Abdullah Shaikh, Class of '25

My story begins in India, where as a child I witnessed children my own age begging on the streets. Those images stayed with me. I realized early that I wanted my life’s work to create social impact: something that could shift opportunity into the hands of people who didn’t have it.

In Year 6, I discovered entrepreneurship and innovation as a way to channel this desire. At the Dubai STEM Olympiad, I helped design a device to aid the visually impaired in navigating roads. Later, I built a wearable system for disaster victims trapped beneath rubble. These experiences showed me that technology can spark change—but they also revealed a limitation: my projects rarely moved beyond prototypes.

That changed when I understood the missing piece was financial literacy. Without it, even the most promising ideas struggled to grow into sustainable ventures. To bridge this gap, I founded Tyche Online Academy, a youth-led startup that delivers financial literacy workshops across Dubai, India, and the U.S. From there, Tyche expanded into the FinTalk Forum Podcast, where I interview entrepreneurs and innovators, and the CreditJr App, an AI-powered finance tracker that teaches teens spending habits through a virtual credit score. Together, these initiatives create a model that blends awareness, community, and habit formation.

I applied to HUVTSP to learn how to take Tyche to the next level: to scale a startup sustainably, understand the global entrepreneurship ecosystem, and gain insights into the intersection of business and technology from world-class mentors.

During the program, I remember the intensity of the lectures, the guidance of mentors, and the thrill of collaborating with like-minded peers who were equally driven to solve big problems. Additionally, what stands out most vividly is the internship project. It was my first time working closely with people from such diverse cultural, academic, and professional backgrounds. Each teammate brought a different lens to problem-solving, whether in design, marketing, or technology. Collaborating across these perspectives taught me how innovation thrives when ideas intersect, and how adaptability and communication are just as vital as technical skill. The experience broadened my worldview and gave me the confidence to take Tyche from a youth-led idea into something that could scale beyond borders.

Looking ahead, my goal is to grow Tyche Online Academy into a global financial literacy movement. I aim to expand workshops across new geographies, develop the CreditJr app into a household tool for teenagers worldwide, and continue scaling the FinTalk Forum Podcast as a space for dialogue on finance, entrepreneurship, and technology. Beyond Tyche, I want to deepen my understanding of entrepreneurship at the intersection of business and technology, learning how to create ventures that are not only impactful but also sustainable. HUVTSP gave me a glimpse of what is possible when you combine innovation with community, and I want to carry that forward into every venture I build.