Brendan Kumarasamy‘s parents immigrated from Sri Lanka in the early nineties to Montreal, Canada. They insisted their son learn French. That didn’t make it easy on a kid who was already struggling with communication. Today, he speaks three languages, English, French, and Tamil.
Elementary School from Hell
Struggling with communicating also meant it was difficult for Kumarasamy to make friends in his primary school years. Couple that with his having surgery on his arm, thus making it crooked.
“No one wanted to be friends with me,” says Kumarasamy. “It was really hard to socialize.”
Things weren’t much easier when he came home from school. His father was a heavy alcoholic. His home life did, however, greatly impact his life trajectory.
“Because he always thought I was going amount to nothing, I was super competitive growing up as a kid. Except my competition wasn’t sports. My competition was presentations. I wanted to prove him wrong.”
Finding His Niche
In business school, Kumarasamy approached his studies like a high level athlete. He trained for hours so he could get the dream job his dad said he could never get.
His father passed away, and it was then Kumarasamy learned the valuable lesson his dad left him. If his parents never moved to Canada, if his dad didn’t push him to learn French, he wouldn’t have attended Concordia University, which had the world’s largest competition program. He would be stuck in a third world country. It would have been difficult for him to have the success he has had.
Kumarasamy became the youngest professional speech coach by accident. He loved coaching but never thought anyone could make money from it.
When he worked at IBM, he coached a community of students, who then found great jobs out of university. They came to Kumarasamy and asked him how did he learn how to speak? There was no answer. He didn’t have money for a coach. Investment in resources wasn’t an option.
That’s when he saw the opportunity. There was a gap in the market. Nobody shared free content on how to communicate effectively. MasterTalk was born.
Kumarasamy’s Purpose
Then he grew his YouTube channel. “I’m a big believer of not relying on the algorithm. That was never how I got to 25,000 subscribers. Forget a thousand followers, are you willing to have a thousand conversations?”
The channel was for the 15 year old kid that nobody cared about, who was never taught effective communications skills. She might be in South Africa, Cambodia, anywhere in the world. This was his incentive to build his channel. It was his incentive to share his abilities with others to help them be better at communicating with the world.