As an internationally renowned impact entrepreneur and award-winning disruptive innovator Kunal Sood is on a mission to make the impossible possible by transforming a billion lives over the next decade. As the Founder of X Fellows, NOVUS and #WeThePlanet he is focused on positively disrupting the human experience using technological innovation to usher in a Social Impact Revolution, whereby impacting a billion lives will be more powerful than just making a billion dollars over the next decade.
Sood began his career in the fashion and wellness industry in New York City 20 years ago after graduating from Parsons School of Design and worked in the family business for several years, before dedicating his life’s purpose towards high impact entrepreneurship.
Growing up in India, Sood suffered as a young child from a learning disability and obesity and was known as the Rasna Kid. In this infamous television ad, he drank the entire jug of Rasna, and then said, “I love you Rasna.” Given this stereotype Sood was often the target of bullying in school and identified himself as the black Labrador of the family since he was such a misfit and an outlier.
Early in life this suffering taught Sood valuable lessons as a future leader, where he went from being bullied to building the moral courage, emotional resilience and mental strength to stand up to his adversaries. This transformation from a black Labrador into a black Panther metaphorically speaking gave him a new sense of omnipotent power and authority. Sood learned how to harness his disability as his superpower, which became the foundation for his company X Fellows. Today X Fellows is a global network of the most extraordinary outliers on the planet, or what Sood calls the network of networks.
Sood’s own heroes journey cultivated in him a life-long passion for social impact and the relentless pursuit of transformation. His early experiences forced him to transform from being bullied as a victim of his circumstance to becoming a guardian and protector of the people.
From obesity to becoming a fit young influencer in the world of fashion and wellbeing in New York and India, Sood transformed and became an apprentice with the renowned physician Dr. TJ Cherian in Chennai. However, in 2006, he tragically lost his mentor to suicide. This tremendous loss served as the catalyst for his vision for the future of high impact entrepreneurship to transform our world.
From working in the trenches in the slums in Mumbai as a Global Health scientist with Harvard to building global movements at the United Nations General Assembly with iconic leaders such as Prime Minister Modi and Steve Forbes, he used his loss to fuel his passion for transformation by creating organizations that solve global challenges. Leveraging exponential technologies can solve our greatest challenges by uniting global leaders with extraordinary entrepreneurs from the bottom of the pyramid to the very top, thereby uniting the 99% with the 1% of humanity to unite as one world and make the impossible possible.
