Partner Content, Provided with the support of Wade Institute
What happens when you spend a year immersed in entrepreneurship? Bindi Raja tells Women’s Agenda how she quit her well-paying and secure job for a course in entrepreneurship. Less than 12 months later, she’s come up with a brilliant new business 3D printing models of babies from ultrasound images.
When Bindi Raja quit her secure job as a sonographer to pursue entrepreneurship, she had no idea what kind of business she’d build or where her future income would come from.
Done with pursuing a career merely because it would offer security, she read one book on entrepreneurship called The Freedom Switch, and found part of the author’s journey familiar.
“I was comfortable in my job but I just wasn’t able to diversify my skillset and I just felt really incomplete,” she says. “I remember the day I submitted my resignation email and thinking ‘Am I really doing this? Am I crazy?’ I have security, a six-figure salary, I don’t have to take work home with me and all at the age of 26. Why would I walk away from this? It’s picture perfect.’
Less than one year later, she’s completed The University of Melbourne’s Master of Entrepreneurship, delivered at the Wade Institute, and launched a disruptive new business that prints 3D models of babies at their 20-week ultrasounds. While offering such products to expecting parents, the business is also researching methods for reducing the margin of error when detecting abnormalities during scans. Having only come up with the idea midway through the year, Raja launched the business, TeenyCo, with a software engineer and designer she met through the university. They’re piloting the consumer side of the business across radiology clinics whilst also collecting raw data to produce the algorithms that can support their research.
Speaking with Women’s Agenda just as she’s completing the course at the Wade Institute – after being awarded the $25,000 Naomi Milgrom Scholarship supporting female entrepreneurs – Raja’s also celebrating another win, picking up one of two $10,000 prizes provided by Credit Suisse and CMB Capital during a pitching competition last month.