Risk Taking in Building the Career You Want

In the below interview, Kantha Shelke, Principal of Corvus Blue LLC and Senior Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, reflects on leaving corporate life in early 2000 to start her own scientific consulting practice, after years at companies like Ben & Jerry's and ACNielsen (now Nielsen).^1,2

In the video clip, Shelke explains that the biggest risk most people associate with quitting a corporate job is losing a steady paycheck. However, she highlighted that wasn't her biggest concern. What worried her more was giving up the built-in credibility that came from a recognizable company logo, since that association had done a lot of the "talking" for her inside a large organization.

The video highlights that risk taking is part of the process of going into business for yourself. Shelke had to navigate these new waters without the luxury of employing a sales and marketing team, believing that her experience and knowledge, which she had accumulated over 16 years in the private sector of delivering science-based solutions, would be enough to carry the new venture.

And as it turned out, Shelke got the break that she was looking for weeks into her new venture. A phone call from an airport lounge in Amsterdam became the catalyst that helped her grow her business. The caller had an ingredient succeeding in the European market, but he couldn't get any American companies interested and was on the verge of letting his sales team go. He'd been given Shelke's number by a stranger who overheard him describing the problem. Shelke told him she could get him in front of the country's largest bakeries if he supplied solid scientific and analytical data. Within weeks, she had secured meetings inside R&D laboratories at major bakery companies, allowing him to keep his sales team intact.

From that experience, Shelke draws a broader lesson about consulting: expertise is the non-negotiable "table stakes." Clients aren't just paying for information; they're paying for judgment they can trust on things they can't verify themselves. She argues this is where scientists have a natural edge, since their formal education and training already equip them with the credibility needed to build a business, provided they can turn that expertise into results clients can rely on.

References

1. LinkedIn, Kantha Shelke, PhD. LinkedIn, 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanthashelke/ (accessed August 27, 2026).
2. Shelke, K. About. Personal Website, 2026. https://kantha.com/about/ (accessed August 27, 2026).