Aditi Shrivastava is the co-founder and CEO of Pocket Aces, India’s leading digital entertainment company known for its content brands FilterCopy and Dice Media. With over 40 million followers on its portfolio of brands, Pocket Aces has now become a full-fledged production company with a huge distribution across social media channels.
Aditi’s goal was always to create relatable and delight-evoking content for Indian youth, and it all started when she was living in the US. Having been exposed to tons of international media, she wanted to offer that quality to the Indian population, especially the youth.
Growing up in Kuwait and describing it as a safe and serene country, she experienced a pure, peaceful, and undisturbed childhood with a ton of wholesome moments shared with her close circle of family and friends.
It was so good that her dad asked her to rate different parts of her childhood on a scale of 1 to 10! She also spent bits and pieces of her life in Baghdad and Bombay as her family had to escape from the Gulf War that occurred from 1990 to 1991.
Startup Story of Pocket Aces
Ever since college, Aditi was a huge movie buff and binge-watching all sorts of films was inevitably part of her daily routine. An alumna of the prestigious Princeton University, she completed her Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science and went on to work at Goldman Sachs, a well-reputed global financial services company. She worked there for a little over 5 years and came back to India with her now husband.
Right after coming back, the long-held idea of Pocket Aces came to life in 2014. Initially, the idea was to make a film production studio, planning to make feature films.
The first year of Pocket Aces was spent trying to make these high-budget projects. After film production no longer aligned with their goals of time management and autonomy, they switched to easily digestible and bite-sized digital content in the form of YouTube and Facebook videos, which were relatively easy to produce.
Hence, their first short video was released in 2015 under Dice Media and the journey never stopped since. She has produced a lot of heartwarming and relatable content for her brands, including the web series Little Things, Operation MBBS, What the Folks, Crushed, Adulting, etc.
Have you ever felt the urge to shut the world down and just lie down with that cup of coffee? The only missing thing is that feel-good video accompanying that very sip of coffee on a slightly gloomy day. Pocket Aces is a digital entertainment company which will provide you with exactly that.
Remember Little Things? The giddy and adorable, but realistic web series? It was produced by Dice Media, one of the brands of Pocket Aces. Along with Dice Media, it operates many brands like FilterCopy— a channel for short videos, Loco— an e-sports streaming platform, Gobble— food travel and entertainment, and Nutshell— informational yet entertaining videos.
Content Creation and Success Secrets
Coming from an engineering background helped her run her business in a purely analytical way. She started the business with a solution-oriented mindset and hasn’t looked back since.
“Engineering has helped break down problems, question everything, not take anything for a given and find your solution,” says Aditi Shrivastava. She truly believes in breaking down problems to their tiniest parts and working her way up to find a unified solution.
Finding your voice is something that she highly advocates for. Merely going along with the crowd and creating content that doesn’t reflect who you are isn’t the best approach.
She encourages people to find their strengths and niches and stay true to themselves and their unique abilities. After all, why merge in with the crowd when you’re allowed to stand out?
