After dropping out of school, Mehak Vohra spent the next two years working her way up the corporate ladder before establishing SkillBank, where she can now assist people land jobs at marketing agencies across the United States. 

Vohra was an experienced ghostwriter and copywriter from an agency, which inspired her to establish her marketing.

When the 21-year-old growth hacker attempted to launch Skilbank, it was initially conceived as a growth marketing training program geared toward newly established technology businesses. She first started the organization during the pandemic in 2019 and aspired to train a workforce that could soon fill entry-level positions in marketing. 

She has also established relationships with her business partners, who are her primary motivation in maintaining a healthy balance within the company and developing productive plans. 

Even though the pandemic has made people jobless, Vohra had the chance to build up the organization to help service workers upskill and gain employment. Skillbank was able to raise $1.5 million thanks to the support of investors like Jason Calacanis, Hawke Media Ventures, Soma Capital, Hustle Fund Champion Hill Labs, Transcend Network, John Kobs, Nelson Wang, Saunder Schroeder, Zack Bloom, and TikTok’s own Josh Richards and Griffin Johnson.

Investors have teamed up with Skillbank partly because they want to contribute to the funding of technologically savvy marketers. They believed that despite marketers’ best efforts, they are not educated in the field and often lack a solid foundation. They also liked that SkillBank was making their training easily accessible and thought the standard education model could use some improvements. “Mehak is a rockstar, and we believe she is the person to get this to success,” said Erik Huberman, CEO of Hawke Media, in praise of Vohra’s decision to Skillbank.

Skillbank just closed a funding round that helped numerous marketers make a career change and, as a result, increase their remuneration. Vohra also has designs for growing SkillBank’s business. At this time, a subscription to SkillBank’s courses starts at $4999, or $7199 if paid in installments. The SkillBank team may be small at the moment, but they have big plans to take on industry leaders like Masterclass and General Assembly.

Nothing can prevent anyone from becoming successful; even a student who quit school and later decided she wanted to devote her life to assisting others in achieving their goals can turn her dreams into a reality.

The ability to cook does not, however, automatically translate into the capacity to manage a restaurant. The food industry is a fiercely competitive one.

Fortunately for Vietnamese chef Nikki Tran, he succeeded as an “accidental chef” despite his previous failures in the restaurant industry. But what exactly is the secret to his success? 

Nikki launched his first restaurant in Vietnam but was doomed to flop from the beginning because of its quick decline. It started on a drunken night when he drafted his first business plan. He had put down a deposit on a new location that same night, hired a chef, and opened a new restaurant within a week. 

The only problem was that the chef didn’t show up which caused trouble on the first day it was open. The restaurant also struggled to bring in customers despite the backing of Nikki’s famous actress friend, which resulted in a steady loss of revenue. 

Nikki recognized his missteps and realized he was not as well prepared as he thought. Consequently, he worked to improve and reinvent his culinary skills. It did not end up being a challenge for him; instead, he worked toward opening a second restaurant in Houston, Texas, when he returned to the United States. 

At that time, he got hooked on crawfish and began eating them frequently. He took it to Vietnam and experimented with it using a typical technique of its culture. His family, friends, and the first people in Vietnam are thrilled to try it out, and they’ve called it “Viet-Texan cuisine.”

This innovation, which was his take on the now-classic Viet-Cajun crawfish boil made using Vietnamese river prawns, became the one that accidentally brought and pushed him into the international limelight.

Soon, he was profiled by media outlets such as Vice, NBC’s Travel Voyager, Houston Eater, and Netflix. He did not let his first failure or lack of experience prevent him from pursuing his dreams and developing relationships until he became a Netflix star. He is also a familiar face in David Chang’s Ugly Delicious, Phil Rosenthal’s Somebody Feed Phil, and the critically acclaimed Street Food: Asia.

Today, Nikki operates three locations of his restaurant, known as “Ku Ba Quán.” And even though he is known for breaking the rules of traditional Vietnamese cuisine and blending in international influences whenever he feels it is appropriate, he has the impression that he has always gone his own way.