Community Highlights: Meet Mayank Mishra of Televeda

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mayank Mishra.

Hi Mayank, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today. 
For reasons I considered romantic at the time, I decided to pursue criminal defense litigation in India. Shortly thereafter, the reality of that poorly thought-out plan struck, and I decided to abort that mission. My step-father was practicing as a Geriatric in South Dakota in 2013, and he suggested that I partner with him on starting a telemedicine company for seniors.

I had no experience with entrepreneurship or knowledge of the health IT sector, but I had nothing to lose. I was armed with confidence & optimism to embark on the American dream. After a lot of hard work and struggles we promptly failed within a year.

Even though I couldn’t execute the business plan, I fell in love with the problem. Actually, I became obsessed with it. The data was obvious; it indicated a high growth rate in global senior populations, a rise in loneliness & poor care coordination. But more than just the data, my issue was about hubris. This was the first major failure I had experienced, and it didn’t feel great. So, it kept nagging me while I went on to pursue a string of various jobs as I would figure things out.

I started with outdoor sales work. The plan was a pitch to ADT Security Systems about evaluating senior home care in their portfolio. Instead, they offered me a job as a Security Consultant to learn the trade, and I began my blue-collar journey. Sales was a great fit, it doesn’t care about your educational background or if you have a useless degrees foreign law degree.

The only thing that matters is if you can deliver. Those were some of my best work memories; the road was my office and every day I’d get to visit a new home & chat with people from all walks of life; there was no take-home work or office politics to deal with, and I learned a great deal about a proper work ethic & being useful with my hands.

It brought food on the table, so I could support myself & my immigrant wife through her law school at the University of Arizona. The only issue with the job was that I wasn’t getting any intellectual stimulation. And there’s nothing more tragic than wasted potential.

At the time, everything in the world pointed to tech. It was exciting and prosperous & people were making amazing things. I would study how to program during the evenings. I would do my best to hold on to a job for a year before getting bored and quitting. This cycle continued across my twenties; I was restless and kept changing my fields, not just my jobs.

After sales, I went tech adjacent into digital marketing. But programmers seemed like the cool ones, so I had to learn how to do that wizardry. When my wife graduated and got a job, I attended a coding boot camp in New York and was lucky to land a job as a software developer. I absolutely loved programming; it was an opportunity to get paid to solve puzzles.

This could have been my happy ever after. Unfortunately, while I loved the work, I was not a fan of the work culture at this company. So I bounced again and found an amazing tech startup that had a great team & operated a remote-first environment. It was fun & I learned a bunch.

That restlessness & curiosity in my twenties helped me develop a multifaceted background. I now had skills like sales, marketing & product development that would be instrumental to help build my company. And in 2018, after much prodding & pleading with my wife, I decided to take the risk and retry this age tech company again.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Being an entrepreneur certainly helps you become more resilient. We’re in a space where the default response is always a no & the status quo doesn’t like to be disrupted. We deal with obstacles all the time.

Everyone at any level is dealing with obstacles & challenges; I guess it comes down to what scale of problems you want to deal with. It’s been nice to level up in this regard: will anyone use this product, will I get a paying client, will anyone agree to join my venture, how do I manage the payroll, how do I scale this technology, etc., etc?

One major challenge that came our way was when our whole business model flew out the window during the pandemic. At the time, senior living & nursing homes were our primary buyers, and they were all shutting down & dealing with much larger issues internally.

While we considered a cute niche solution prior to 2019 (virtual events for seniors), all of a sudden, the service became a necessity. Every week, we heard news of several new competitors raising massive funding rounds. And while we were tempted to go down the fundraising route ourselves, we’re grateful that calmer heads prevailed, and we stuck to our sustainable bootstrapped model.

We’ve been impressed with Televeda, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Televeda is a social venture with a mission to combat social isolation & loneliness for vulnerable populations. It’s a study of the human experience and what it means to connect with others & share life with them.

What started as a way to play bingo with our grandparents turned into something with public health ramifications. And now we’re grateful to be supporting many more underserved populations like low-income minorities, rural farmers, LGBTQ2S+, Veterans & Native Americans, all looking for community & a chance to connect with each other safely.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I am married to a very successful & badass woman. I am what they call a Trophy Husband.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.televeda.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Televeda/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/televeda