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This Trio of 30 Under 30 Founders Turned Early Rejections Into Hidden Blessings
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Quitting smoking has never been easy. With the health risks known and a strong, negative social stigma attached to smoking, people have plenty of reasons to stop purchasing packs of cigarettes. Most fail to curb their smoking habits on the first try. Yusuf Sherwani, Maroof Ahmed, and Sarim Siddiqui started Quit Genius, a gamified cognitive behavioral therapy application to assist tobacco users in their journey to stop smoking. Quit Genius has raised nearly $2 million in seed funding from Village Global VC, Pioneer Fund, Arab Angel VC and various angel investors. All three founders are 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe honorees in the Social Entrepreneurs category.
Frederick Daso: How have your past failures produced current success?
Yusuf Sherwani: We faced an uphill challenge just by quitting our careers in medicine to create a startup. Three students studying medicine is an atypical team for starting a company. Investors were continually asking us what kind of experience we had to tackle the problem of getting people to quit smoking. After getting…
