Entrepreneurship Success Story: Riya Sinha

Women Entrepreneurship has become one of the most popular topics in today's time to talk about. Several women have moved out of their shells to set up their own businesses and take the ownership. It is difficult to recognize the first female entrepreneurs of the world. However, Sarah Breedlove aka Madam C.J.Walker was considered as the wealthiest self-made African - American business woman at the time of her death in 1919. Similarly, Kalpana Saroj, Kamani industries is probably the first female entrepreneur of India.

Women Entrepreneur: Riya Sinha

However, this wrytup is going to talk about one such teen entrepreneur who had the power to influence people at the age of 11. Yes, you read it right. Riya Sinha was just at the age of 11 when she founded her company called Fuzia Media Pvt Ltd. She is now an undergraduate student with University of California, Berkeley and is based in Palo Alto, California. She believes, “Activated Leadership is all about how we choose to pursue our passion in helping the world.”

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Her passion is exploration of the blend of feminism, media and journalism and she loves Spanish language. She had written a book about two twins who ran away from an evil babysitter to solve a family mystery when she was 11 years old. While representing the book in a local store in Palo Alto, she came across a six year old girl who got so inspired listening about Riya and wanted to write a book too at the age of 6. This lit a fire in Riya’s mind. She realised that if she can influence one girl, she definitely can influence others.

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Since her childhood, she had been listening to various stories about her aunts from her mother. Her mother belonged to India so she often spoke about the different customs and superstitions that were followed by Indian women. Also about the restrictions imposed on them. This gave Riya an idea of building a community that can help women to get motivated and encouraged. She built a website that served the only purpose of empowering women. And to her amazement, when she spoke to several women on Fuzia, she was happy to know that her purpose is being served.

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Fuzia

Fuzia is an online community that provides a platform to the women across the globe to share their creative art pieces in any field. It allows you to connect and with several artists in the field of writing, photography, art, cooking, travel or poetry or any other creative industry. It also provides a platform to work in part time or full time or as an intern with the freedom to work from anywhere. They organise several contests and rewards the participants. Gradually, they are coming up with several different projects like podcasts, interviews, live chats on their social media in order to share the expertise of various members with others. It aims at creating a virtual talent pool of girls and women to inspire each other and improve their learning culture.

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Riya Sinha came up with this concept in 2012 and got a domain name with the help of her parents. Later in 2015, Shraddha Varma joined hands with Riya as a co-founder of Fuzia and expanded it to various countries of the world through her marketing and management skills. Fuzia is over all managed by Riya Kumar (Mumbai), Ria Singhal (Kanpur) and Sakshi Shrivastava (Bhopal) from left to right.

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Today, Fuzia is a family of around 30k+ members. It has more than 39 millions followers on social media and is popular across 35+ countries of the world.

“We aim to fade away the geographical and community barriers to bring women and girls from around the globe together to build a strong community filled with creativity, inspiration, appreciation, motivation, empathy and sisterhood, thereby creating an environment full of learnings, growth and confidence." - Shraddha

Popularity

The story of Fuzia and her founder Riya has been covered by several publications like Scoop, Bfirst, Empire and her own school publication, the Paly voice. Riya has also been awarded with “Iconic Teen Entrepreneur” by Women Economic Forum in Vancouver, Canada in Nov 2017. She also has spoken at several conferences like Women Economic Forum, Tedx @ Sonoma, Horasis Global Conference in Malaysia Spain, Women of Global Change summit and Diversity Women Conference in Washington DC.

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Thus, we can say that all you need is that spark, that goal, that vision in your heart and mind. If you desire something honestly you can definitely achieve it with all your hard work. And when you know you are doing something good, you will definitely find people around who will support you.

“Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world.”- Hilary Clinton