Find A Way Podcast

Find A Way Podcast

#89 Refugee to CEO w/ Ali Zaydan

Originally from the suburbs of Tripoli, Lebanon. Ali was raised in a catholic french school. He received a scholarship at the age of 16 to be an exchange student in the US, and with that he widened his dreams, ambitions and drive.

Ali was a refugee several times from 2005 until 2014, the first being after the Israeli invasion, the second time in 2012 after the Outbreak of ISIS and then he decided to leave Lebanon in 2015.

He moved to UAE after finishing his MBA from the Lebanese American University and started working in the Sales department with P&G and within one year, he moved to Nestle UAE. Fast Forward to six years later and he is the Strategic National Key Account Manager, managing portfolios with sales that ranged from 10 to 90M USD/year, with a team ranging from 4 to 68 people.

Ali wanted to embrace Innovation and entrepreneurship after an 8 years experience in corporate, so he decided to come to Canada and do his masters in innovation at Queens University.

Ali Zaydan is currently the CEO and co-founder of Drivisa.

Find A Way Podcast

#88 Endless Possibilities w/ Milad Nourvand

Originally from Iran. Milad is a second-time entrepreneur with expertise in tech and marketing. He is the co-founder of Behtarino, a thriving startup in Iran that scaled to 6 million monthly users and a team of over 80 employees.

In 2022, Milad relocated to Canada to pursue a second Master’s in Marketing and co-founded a healthcare startup during his studies. After a year of valuable insights from Canada's market, he shifted his focus to co-founder of LingUp, his current venture, which utilizes AI to help users improve their language speaking skills and achieve fluency more efficiently.

Find A Way Podcast

#87 Entrepreneurial Ecosystems w/ Marlina Ramchandran

Every once in a while, we like to give the opportunity to highlight the incredible work of other immigrants that have been dedicating their professional lives to supporting entrepreneurs and this amazing ecosystem we are part of.

Marlina Ramchandran is a Special Projects Manager at YSpace York University.  She is responsible for planning and implementation of corporate partnership projects, has led the national expansion for YSpace’s women entrepreneur focussed program (ELLA), and supports the international outreach strategy for YSpace, that helps international entrepreneurs to establish businesses in Canada.

With over 20 years of experience spread over startup consulting, hospitality, education and media, Marlina has significant expertise in leading high-performance teams to accelerate the growth journey for startups. Marlina has served on the advisory board of Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship's initiative to build a sustainable entrepreneurial campus ecosystem across 500 universities and academic institutes in India. She is a mentor to early-stage startups and advises on business models, value proposition and GTM strategies. As a lead player in the pioneering team that launched entrepreneurship across major cities in India, she has built large scale city-based startup ecosystems, increased capacities of mentor and investor pool, and trained 200+ university faculty to teach outcome-based entrepreneurship.

Marlina holds a Master's in Business Administration, with a specialization in marketing and has completed her Bachelor's in Arts from St. Xavier's college, Ahmedabad in India.

Find A Way Podcast

#86 Strategic Wellness w/ Rochan Kakar

Rochan was born and raised in a small sub-urban city - Chandigarh in North India. At age 23 he moved to New York to pursue a Masters in Finance at University at Buffalo.

Today, Rochan Kakar is the Chief Strategy Officer at Granimals (www.granimals.com) a digital healthcare startup focused on helping people with mindset-led well-being, injury rehabilitation and prevention care.

Granimals was bootstrapped with $600 and today it is at $3M ARR with ambitions to raise capital in FY 2025.

In addition to Granimals Rochan is an active investor in 15+ startups in the retail tech and consumer tech space.

Prior to Granimals Rochan was a Strategy Consultant at Deloitte Consulting in New York City and Toronto, MS Finance Graduate Student at University at Buffalo, Mentor to D1 students in UB Athletics and a professional soccer player in India.

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