brand logo

Meet the young business tycoon – Anish Wijesinghe  

16 Aug 2020

By Mahika Panditha Another Sunday, another amazing cover feature. This week, The Sunday Morning Happinez had the honour of speaking to one of the most inspiring people (at least, I think so!) He is the Founder/Co-Founder of four companies, of which he is hands-on in two. These companies are Wibble, a social media platform that allows for easy vlogging, and Motion Miracles, a game development and production company which makes market games and animated stories. I even downloaded one of the games! And one of their games, Tie N Dye, hit No. 4 on the US app store as well, with over one million downloads in one week! Can you believe that? It is absolutely amazing! Another company is called Nimby, which is an engineering company that builds smart city technology. And also Cryptec Innovations, which is a cryptocurrency miner focusing on two-phase immersion cooling and brokerage. Cryptec happens to be one of only two companies in the world with this technology. With all of this combined, Anish has offices here in Sri Lanka and in New York too. He wants to build a company that is of the same scale as Google, wherein he can also work with several talented people that share the same, if not similar, vision for the future. If you did not already know, Anish has dedicated his life to modernising education. This is a great move and is honestly an admirable one. He shared that he aims to do so “to a point where I know I’d be happy with my kids growing up in it. I want to create a system where education accommodates all types of people and is based on love and support rather than structure and bureaucracy”. Other than the amazing work Anish is currently doing, he also loves to build and invent products, create tools, and cultivate platforms. His passions do shine through in his work. On the sidelines, though, he enjoys binging on Netflix and playing video games with his friends – we are right there with you Anish! Before we dive in, a small fun fact: Anish failed two years of homeschooling and just got through his final year of school. Despite this, it truly does go to show that you can do whatever you put your mind to and whatever you are passionate about. Tell us a little about yourself Anish. Thirteen years of my life were spent training to be a professional tennis player. Travelling and training really shaped my mindset into something different to the norm. I trained for multiple years in between the US, France, and Thailand, eventually having to stop my career due to injuries and a severe case of asthma. In my teenage/tennis years, I began homeschooling, which was both a blessing and curse. I had a lot more free time and I was isolated. The isolation was great for developing my own identity in pursuing passions without being limited because of other people’s boundaries. During this time, I started my first business in interactive media and scaled my first business. My hobbies include making the most random TikToks, playing the guitar, beatboxing, and playing games with friends. I also love learning and discovering new things. Hence, why everything I do has some sort of educational theme around it. As for my personality, I tend to be a bit rebellious and could come off as either entitled or unappreciative because I feel that systems can always improve and get better. I challenge everything to no end and that can get annoying at times. I respect intellect and people with developed technical and emotional minds. Let’s discuss Motion Miracles. How did you start and what pushes you to keep going every day? I started my first personal business in interactive media at the age of 13. Due to homeschooling, I had additional time to work on my passions and had no restraints from teachers or other students telling me what the norms were for kids my age. Through the internet, I taught myself 3D animation and some coding. I then started teaching online and accumulated 25,000 student followers and over 40,000 followers on my animations/productions. My views accumulated to over seven million plus. With the traction on YouTube, I started selling products and my most successful product had over 350,000 downloads which enabled me to bootstrap and move my passions forward in game development with Motion Miracles. I believe gaming and interactive media is going to play a vital role in education and consumption of information. I want to be leading some of the trends and be in control of some of the tools of the future in the gamification of old systems. The ability to visualise and gamify data while creating something entertaining and more authentic is really interesting to me. That’s what pushes me every day – seeing my dream come together day by day and being challenged daily on bringing concepts to fruition. Right now, there is a lot of compromise on what I envision for the company, but I find joy in the things we are trying to accomplish at this stage of the company. What made you think of the concept for Tie N Dye? Tie N Dye was created by the game development team at Motion Miracles. Binura, our game development team lead, used to tie-dye clothes with his family for fun and he thought it would be a great idea to make it into a game. He led/executed the project, worked with Voodoo (the largest mobile game publishers in the world), and published the game. I almost had no say in the development of the game or communications; I only facilitated and helped focus Binura’s mind towards his work. We have a culture that empowers the teams to ideate, execute, and finally take to market. The game development teams are given a daily budget of $ 1,000 to test their game ideas and see whether a game has potential. I believe that leadership should default to trusting teams to be passionate about what they do and my role eventually is to make myself irrelevant in the company. Are you planning to release any more games in the near future? We work on games all the time! We have built around 80 games so far; we have just not launched them because they didn’t hit the criteria for publishers to purchase the monetisation rights. We have built 80 games so far in the last year just to get this one game out. Now that we’ve done it once, we are confident in replicating a hit game. We plan on building larger-scale games for PC and console within the coming years. There is a lot of infrastructure that needs to initially develop in Sri Lanka before larger-scale projects can be feasible. We are laying the foundation with our online school and training resources to build communities here. In the meantime, we are scaling in Canada and India to be able to have the appropriate resources to approach larger projects. Where do you hope to see Motion Miracles in the next five years? I want Motion Miracles to have scaled into a large-scale company with projects in various industries. Whether that’s AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) technology or sensor technology, I’d like the company to be leading some of the world's most innovative technologies and housing some of the best talent. If we haven’t accomplished that or are not on the right trajectory, I’d leave the company and start over, but I’m doing my best to ensure that doesn’t happen. I’d also want the company to have had multiple hit games in different industries and hundreds of millions of downloads. Ideally, also have a show or a Netflix series that has generated millions of views and made a lasting impact in the film market as well. So, how would you describe your work ethic? I think I am incapable of doing a mediocre job, probably due to having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder). If I am not challenged in something, I will get distracted or just get annoyed. I have ways around it but it's a tonne of effort. I work long hours and have an intense focus all the time, as I know I need to be all in or I’d end up being all out. If I’m not thinking about something all the time, I would lose steam or motivation in the work. I’m constantly thinking about how different outcomes affect the larger picture of my work and always seeing what new avenues I can activate. I always question current workflows and look for ways of improving it. Some may call it obsessive, but to me this is how I need things to be. I’ve a multitude of different ways of working and this works best for me. What would you say has been one of the biggest life lessons you have learned so far? To work within my framework. I believe the mind cannot be forced to perform but it needs to happen naturally. Just like how a seed naturally grows into a tree when its environment is nurtured. I had the tendency of asking too much of myself or forcing myself to adhere to what the books told me without fully coming to the realisation myself. It made me really fake and I eventually didn’t even know who I was anymore or what I liked. Being a bit selfish and giving myself time was really important for my recovery. I eventually learned to trust myself and my mind to work to perform towards what I want in life. What is your opinion on the inclusion of technology or lack thereof in the education system in Sri Lanka? Right now, I think emotional intelligence is lacking. No matter how bad the education system is, if we raise an army of emotionally intelligent beings, Sri Lanka will change for the better. Right now, families are not nurturing individuality and are stripping kids of their unique identities. Children grow up praising people with egos, people who live in denial, and people who don’t appreciate human connection. This is a fundamental flaw in being able to create a person that can act on empathy and their individual perception of what’s right. There are a lot of avenues that need fixing, but if I could flip a switch to fix one thing, it would be to create more emotionally aware people. This would naturally fix our education systems and our governmental issues over time. Companies also need to raise the bar on what is expected out of graduates. I believe if a professional setting is pushing the bar, it requires people to be emotionally aware to be able to perform at such a high level. There is no one clear answer, just a multitude of different active players that are hindering the growth of our educational systems. My goal is to continue reducing the bottlenecks in each system to hopefully create a more conducive environment for people to blossom and be fulfilled. With the current global situation, what do you think of the concept of online learning? I think online learning and self-learning is the future. I think that Covid-19 only accelerated the inevitable growth of online/self-learning. If you think about it, when you search for guitar tutorials on YouTube, you get the top rated tutorials right at the top, while physically you’re only subject to what's available in your region. This concept is only going to grow. Any advice for budding entrepreneurs? Build your own framework of reference. There is so much information out there and tonnes of self-help books that almost force you to work on the realisations of others. You cannot force your mind to do anything – it has to happen naturally and authentically. It might take longer to do something but it's worth it! You will lose your identity over time if you follow what everyone else is saying you can and can’t do. In short, learn a lot, let those learnings be kept in question, and do what you think is cool and you think works. Don’t listen unless it makes complete sense to you and you’re okay with it. That’s how you build your unique identity as an entrepreneur. Also, don’t do what makes you happy – do what you think would make you feel fulfilled. Consistent happiness is impossible and there’s so much pressure to maintain it. Accept sadness and everything else that comes with the journey and you shall feel fulfilled. Ignore praise. People are always going to try to bind you down to a norm, telling you that you did a great job or calling what you did an “achievement”. I’d tell you to throw all that praise out the window or it goes straight to your ego. That’s a great way of putting unnecessary pressure on yourself and limiting your potential of going above and beyond. Ask yourself why you started the business in the first place and don’t let external things get in the way of that. Anyway, you should not start a business for praise and approval, you should start because you think it's cool to you. If you are starting a business for praise that’s fine too – just know it, admit it, and joke about it because humans are funny creatures.


More News..