The founder and CEO of Speakin and author of 101 Lessons To Be A Damn Good Speaker! on making mistakes, seeking support and staying true to yourself
When Singapore-based entrepreneur Deepshikha Kumar and her team decided to track the words ‘speaker’, ‘consultant’ and ‘thought leader’ on LinkedIn they were surprised at what they discovered. “Nearly 300 people add those words to their profile on a daily basis. But you can't become an expert overnight,” says Kumar. “There’s way too much noise building up out there.” Since she founded her startup Speakin four years ago in India, she has been sifting through the noise to find credible mentors and experts who can help to coach others. Today, her company has emerged as Asia’s largest digital platform for professional learning covering several hundred topics including entrepreneurship, public speaking and motivation.
Kumar herself has been widely celebrated as a pioneering female entrepreneur in the region. She has received numerous accolades ranging from Indian newspaper The Economic Times’s Most Promising Women Leaders award in 2021 to the Asia Women Icon Award, which she took home in 2017 and 2019 in Singapore. Last year, she also published a book titled 101 Lessons To Be A Damn Good Speaker! sharing strategies for public speaking.
It’s no surprise that Speakin counts the likes of Accenture, BCG and Shell among other major corporations as its clients who sign their employees up to receive one-on-one mentoring or participate in group sessions. “The idea was to provide learning from the best people that are out there,” says Kumar, who adds that the platform also has a blog, e-learning content, live sessions and podcasts. “In India there’s a saying: ‘The son of a king becomes a king’, but I believe he becomes a king not by virtue of being born in the [right] family but because he has observed what his father has done all his life. That’s what I wanted to bring in.”
Unlike tedious group training sessions that HR heads often have to coerce people to attend online, Speakin takes a more personalised approach and offers a chance to receive one-on-one coaching from fascinating individuals who you may normally not be able to access. After taking a psychometric assessment and inputting your goals, platform users can be matched with mentors ranging from TV personality and businessman Daymon John from the show Shark Tank to Bear Grylls, a former British special forces soldier and survival instructor. To become an accredited mentor on Speakin is not an easy task. At the minimum, it requires having an impressive CV and several years of experience. As many as seven out of ten people who apply are rejected.
Kumar says that experienced mentors have played a critical role in her life. “I have had many. I get stuck all the time. I'm not intelligent, I'm just resourceful,” she says candidly. “That’s why I always recommend women go out, talk and find their support.” Among her earliest mentors were her parents. She grew up watching her mother contribute equally to finances in the home which was inspiring. Her father also played an instrumental role in laying a foundation for her public speaking skills. From a young age, he would ask her to sit and read books and magazines aloud and give her pocket money to motivate her. “Then, in the early '90s, when we started getting English-language movies in India, he would ask me to read out all the names when the credits would roll at the end,” she says, explaining that he was eager for her to master English.