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Key Takeaways Abhi Thanendran is the cofounder and CEO of Tilt, a live commerce platform.
On Tilt, shoppers log into a stream of live auctions and flash sales hosted by sellers.
Thanendran says that what unites successful sellers is not audience size but attitude — they are all extremely “hard workers.”
Tilt cofounder and CEO Abhi Thanendran likes to point out that none of the 13 people who did $1 million in sales on his live commerce platform last year were influencers — and that is exactly the point. Thanendran created Tilt for people willing to start from nothing, learn the platform and turn a home or small shop into a seven-figure sales channel.
Thanendran traces his ambition back to a childhood shaped by war and dislocation.
“I’m a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee,” he tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “My family moved and settled in Canada when I was about 8 years old.”
They landed in a low-income neighborhood in Toronto, where his parents pieced together odd jobs to make ends meet. Both of Thanendran’s parents had been trained as teachers, and he says they gave him a solid educational foundation. That push carried him to the University of Waterloo, where he studied mathematics.
After university, Thanendran’s first stop was actuarial science, modeling when people would get sick or die. “It’s a very morbid style of job, so I didn’t really enjoy it, but the math was interesting,” he recalls. He pivoted into hedge funds on Wall Street and Bay Street, using math to predict the market while funds traded on top of his models.
He then jumped into tech, joining $115 billion fintech Revolut in London when the company had fewer than 30 people. “I actually met Neil there, day zero on the job…we still sit beside each other, but now in our own company,” he says of his Tilt cofounder, Neil Shah.
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