Navin always wanted to fly high in life. An engineer and web developer, he pursued his dream of becoming a pilot. Leadership is what one needs to become a pilot is what he strongly feels.

Navin Sridhar is a trained commercial pilot and founder of Webstart 360.

Navin was born and brought up in Mumbai. He did his initial schooling from Fatima High School. After that, his father got transferred to Pune and Navin completed his higher studies there.

Navin always had a dream to become a pilot but it was a costly thing to pursue. So, Navin decided to go for engineering and did Instrumentation Engineering from Vivekananda Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Navin then did a two-month internship in Air India and got a sense of the working of airlines.

Navin shares that he applied to work in a software company and almost got selected. However, one of his friends was going for pilot training and Navin also tagged along with him. He says that then there was no looking back. He researched various institutes and then joined Delta Airways Cadet Pilots Training Program. In 2018, he went to Phoenix, Arizona for eight months of training. He came back to India and got his flying license in 2019. However, he had to additionally train on an Airbus 8020 to get a license for commercial flight flying.

Navin shares that around this time Go Air started recruitment for trainee pilots and he cleared the initial rounds. However, COVID-19 hit, and the process was canceled.

Navin shares that he did not waste his time even after that and dedicatedly started working in the web development field. He shares that this was the beginning of his COVID-19 experience which he initially thought would not last longer than two months. He started his own company and was working with clients online. Navin launched a Clinic Management Software for doctors. He also continued with his cycling ritual after the first unlock was announced.

Talking about education and experience, Navin says that initial schooling and engineering provided him with a vision and understanding for the future. However, experience has helped him in performing well and improving his skills.

Navin shares that to be a pilot one needs to have good leadership skills, work well with the team and have command and control over them. You should also be good at managing time, and understanding and adapting to changing environmental variables as well.

Talking about his role models, Navin says that he is inspired by Steve Jobs. Navin is motivated by the way Steve Jobs worked with his team and understood the market and also captured it.

If given a Time Machine, Navin would like to go back to his school and play more sports, and indulge in more physical activities.

Navin shares his struggles and says that his stay in the US was a tough one as he had to manage everything, from cooking to classes, on his own. He adds that one has to absorb a lot of things in a very short time of pilot training and it was a tough job to do.

Navin says that he is a part of a cycling club and goes for thirty to forty kilometers of cycling in the morning. He and his friends also organize what they call, ‘Dabba Parties’ and would gather at a place and chit-chat and eat things brought from their homes in a ‘Dabba’.