Shlok Srivastava: Demystifying technology

As a teenager, Shlok Shrivastava would fiddle with his father’s laptop to make videos. After 100 or so attempts, he realised that he might not be good at it. But as the content creator and entrepreneur now puts it, he had the intent to make it work and kept going. Now he is one of the most influential tech reviewers, with a subscriber base of more than 7.5 million for his YouTube channel Tech Burner.

Starting Tech Burner was not a planned move for Shrivastava. It began with making in-depth tech-centric videos for his friends at SRM University in Chennai to simplify the concepts of mobile software. The exercise helped him realise that the simplicity of videos carried some value. He then set out to polish his presentation skills. Seven years later, the tech-influencer creates ‘How To’ tutorials on gadgets, product reviews and life hacks, and has a viewership of more than 50 million every month.

His motto and vision? “We want to make technology simple, fun and entertaining. It is a drawback of technology that it cannot reach common people, and that they can’t understand the nuances of it. So we are trying to figure out ways to reach every part of society and take complex technologies to them.”

These videos are created under Shrivastava’s company Burner Media. Apart from creating content for social media platforms, it manages a couple of websites and five apps, which have over 2 lakh downloads.

Gaurav Khatri, co-founder and CEO of consumer electronics brand Noise, vouches for Shrivastava’s videos: “Shlok, with his brand of inimitable humour and fervour, made tech reviews easily consumable for Indians, thus making them more accessible and widespread. He’s truly a force to reckon with.”

“We are going to create the biggest content distribution network in the world. We are going to scale our content creation from a grassroots level,” says Shrivastava. “We’re going to go regional into every city, town, and village, and provide as much value as possible.”