Designing miracles on his own terms
Modern-day schooling is out of date. Period. The grade school years intended to help students find who they are turns out to be nothing but a hyped-up seating facility for carbon copy education with leaders, innovators, and creators becoming robotic machines blindly generating grades.
Mr. Anish Wijesinghe
The story of Anish Wijesinghe will hopefully inspire parents, professors and policymakers’ alike to think and feel differently towards education, and help to spawn a new breed of critical thinking in young adults like they’re supposed to.
As he was training to be a professional tennis player, Anish was homeschooled from 13 when living in France. “I didn’t like school too much. Everything in school revolves around a set pattern,” the shy Anish, in his office in Colombo, said settling down to what would be a two hour long discussion with the Business Times.
Emphasising that education has to modernise, he said it doesn’t cater to human nature on a fundamental level. “Curiosity is killed in schools,” added Anish, noting schools interpret what the companies want and they are ‘off the dot, severely’.
Don’t reject failures
Students are taught to reject failure, with bright and capable students left behind because their learning style doesn’t fit into teachers’ boxes.
Even in this fresh decade – when anybody can make money online – millions of would-be entrepreneurs are deterred by the system. Anish is one person that’s gone against the system and come out on top.
He said in school, one doesn’t know what he/she is getting to at the end of it but in an online environment one knows. “Not knowing where you’re going what you’re doing doesn’t breed the best people.” It’s true, entrepreneurs like in Anish’s case aren’t willing to walk on the norms set by society.
He added that during the ages of 10 to 13 the creative mind in a child starts kicking in and this is the time that creativity has to be nurtured. During 13, he was on the computer – his happy place. When he started an online business (through YouTube channel – anishwij with 350,000 downloads) in 3-D animation garnered him 70,000 followers for the tutorials and animation. As time went on he also became a teacher on 3-D design with 20,000 followers and he was earning. “So from 13 to 17 years that’s what I was doing. At 18 I went to the US for final year of school but decided against going through with it,” he smiles. At 19 years he started his company (which evolved through his YouTube channel) and named it Motion Miracles by using whatever the money he earned as a kid.
Game development
Motion Miracles is a game development/production company (which on YouTube has 40,000 subscribers) that works on building mass market games and animations. “We are also working on gamified solutions for education and other areas outside of entertainment,” Anish explained. He published a game (after prototyping 80 games) with Voodoo Games (the biggest mobile game publisher in the world) called Tie N Dye becoming number four on the US mobile App Store. “This is the first time a Sri Lankan mobile game achieved number 4 in the US.” With a million downloads its number 2 in the simulation genre.
What he hopes to do with the company is to scale the communities in game development. “We do not have a degree for game development and I want to make an impact in this space and scale the company into a US $1 billion company in the future,” he added. Initially he wants to venture into Canada and India.
Through Motion Miracles, Anish has an online school to teach gaming development. “I want to empower the team to develop the next generation of games and I want the next generation of developers to have free education. Eventually I want to pay people to learn this craft and have Boot Camps etc,” he said. He has already put 100 people through the online school without any effort like advertising.
He says that gaming isn’t recognised in Sri Lanka (when it is a couple of billion dollars bigger than Hollywood) and there is a lot of work to be done in terms of favourable policies. “It should be a proper field and it should be recognised.”
Offers to list
Anish has received several offers to get listed and he is considering. “We are looking for grant funding to expand into Canada and India.” He added that the industry is moving so rapidly and the intended grant funding will go to raise the team and the online school.
The company has got into other things. The first – Wibble incorporated in New York two years ago, is a social media vlogging platform that allows people with basic social media experience to seamlessly create self-made documentaries. “We are building tools for creators and companies to be more transparent in their processes. On YouTube I saw the most authentic documentary which wasn’t fake. This is why Wibble was founded which made self-made documentary easier.” Wibble is like Instagram stories but now the whole journey can be shown – e.g.; building schools in Africa etc.
Cryptech, a crypto currency company that’s building 2 phased immersion cooled mines and a crypto brokerage was incorporated by Anish and a co-founder who wishes to stay anonymous. “We are laying the necessary foundations for crypto currency applications in Sri Lanka.” They intend to build a brokerage and a crypto currency exchange in Sri Lanka. Now the company is raising funds for the exchange.
Machine learning
An engineering company working in smart city surveillance technology, Nimby was incorporated to pursue R&D in surveillance technology. “We aim to create machine learning solutions and decentralised infrastructure for smart cities to function in the future.”
When asked how he manages to do all this at such a young age, the shy Anish smilingly said “I was always eyeing a new challenge and also thinking long-term. Each one brings a fresh challenge and I can learn from one company and apply that learning process to others.”
He has a staff strength of 25 and all of them are 25 years and under.
All his companies have a decentralised approach. “I do not want to build a hierarchy. Eventually I want my role as the CEO to be irrelevant.” He’s passionate about building a concept of ‘ownership driven cultures’ in his companies. “I want to empower the teams. We hire people who have come with a wide scope of reference. With that, they don’t need to be told what to do.”
Employees decide
With 20 per cent from the revenue he receives from the sale of applications a fund for staff will be set up soon and the employees will decide on where the monies should go. “For an example they can ask for a salary increase or they can go for a conference overseas etc.”
Each team is given their US$ 1000 budget with which they can push the game on the store without having to get any permission from anyone.
He stresses one should not treat employees as resources. He is heavily accommodating everyone’s dreams. “I tried to help them in any way – even personally – as much as possible and the quality of work and his individual happiness are both on an equal level.”
When one thought all these achievements are enough, Anish has learnt guitar on his own. “I learned guitar, beatboxing and coaching on my own online.”
There are 1.4 million views of his online guitar playing. He was on TEDx with his music and has 15,000 followers.
“I did not have any boundaries with people saying that I can’t do this or that,” he added stressing again that schools limit children’s’ creativity due to the various social pressures that encounter. “No one is gauging your abilities in school.”