admin Marina Tognetti is a passionate entrepreneur who didn’t realise her sterling skills as an entrepreneur until very late in her career. She worked at multiple multinationals with an exceptional track record of success yet her calling for Entrepreneurship was too strong for anyone to stop her from leaving her job.
mYngle was the result of her efforts as an entrepreneur and was founded in 2007. This revolutionized the way people treat the whole process of learning languages. Since its inception, it has been helping a lot people in learning 45 different languages from anywhere and at any time. The USP of mYngle is that it focuses on personalized one-on-one lessons, unlike most of its competitors in the market. It has a team of highly skilled teachers that are native speakers who teach their own language.
Power of The Internet
Ideas are very organic thoughts and often come to us with no particular invitation. It was the same for Marina. She was working as a consultant on a project on internet strategy where she first derived the power that the internet held. She felt that the internet could disrupt entire industries and change the way people buy, sell and interact, forever. This made her first think about creating an online business, although her online language teaching business came later on.
Qualities of a Pathbreaker
In the conversation with our editorial team, she briefed, “We are living in an era of fast and drastic changes. This affects the role of a leader, woman or man, who should not just be able to adapt but also to ride the positive trends. A leader must have a strong vision, to set the direction and anticipate and navigate challenges. She must not be afraid of taking calculated risks to anticipate trends and steer the company in turbulent waters. Last, but not the least, she must be able to build an agile organization, i.e., able to adapt to the fast-changing environment”
Exigent Challenges
There is a myth that it is the hardest to start a company but from experiences, starting a company is just one building block of the whole puzzle. The whole process is a journey to the unknown. You are always throttling the engines and challenges keep on coming towards you.
The toughest parts of the journey are also the best afterwards, once you overcome the challenges.
She enunciated: “The biggest challenge was not at the beginning, but when we had to ‘pivot’ from the initial business model to a completely different one, which is the mYngle we are now. We could have failed or succeeded. Fortunately, we managed to turn the company around, from an open marketplace to a quality global online school; from B2C to B2B. That was the key to mYngle’s success.”
Inspiration to Thrive
Her life was all about picking up challenging things so that she could come out as a better person at the end of the tunnel.
A leader must have a strong vision, to set the direction and anticipate and navigate challenges.
She said, “I like challenges in everything I do. That is the reason why I left Italy shortly after my graduation to live and work in different Countries; why I travelled the world, went backpacking in Asia for one year; why I like extreme sports; why I became a tech entrepreneur. I do not have one specific person who inspires me. I get inspiration from all the people who dare to push the limits and get out of their comfort zones. I am talking about innovators, explorers, even extreme sports athletes.”
Courageous Choice
Life is always full of choices and it is how we execute the choices we make that ends up building our fate. Sometimes your passion calls you so loudly that everything else blurs out and you can just hear the calling. This is what happened to Marina when she had two very different choices to pick from–to continue her successful corporate lifestyle or to go on an adventurous entrepreneurial ride where she might or might not succeed. She chose the latter and the results are speaking for her.
This is the way she describes this event- “I would say that giving up the safety of a successful corporate career to adventure on the unknown of entrepreneurship was the most courageous thing I have done in my life. I took the plunge. Despite no one initially believing in the idea, the idea being complex, having no experience in the industry, and even less as an entrepreneur. I picked this option because it was thrilling and exciting. I had to learn many things along the way, like jumping from a cliff and learning how to fly at the same time.”
Advice to Young Adventurers
She has always had the mindset of an athlete, brains and body alike. She has always had this never giving up attitude in all her endeavours.
If you are willing to take risks and make the hard choices, there is nothing you cannot achieve.
While in conversation with us, she had a piece of wisdom to impart to the people picking on hard things. She said: “The toughest parts of the journey are also the best afterwards, once you overcome the challenges. Do not be discouraged from the initial difficulties or blocks along the road, remember that no matter what challenges you meet along the way, you can always find a solution. And if you are willing to take risks and make hard choices, there is nothing you cannot achieve.”
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