{"id":39777,"date":"2023-10-20T15:04:25","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/how-this-young-australian-of-the-year-finalist-is-activating-wildly-innovative-ideas-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:04:25","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:04:25","slug":"how-this-young-australian-of-the-year-finalist-is-activating-wildly-innovative-ideas-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/how-this-young-australian-of-the-year-finalist-is-activating-wildly-innovative-ideas-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"How this Young Australian of the Year finalist is activating “wildly innovative ideas” – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"FiftySix<\/div>\n

This week, remarkable young people around the country were celebrated in the Australian of the Year awards.<\/p>\n

One of them was Indian-born teenager Taj Pabari, Queensland\u2019s Young Australian of the Year and finalist for the national Young Australian of the Year award.<\/p>\n

Pabari, aged 17, began his venture into tech entrepreneurship at the tender age of 11 and just a few years later, he founded Fiftysix, a three-year-old venture that makes build-it-yourself tablets and coding kits for children.<\/p>\n

Aiming to bring world-class education in computer science, entrepreneurship and creativity to 1 million kids by 2020, Pabari and his core team of about 15 are actively working to expand the business globally.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re all very, very young,\u201d Pabari tells StartupSmart.<\/em><\/p>\n

With bases in both Brisbane and San Francisco, Fiftysix already services students across Australia, including in remote towns, as well as in North America, Kenya, South Africa and the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

To date, the team has reached 45,000 children from private schools and disadvantaged communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just making a push in to Saudi Arabia,\u201d says Pabari.<\/p>\n

Breaking the rules to be\u00a0a tech entrepreneur<\/h3>\n

Pabari admits that playing by the rules was never his strong suit.<\/p>\n

Inspired by the likes of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, he too wants to change the world with technology\u2014and the traditional route from classroom, to university, to graduate job and a corporate ladder was not going to get him there.<\/p>\n

Pabari says he would stay up till the early hours of the morning to listen to online keynotes by these global pioneers.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the time I hit grade six, I had three suspensions to my name, I was not the best kid,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was disinterested by the education system \u2026 but I was intrigued by technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started my first business at 11, which was a tech blog for kids, by kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

At its peak, Pabari says the site was getting about 100,000 hits and $10 in Google AdSense each day\u2014and from that point, he was smitten with the idea of being an entrepreneur.<\/p>\n

But at the age of 13, he attended a Tony Robbins seminar and came to the realisation that he needed to do more to make a real world impact. The idea for FiftySix was born.<\/p>\n

Wanting to empower disengaged students around the world, Pabari visited Nepal to explore how he could do this.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe numbers fifty six in numerology mean opportunity,\u201d says Pabari.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to give young people all around the world, the opportunity to create technology not just use and consume it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Changing the stats on diversity in tech<\/h3>\n

Considering the global challenge of gender diversity in tech, Pabari says the FiftySix team is making an active effort to change the statistics, both internally and externally.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the start of 2016 we were an all male company. We kind of recognised that there are too many alpha males in the business,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But the business has kicked off 2017 with 60% of its facilitators being women, Pabari says, and is aiming to serve a target market that\u2019s at least 50-50 girls and boys.<\/p>\n

Activating\u00a0“wildly innovative” young minds<\/h3>\n

Recently, Pabari watched a reluctant six-year-old schoolgirl, who initially \u201ccouldn\u2019t think of anything worse\u201d than attending a FiftySix tech workshop, walk up on stage with an idea for a $90 robot that enters the brain through the nose and detects tumours.<\/p>\n

He says she even researched parts for the robot on Alibaba and priced it to make it affordable for everyone because she wanted to stop brain tumours taking more lives.<\/p>\n

The girl had a relative with a brain tumour, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe presented the idea on stage and ended up winning the event,\u201d Pabari says.<\/p>\n

With workshops running across Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne and in remote parts of Australia, Pabari says FiftySix is activating \u201cwildly innovative ideas\u201d that will help shape Australia\u2019s future economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to make sure that we are exposing young people to enterprising skills and soft skills as well,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Follow StartupSmart on<\/em>\u00a0Facebook<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Twitter<\/a>,\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a>\u00a0and iTunes<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, remarkable young people around the country were celebrated in the Australian of the Year awards. One of them<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39777"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}