thought you either are a giver or you're a taker, and it's hard to do both. And Daes really helped me take that book and implement that personally and in my business. How do we really be a giver and a taker? Uh, and and everyone wins at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Did Daz recommend that book for you?

SPEAKER_01 28:43

No, I read the book well before OPM, but I just made this connection now because I think that we always think about how do you be a go-giver? But it was OPM that as soon as I got to unit one and he started talking about how do you extract value, I didn't really think about that very much. I was always thinking about how do you give value? How do you create value, but not so much how do you also build a structure or a platform in a way where you can extract value at the same time? So it took me a while to understand and implement that. But learning from my classmates who have ecosystem businesses, lots of portfolios, uh, they I learned how they were able to do that with their businesses. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Salima, in closing, if you could go back to the start of your career and talk to yourself, what advice would you give your younger version now?

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Don't overthink things. I think that uh too not too much, but a lot of education made me very analytical. It made me think twice uh about taking decisions, made me decrease my confidence, I would say, by thinking too much, seeking validation, trying to, you know, I actually had have some of my best ideas is when I just go after them spontaneous. I don't think so hard. And I tend to overthink a lot. I still do a lot, personally in in the business, uh, because I we build a certain amount of trauma, we build a certain amount of jadedness, right? When we, when we when we fail or hurt, that pain is there. It doesn't really go away, even if we work on it. And so yeah, just don't overthink things and just go with the flow. Use a combination of intuition and data, but also listen to your gut. And I think that's something that whenever I did listen to my gut and of course validate, that's when I've had my my biggest successes.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Very well said. Thank you. Going with your gut is what makes uh entrepreneurs stand out. I think if we go for social validation, then in some way the thinking would uh get get uh merged with what the society thinks already of that particular problem statement. So very well said. Thank you very much, Salima. Appreciate your time. And um yeah, I look forward to being in touch.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Thank you so much, Sam.