The year of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the year I spent most of my time on zoom with a multitude of people, did not leave much memories. Nevertheless, Pratik Gauri, the president of social impact agency 5th Element Group,  managed to leave a permanent impact. 

“I keep travelling to different countries on time, but Nepal is a completely different experience for me,” he said during an interview. “I wish it wasn’t virtual.”

He first spoke with me about building ventures, which he became involved with at just 16 years old. Gauri started his first venture, he said, due to social problems like scarcity of water, gender equality, and poverty, all of which he hoped to solve.

By 30, he had already worked with a couple of fortune 500 companies, sat on the board of six startups, and represented India in  prestigious forums such as the named The World Economic Forum in Norway and a Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Oslo. He also started an India chapter for a 5th element group.

“You all know that we all live in the fourth industrial revolution where you have access to AI, Internet of things, Block Chain, 3D printing etc.,” Gauri said in an interview. “If you can use these technologies that have been given to us and use it for the benefit of humanity to solve the social problem then your ideas can be executed into a big model.”

Gauri, a passionate man striving to implement 25 different offices in 25 different countries, achieve the 5th industrial revolution, and begin building unicorn startups, is an example of a visionary changemaker.

According to Gauri, people trying to bring change will fail multiple times before they succeed. But nevertheless, they should always keep our hopes high, and always motivate themselves. 

He concluded the interview by emphasizing the importance of learning from failures and never repeating the same mistakes.