Shivam Mistry

Son of an electronics business family in Silvassa, upgrades himself through the fellowship and works as an executive assistant with a leading electronic system manufacturer in Pune

Hailing from a family with a well-established  mobile and electronics business,  Shivam Mistry was exposed to and fascinated by business from a young age.

In 2020, Shiv was in his final year of BBA and had decided to take a gap year after college to prepare for CAT. Shiv was enthusiastic to learn and do new things but was unable to put that into action.

Shiv felt that being in a small town was restricting his exposure and growth. He was eager to learn new things and meet like minded people. Following informative pages and watching youtube videos didn’t fully satisfy his hunger beyond a point.

One day, he came across a video on Instagram by Nisha Chawla, a co-founder of the Enterprise India Fellowship about choosing between “joining the family business or doing an MBA”.  He could relate with every sentence and immediately checked out the entire page.He religiously kept up with the account for over a year and a half and tried to learn as much as he could.

In March 2020, when the nationwide lockdown was imposed, Shiv had hoped to take some time and rest at home. However, within the first seven days of the lockdown, Shiv ended up joining the Enterprise India Fellowship as a Partner (students who are a part of the Fellowship are called Partners), and kicked off a year more productive than he could ever imagine.

The situation in the country was very dire, and due to the sudden travel ban, many daily wage laborers from different states were stranded in their cities of work without access to basic resources like food. Many citizen groups and organizations jumped in to help in different ways and one such initiative was the Daal Chawal Initiative in Pune, led by the Pune Police and citizen activists like Sathya Natrajan.

To contribute to this, as their first project, Shiv and his fellow Partners, with guidance from mentors like Nisha Chawla, worked to help raise funds for the Initiative by helping organize a three day career growth hacks workshop, the #start weekender. The workshop was hosted by nine enterprising young people from different fields to help participants dedicate a weekend to reflect on their lives using 10 different tools and techniques to identify their strengths, inner conflicts and explore next steps. In return for participation in the workshop, participants were encouraged to donate to the Daal Chawal initiative. In two weeks, Shiv and the fellow Partners got 50 people to participate in #start and one lakh rupees were raised to support the initiative.

Through this project, Shiv learned how to fundraise, create leads and close sales as well as create a unique user experience for the participants. Shiv contributed to the project with action-orientedness, discipline and punctuality. Ankita Parashar, Business Partner and Marketing Lead at Enterprise recalls, “When we interviewed Shiv for the Fellowship, he had a white board in his background and he carefully wrote notes from our conversation. We knew then, this guy won’t have to be hand held for anything, rather he will be leading!” And through this project, his peers and mentors were amazed to see his time management and “doer-ship” in action.

From experiencing day to day operations of his family business, he had learned that it was quite different from the theories learned in college which made him realise that applied knowledge is power.

Before joining the fellowship Shiv had shared, “The primary reason I want to join the Enterprise India Fellowship is to gain practical knowledge by working on projects which will also help me build my career, skills, relationships, and self growth.
And through the fellowship, that’s what he ended up doing.

Throughout his fellowship journey, he worked on over five projects including in-house projects like #karo & #start and a client project called Chandrayaan0.0 with the Area Sabha Association of Pune.