Amodhi Weeresinghe – CEO of HCL Designs Marketing Agency
It is an astounding feat not just to overcome great adversity but to use the life skills developed through surviving it to harness your goals and become everything you dared to dream.
At the age of thirty, yeah that’s right, thirty (!), Amodhi is the embodiment of what it means to take what you learned while surviving and using it to thrive.
Growing up in the midst of the Sri Lankan civil war meant early life began with a bang – literally and proverbially. Living in an environment where armed secruity check-points and bomb drills was the norm promoted this child to develop some pretty powerful personality traits – resilience and the ability to be highly adaptable are a couple that comes to mind. The flip side of developing some leviathan coping strategies at a very young age was social isolation when she relocated to the US at the age of nine, days before the 9/11 attacks. Amodhi recalls being at school that morning, and while the other children reacted with immense fear, shock, and distress, she was unphased because, remember, in her country of origin, this type of event was no phenomenon but instead a regular occurrence.
As an adult, Amodhi can look back with great empathy for her peers, understanding that from an American perspective, such events were unprecedented and thus shook them to the core; but back then, being the “unphased new kid” separated her on a profound level from her peers, and she became the weird one, the other, who on top of having brown skin and being from a country no one had heard of or knew anything about, she also didn’t have the “right” reaction and stood out even more. Nine days after moving to a completely different country with a new language and culture, Amodhi was now dealing with classmates calling her dad a terrorist.
As she put it, her childhood was “atypical,” to say the least, but she got through that too. By the age of nine, she dealt with growing up in a country at war with itself, moving across the world, and being completely socially isolated and segregated in her new “home”. How do you like them apples?
Amodhi turned to the example of her rockstar of a father, who himself modeled what it meant to take the little life given him and turn it into gold, and decided she was going to do the same.
This tech entrepreneur and stock market mogul has a high school education. He got into MIT but being unable to afford the plane ticket meant he didn’t get to attend. And yet, this man became one of the most prolific figures in automation stock exchanges. His immense success is what brought Amodhi’s family to Boston after winning the contract to automate the city’s stock exchange.
All that being said, growing up under her father’s influence led her to adopt the notion of not needing to fit the “mold” and daring to embrace an alternate reality of striving for your dreams and, by that and hard, relentless work, – being and becoming exceptional.
Her days-old experience of being othered by peers instead of being embraced as a friend had a profound impact on shaping her perspective of America and her lack of a place or space here. And so, embracing her father’s mode of operating in the world, she reacted by immersing herself in academics and competitive running. The latter also proved to be a space where instead of being celebrated for her physical strength and talent, she was told by peers that she shouldn’t be the sprinter she was because while she was brown, she wasn’t the right type of brown to be running those races. In her words, “My whole upbringing was [listening to that inner voice telling me] ‘I’m going to prove people wrong and not let them tell me where I belong.’”
Amodhi’s vision of an egalitarian world, full of equity and access, informed and guided many of the significant decisions she made – starting from the time of early adolescence. The knowledge that it wasn’t right for only a select few to have access to resources led her to think she should attend the Princeton School of Public Relations and Affairs Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton and work for the UN. In pursuit of this goal, she became involved in Model UN while in high school and learned about the bureaucracy of public service. She is a self-proclaimed “rule follower,” but this doesn’t mean she likes it. Instead of finding her niche, she realized she didn’t want to restrict herself or her career to a place where she had to conform to climb the ladder. Thus, it’s no surprise that she is now a tech entrepreneur running her own business.
High school is far from the best years life has to offer for many of us, but for Amodhi, it consisted of utter upheaval and heartbreak. By junior year, her parents had divorced and her biological mother revoked all parental rights. Her mom essentially broke up with her over a text message, and Amodhi never saw her again. Years later, she would tell the guys she dated that they couldn’t break her heart because her mother already had.
It was this agonizing experience that led a young girl who grew up without religion or faith, to turn to God, and this connection to her Creator grounded her and paved the way for the rich spiritual life she celebrates today. Awareness that she couldn’t rely on other people and was too unstable to rely on herself, led her to seek a relationship with God; one that has been her guiding compass for the last 15 years.
And then began the college years. When she arrived at Williams College, she found herself surrounded by people who had a script she didn’t have access. They knew how to network, what internships to apply for, and who to vacation with on breaks. Peers were funded by their parents with exorbitant monthly allowances and ready-to-be-swiped credit cards. Amodhi came from means herself, but her father’s perspective of the family’s wealth was, “I’m rich, but you have to earn it. You will graduate without debt, but everything else is on you.”
Amodhi recalls working since the age of fourteen, starting out scrubbing toilets and washing dishes at a golf course. She remembers sitting in classes thinking, “I know they are speaking English, but I don’t know what vocabulary they’re dropping.” But from her perspective, this was a positive thing because it’s good not to know what’s going on in the world and put yourself in situations where you must learn. Williams didn’t give her a specific career direction but taught her how to work hard and enter spaces and negotiate those spaces. She never leveraged her parents’ network to get internships; everything she did was on her own.
After graduating from Williams, Amodhi was lost, floundering around in the endless possibilities of “what’s next” and found herself in the most unlikely of places. By now, her father had remarried, and Amodhi’s adopted mom was a bright light in her life. Regardless of strong familial relationships, when they offered her a job working for the company they had just founded, she was repulsed. The last thing this dreamer EVER envisioned herself doing was working for mom and dad in an industry that left her feeling apathetic. And yet, somehow, that is exactly what she ended up doing – working in the ever-challenging world of financial technology.
Working for parents who held her to a higher, almost unobtainable, standard than all other employees was hard enough, but add to that being a woman of color who was 15 years younger than all of her colleagues, and you have a recipe for challenge and growth. Amodhi learned what she needed to know, and got really good at managing her emotions and proving people wrong. At this point in the interview, she explained, “My favorite things to hear from people are ‘no’ and ‘you can’t do it’” because the challenge to prove them wrong is irresistible. And so she found her career going in a direction she never intentionally sought out – marketing and design and product development, but was good at it, and for a time, that was good enough.
When she was 26, 1/1/19 was the specific day Amodhi realized she didn’t just want to be “okay” anymore. The feeling that she was merely checking off boxes and not really living her life engulfed her, and so she took immediate action. She broke up with her boyfriend and gave her parents and the company five months’ notice. The dreamer dared to dream and it brought her to the role she currently works in for the Indian-based nonprofit – Shanti Bhavan’s Children’s Project. The organization empowers youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and changes the trajectory of their lives. Amodhi packed her bags and moved across the world yet again to start working at the ground level as an on-site administrator and to learn from and humble herself before the people who had devoted their lives to the mission of the org. She didn’t share the position she left and the money she had been making because these things were irrelevant at this point and in this place. Still, once she learned the ins and outs of the organization, she shared her background with them and was encouraged to create a program helping these kids who were growing up in slums get into and attend schools like Stanford, Duke, and Dartmouth. Later, her boss said if she hadn’t pushed for it so hard, the org never would have dreamed of setting its sights on such an ambitious (and yet achievable) goal. “I’m the person that dreams beyond the scope of dreaming. Many people have told me throughout my life, ‘You need to stop acting like a kid because that is not the reality.’ Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I do need to think like a kid. Maybe I need to think that there are endless possibilities because that’s when opportunities happen. Yes, it’s scary but that’s where the magic happens.”
Covid brought Amodhi hack to the US in 2020, where she continued working for Shanti Bhavans Children’sProject as their Global Operations Manager. The work has been gratifying, and the sacrifices she has made to do it have been rewarding, but this dreamer never ceases to dream, and so by 2021 something new began to brew within her. That was the year her family experienced financial ruin, and her goal shifted to how she could serve them while also elevating the world around her. After a conversation with her mother, her need to fully unleash her reservoir of unfulfilled potential onto the world, Amodhi founded her company, HCL Design which is the meaning of her name – Happy Courageous Lion – focused on fintech and Web3 growth marketing.
When asked to talk about the business she founded and will be pursuing full-time come January 2023, Amodhi couldn’t help but get a bit braggy because the things they are doing are inspiring. “We know the industry to do complex marketing campaigns. We know tech and finance, so we can relate to the founder, but we also know the consumer side of things and know how to make it relatable to them. I wanted the opportunity to work specifically with female and female-identifying entrepreneurs.” As one herself, she was and is fully conscious of how hard the entire process can be. There was no seed funding, very few resources, and no one teaching her how to apply for loans. There is no script for women being extremely successful, and finding tangible examples of women who went from 0 to 100 in their success trajectory is challenging. So she decided to be that for other women. “Here, as a woman of color, I can carve out a great narrative and space and open up opportunities for people to do this after me or come up with me. Let’s all do this together!”
The specific service HCL Design provides to their clients is compliance conscience marketing for early-stage fintech and Web3 companies looking to get seed funding or who already have seed funding and are looking for the next growth stage. HLC Design is very good at getting an audience to rally around a fintech product, making it seem relevant to them, showing investors the growth opportunity, and presenting this info and data in a way that makes people excited to invest. “We can do this because we have a regulatory compliance background and know what you can and can’t say in this space. We also have a finance and tech background so we can speak to your developers, compliance officers, founders, or finance people. This is a unique trio when it comes to marketing.”
Amodhi is that rare bird of a boss who creates, manages, and models work-life balance for her employees. She pays them salaries she can’t afford because she believes in them. “Part of valuing an employee is financial compensation. I can help them focus on being exceptional because they don’t have to worry about paying their bills or worrying about being valued as a person.”
Knowing what she knows now if Amodhi could have a moment with her younger self, her words would be reassurance. “You will accomplish everything you set out to do. Even if there are bumps along the way, you will do it, so just trust the process.”
Often, the advice given in hindsight is what a person wished she had done, but Amodhi did just that. The dreamer never stopped dreaming.
It is an astounding feat not just to overcome great adversity but to use the life skills developed through surviving it to harness your goals and become everything you dared to dream.
At the age of thirty, yeah that’s right, thirty (!), Amodhi is the embodiment of what it means to take what you learned while surviving and using it to thrive.
Growing up in the midst of the Sri Lankan civil war meant early life began with a bang – literally and proverbially. Living in an environment where armed secruity check-points and bomb drills was the norm promoted this child to develop some pretty powerful personality traits – resilience and the ability to be highly adaptable are a couple that comes to mind. The flip side of developing some leviathan coping strategies at a very young age was social isolation when she relocated to the US at the age of nine, days before the 9/11 attacks. Amodhi recalls being at school that morning, and while the other children reacted with immense fear, shock, and distress, she was unphased because, remember, in her country of origin, this type of event was no phenomenon but instead a regular occurrence.
As an adult, Amodhi can look back with great empathy for her peers, understanding that from an American perspective, such events were unprecedented and thus shook them to the core; but back then, being the “unphased new kid” separated her on a profound level from her peers, and she became the weird one, the other, who on top of having brown skin and being from a country no one had heard of or knew anything about, she also didn’t have the “right” reaction and stood out even more. Nine days after moving to a completely different country with a new language and culture, Amodhi was now dealing with classmates calling her dad a terrorist.
As she put it, her childhood was “atypical,” to say the least, but she got through that too. By the age of nine, she dealt with growing up in a country at war with itself, moving across the world, and being completely socially isolated and segregated in her new “home”. How do you like them apples?
Amodhi turned to the example of her rockstar of a father, who himself modeled what it meant to take the little life given him and turn it into gold, and decided she was going to do the same.
This tech entrepreneur and stock market mogul has a high school education. He got into MIT but being unable to afford the plane ticket meant he didn’t get to attend. And yet, this man became one of the most prolific figures in automation stock exchanges. His immense success is what brought Amodhi’s family to Boston after winning the contract to automate the city’s stock exchange.
All that being said, growing up under her father’s influence led her to adopt the notion of not needing to fit the “mold” and daring to embrace an alternate reality of striving for your dreams and, by that and hard, relentless work, – being and becoming exceptional.
Her days-old experience of being othered by peers instead of being embraced as a friend had a profound impact on shaping her perspective of America and her lack of a place or space here. And so, embracing her father’s mode of operating in the world, she reacted by immersing herself in academics and competitive running. The latter also proved to be a space where instead of being celebrated for her physical strength and talent, she was told by peers that she shouldn’t be the sprinter she was because while she was brown, she wasn’t the right type of brown to be running those races. In her words, “My whole upbringing was [listening to that inner voice telling me] ‘I’m going to prove people wrong and not let them tell me where I belong.’”
Amodhi’s vision of an egalitarian world, full of equity and access, informed and guided many of the significant decisions she made – starting from the time of early adolescence. The knowledge that it wasn’t right for only a select few to have access to resources led her to think she should attend the Princeton School of Public Relations and Affairs Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton and work for the UN. In pursuit of this goal, she became involved in Model UN while in high school and learned about the bureaucracy of public service. She is a self-proclaimed “rule follower,” but this doesn’t mean she likes it. Instead of finding her niche, she realized she didn’t want to restrict herself or her career to a place where she had to conform to climb the ladder. Thus, it’s no surprise that she is now a tech entrepreneur running her own business.
High school is far from the best years life has to offer for many of us, but for Amodhi, it consisted of utter upheaval and heartbreak. By junior year, her parents had divorced and her biological mother revoked all parental rights. Her mom essentially broke up with her over a text message, and Amodhi never saw her again. Years later, she would tell the guys she dated that they couldn’t break her heart because her mother already had.
It was this agonizing experience that led a young girl who grew up without religion or faith, to turn to God, and this connection to her Creator grounded her and paved the way for the rich spiritual life she celebrates today. Awareness that she couldn’t rely on other people and was too unstable to rely on herself, led her to seek a relationship with God; one that has been her guiding compass for the last 15 years.
And then began the college years. When she arrived at Williams College, she found herself surrounded by people who had a script she didn’t have access. They knew how to network, what internships to apply for, and who to vacation with on breaks. Peers were funded by their parents with exorbitant monthly allowances and ready-to-be-swiped credit cards. Amodhi came from means herself, but her father’s perspective of the family’s wealth was, “I’m rich, but you have to earn it. You will graduate without debt, but everything else is on you.”
Amodhi recalls working since the age of fourteen, starting out scrubbing toilets and washing dishes at a golf course. She remembers sitting in classes thinking, “I know they are speaking English, but I don’t know what vocabulary they’re dropping.” But from her perspective, this was a positive thing because it’s good not to know what’s going on in the world and put yourself in situations where you must learn. Williams didn’t give her a specific career direction but taught her how to work hard and enter spaces and negotiate those spaces. She never leveraged her parents’ network to get internships; everything she did was on her own.
After graduating from Williams, Amodhi was lost, floundering around in the endless possibilities of “what’s next” and found herself in the most unlikely of places. By now, her father had remarried, and Amodhi’s adopted mom was a bright light in her life. Regardless of strong familial relationships, when they offered her a job working for the company they had just founded, she was repulsed. The last thing this dreamer EVER envisioned herself doing was working for mom and dad in an industry that left her feeling apathetic. And yet, somehow, that is exactly what she ended up doing – working in the ever-challenging world of financial technology.
Working for parents who held her to a higher, almost unobtainable, standard than all other employees was hard enough, but add to that being a woman of color who was 15 years younger than all of her colleagues, and you have a recipe for challenge and growth. Amodhi learned what she needed to know, and got really good at managing her emotions and proving people wrong. At this point in the interview, she explained, “My favorite things to hear from people are ‘no’ and ‘you can’t do it’” because the challenge to prove them wrong is irresistible. And so she found her career going in a direction she never intentionally sought out – marketing and design and product development, but was good at it, and for a time, that was good enough.
When she was 26, 1/1/19 was the specific day Amodhi realized she didn’t just want to be “okay” anymore. The feeling that she was merely checking off boxes and not really living her life engulfed her, and so she took immediate action. She broke up with her boyfriend and gave her parents and the company five months’ notice. The dreamer dared to dream and it brought her to the role she currently works in for the Indian-based nonprofit – Shanti Bhavan’s Children’s Project. The organization empowers youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and changes the trajectory of their lives. Amodhi packed her bags and moved across the world yet again to start working at the ground level as an on-site administrator and to learn from and humble herself before the people who had devoted their lives to the mission of the org. She didn’t share the position she left and the money she had been making because these things were irrelevant at this point and in this place. Still, once she learned the ins and outs of the organization, she shared her background with them and was encouraged to create a program helping these kids who were growing up in slums get into and attend schools like Stanford, Duke, and Dartmouth. Later, her boss said if she hadn’t pushed for it so hard, the org never would have dreamed of setting its sights on such an ambitious (and yet achievable) goal. “I’m the person that dreams beyond the scope of dreaming. Many people have told me throughout my life, ‘You need to stop acting like a kid because that is not the reality.’ Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I do need to think like a kid. Maybe I need to think that there are endless possibilities because that’s when opportunities happen. Yes, it’s scary but that’s where the magic happens.”
Covid brought Amodhi hack to the US in 2020, where she continued working for Shanti Bhavans Children’sProject as their Global Operations Manager. The work has been gratifying, and the sacrifices she has made to do it have been rewarding, but this dreamer never ceases to dream, and so by 2021 something new began to brew within her. That was the year her family experienced financial ruin, and her goal shifted to how she could serve them while also elevating the world around her. After a conversation with her mother, her need to fully unleash her reservoir of unfulfilled potential onto the world, Amodhi founded her company, HCL Design which is the meaning of her name – Happy Courageous Lion – focused on fintech and Web3 growth marketing.
When asked to talk about the business she founded and will be pursuing full-time come January 2023, Amodhi couldn’t help but get a bit braggy because the things they are doing are inspiring. “We know the industry to do complex marketing campaigns. We know tech and finance, so we can relate to the founder, but we also know the consumer side of things and know how to make it relatable to them. I wanted the opportunity to work specifically with female and female-identifying entrepreneurs.” As one herself, she was and is fully conscious of how hard the entire process can be. There was no seed funding, very few resources, and no one teaching her how to apply for loans. There is no script for women being extremely successful, and finding tangible examples of women who went from 0 to 100 in their success trajectory is challenging. So she decided to be that for other women. “Here, as a woman of color, I can carve out a great narrative and space and open up opportunities for people to do this after me or come up with me. Let’s all do this together!”
The specific service HCL Design provides to their clients is compliance conscience marketing for early-stage fintech and Web3 companies looking to get seed funding or who already have seed funding and are looking for the next growth stage. HLC Design is very good at getting an audience to rally around a fintech product, making it seem relevant to them, showing investors the growth opportunity, and presenting this info and data in a way that makes people excited to invest. “We can do this because we have a regulatory compliance background and know what you can and can’t say in this space. We also have a finance and tech background so we can speak to your developers, compliance officers, founders, or finance people. This is a unique trio when it comes to marketing.”
Amodhi is that rare bird of a boss who creates, manages, and models work-life balance for her employees. She pays them salaries she can’t afford because she believes in them. “Part of valuing an employee is financial compensation. I can help them focus on being exceptional because they don’t have to worry about paying their bills or worrying about being valued as a person.”
Knowing what she knows now if Amodhi could have a moment with her younger self, her words would be reassurance. “You will accomplish everything you set out to do. Even if there are bumps along the way, you will do it, so just trust the process.”
Often, the advice given in hindsight is what a person wished she had done, but Amodhi did just that. The dreamer never stopped dreaming.