SBenegaL

Category: Education

  • Education – We inherently know what to learn!

    I found this floating in the Facebook world and this sparked off a thought! – Could we make education really personal. I guess there are multiple dimensions of this, and it would be worth exploring these in a series.
    Albert Einstein possibly put this statement out of his own experience! Especially his early childhood when he was considered a good for nothing kid! But today we consider him as one of the many geniuses who walked on the planet.
    As humans, we all possess an inherent urge to “learn something”. This “something” could range from the standard courses taught in college to just what we find around – could be art or just a simple skill too.
    Most likely, we donot know the source of this inspiration that comes to us – exciting us about the “thing” we intend to learn… The question then is – “If we inherently know what excites us to learn a specific thing, why shouldn’t we think of personalizing the learning process?” 
    Recognizing that individuals are all different, like different things, learn different things at different paces should be the bedrock on which we should develop our learning systems. Education though broad-based, should be flexible to give the necessary space for students. 
    An interesting perspective it to allow the diversity itself to be a guiding factor in the process of educating oneself. Constraining and creating a rigid mindset could be detrimental to the education’s cause of broadening one’s horizon.

  • Why dont students challenge the exisiting norms?

    We really don’t find students challenge their teachers today? This is so much an Indian phenomenon…
    This is how one of the conversation started today with Rishi… yes, Rishi and I keep discussing quite a few topics relating to the education in India. 
    In this case it was interesting – I for one have not seen many of my students challenge me on the concept, I have seen some students who did try to put me out of the comfort zone due to attitude issues, but not on the subject matter. This too synched with what Rishi had observed, however I differed on his overall assessment that this was an Indian Phenomenon. 
    We have heard about Gargi or Maitreyi who had been in a detailed discussion with the renowned saints of Janaka’s period on various topics which required tremendous expertise. So it is not possible that discussion or even dissenting with the opinion of one’s teacher is completely unheard of. In fact most of the early scriptures from here are in the from of a discussion and highlighting the nuances of the knowledge/philosophy. The drawback however was that not many were exposed to the knowledge as it was transmitted orally as the primary means and the written scripts were accessible only to a select few. 
    I would rather blame the reason for suppression of the questioning mindset to the period when the system of knowledge transfer was broken thanks to the fear! Yes, the history of India has had enormous challenge to the survival of the religion of the masses at least a couple of times during the Mughal Period and later on during the British Rule. People being closely attached towards religion, feared the influence of the new beliefs and tried to avoid their religion being taken away! They possibly tried to prevent questioning of the fundamentals of their own religion under the influence of the new thoughts and began suppressing the thought of a creative discussion. 
    Coupled with this, the system of generating mass scale clerks through the education system that was introduced during the British Era only worsened the problem. You needed people who could follow instructions while not really applying their minds!
    The effect we see of this – is today in the form of people who dont think independently or question the foundation and belief!
    The way forward I see is to encourage discussion as part of the knowledge discovery and dissemination. It is only through effective dialogue and discussion that one develops Independently thinking individuals who could fearlessly voice their opinions.

  • Look beyond technology when starting a Product Business

    If you have been following your friends who are starting off closely with a new technology business idea – you would have probably found the following scenario:
    Very often, one finds engineer entrepreneur who comes up with an interesting insight from technology and attempt venturing out on his/her entrepreneurial journey. Invariably, one finds that most of these  entrepreneurs focus on developing their products for a very long time, so much so that, they do not know who their market is! They wouldn’t have even spoken with a single customer! They face a constant internal resistance and find it hard to get off their office where they are comfortable with their technical expertise and step into selling the product they are building!
    In making these statements I do not intend to say that entrepreneurs who are technologist cannot build a business – it is an attempt to get them to move out of their offices into the shoes of a businessman.
    As some one who has started a business, begin with the following understanding:
    1. Technology is not Business – Technology is generally a component of business that helps in delivery. 
    2. Get out and Sell – It is important to sell the product that you are building, if you don’t sell the product there is no commercial use of product you might build.
    3. Engage with your customers early – Do not wait for the complete product that you think has a market. Go in with simple to use features and see how the market reacts and listen to what it wants.The following suggestions could help you to start on this:
    • List product features into a priority (your thought) and freeze in on the first 2-3 features in this list
    • Make a list of customer (prospective) that you think could benefit from these features
    • Quickly build this feature set (do-not change as of now)
    • Approach a Customer and ask him to try out as a commercially free product but give you feedback
    • Listen to the feedback – improve your product with the feedback

    Clearly, listening to the market early is important to ensure that your product is market accepted and it is important to do it early than late in the process of building your business. Get out of your comfort zone – businesses really need to be as close to their customer and not in the high rise offices…

  • Entrepreneur’s Interview – BrizzTV

    Sachi: Good Evening Amar, thank you for accepting to come on to this interview.  
     
    Amar is the founder and CEO of Brizz TV. Brizz TV is an innovative platform that delivers internet content directly to the television using set top box technology.  
     
    Without further adieu I would like to ask Amar to briefly tell us about his background and then about the idea?  
     
    Amar:
    Thank you. My name is Amarendra Sahoo, I am a 2004 Computer Science Graduate from NITK Suratkal. After graduation from Suratkal in 2004 I worked across various companies like – Cisco, Juniper, and Lucent for about 5 year. Then I joined IIM Bangalore in 2009, and that is when I started the company – 2009 December.
    Clearing the CAT I would say was an accident, and I joined IIMB – also to fulfil the dream of my parents, wife etc – not many could get a selection to IIMB and not join it. In all this, I was still a “Techie” at heart. Neither the work as an IT professional nor the MBA knowledge was able to satisfy the void I felt. There was a period of self introspection and the meaning of the MBA and the work that would be of interest to me while at IIMB.
    I was also reading some very interesting technology and entrepreneurship blogs at the time, – the achievements of people seems to push me to believe I could do something too. I felt I had quite some time at my hand and I should consider starting off.
    I come from an embedded system, networks background and that probably fed me to believe I could do something more challenging than a e-commerce site. At the point I was thinking of all the idea I consciously stayed away from it even though ecommerce sites were getting a lot of funding.
    While all these questions were popping up at the back of my mind, one day while sitting in a case discussion on Reliance Big TV – as part of the Marketing Course; It struck me that I could be very interesting if we could show Wikipedia on the television without any complex internet stuff in it! A regular TV but with Internet content in it – That is how BrizzTV began.
    At BrizzTV, we show selected Internet content directly on your TV – Example, if we are pushing facebook on your TV you could watch it, unlike internet where you can pull the content. Just like you cannot watch a cricket match on ESPN unless it has been broadcasted, you wouldn’t be able to watch unless we broadcast it. So the data that we transmit will be available on the TV just like any normal channel.
    Our focus is to keep this medium affordable, accessible and easy to use. The problem that we are solving is pretty interesting – in a country with a large rural population, an investment into a PC wouldn’t be economical. Added to this would be the cost of internet. Internet is also not all pervasive, and also costly for a rural consumer.
    In addition to the cost of purchasing the PC, the other barrier for people to adopt to PCs is lies with the additional learning of the usage of the operating systems, brower etc that are  a sort of barrier for adoption.  Also the rural person could run his life without an internet connection!
    Given these thoughts, I wanted to give an affordable, accessible and simple solution – that would have to be the TV. There is not much complexity to using the TV too!
    Facebook which I used as an example earlier is just to make a mention – our focus is on providing quality content that would be mass consumed like; say Wikipedia, or Exam preparation etc. The facebook example was primarily to relate with the present generation J.
    Simply put, Brizz TV enables you put selected internet content on TV, available on a channel interface – say channel 931, 971 etc.
    Sachi: Could you tell us how you managed to put your first team together, and how you managed your finances?
    Amar:
    I never thought I was heading this company, and hence there was no thought of putting up the team as such. I discussed the idea with my friends, and whoever felt that the idea was good I believed we could form a team.
    The first friend I found this way was my batch mate from Surathkal – Jeetu. He was working with Cisco at that time. So we both came together to start this venture off. None of us were from the broadcast domain, and our limited understanding wouldn’t give us a real picture of the technical constraints we might face. We approached an expert – Krishnan who at that point was working at Philips and understood the set-top box pretty well. He encouraged us, and after some calculations and suggested this could be possible if a broadcaster like Airtel or Tata could agree. This was how we formed the first team.
    Coming to the point of Funding part – Both Jeetu and I were basically programmer, and hence we believed we didn’t need any funds to start off. We had a product bent of mind and hence finance was something that we didn’t bother much about. We began working on the product in December 2009 and by April 2010 we had built the prototype. We next had to move towards meeting a broadcaster.
    We approached NSRCEL with the thinking that they could help us connect with the broadcast companies. At NSRCEL we met Guhesh who thought the idea was cool enough to try – he had a friend at Airtel and we were able to get the traction. With this prototype demonstrated, Airtel was willing to work with us. Other things began to move ahead – we were funded by NSRCEL in December 2010. 6 months post the VC round of investment from NSRCEL, we got our next round of investment from Ojas.
    Sachi: Could you tell us how the discussion with Airtel happened, how was the experience? 
     
    Amar: 
    Airtel is a very partner friendly company, most of their activities are outsourced. They weren’t very aggressive in the negotiation too.
    I wasn’t looking for a negotiation too; I always thought that the product I was building had to see the light of the day. I approached it with an open mind.
    Airtel wanted the technology evaluation and proof of concept – all this happened extremely quickly. The approach seemed to be that we (Brizz TV) could do a lot of value add if the young team was taken care off. Airtel has been a fantastic organization to work with. Given their long term vision with Brizz TV, they offered what they generally offer to anyone else without much negotiation.
    There was some bit of luck and the remaining worked with the technical strength the team had.
    Sachi: You have been funded at a very early stage – it would be interesting to understand the experience? 
    Amar: We are a pre-revenue product company – any VC who would invest in us wouldn’t be looking at any revenue for at least one year. It was pretty interesting if we look back at the instance. None of the factors seemed to be favoring us – I was studying, and there were 2 other members in the team. The product was just taking shape, and the company we were working with – Airtel was thought to be as someone whom a start up should be scared off. The technology that we were building was however a very interesting one.
    We went about looking at many VCs in search of funding. The IIMB – NSRCEL connection helped us get a ear from the people we met. Though the technology was interesting, it want something that was tested – they weren’t sure about the monetization prospects of the company.
    I was again luck that I came across to the Ojas investments – Mr Rajest. He was also an NITK alumnus, which helped connect better with him. The team seemed to have struck chords as well. The perspective of looking at Airtel being interested in us also seems to have worked for us. And I think he was willing to take the bet on us.
    Though initially we went about just meeting folks, we began to feel the pinch towards May 2011. We required the money for supporting the operator lab that was crucial for the testing of the final product. Again I believe it was luck that pulled us through.
    Sachi: Out of curiosity, did Airtel help you? Did they co-develop the product or did you get an infrastructure support ?
    Amar: 
    Airtel provided free access to their labs, but given their schedules etc they couldn’t co-develop the product with us. We suggested that we would take care of the technology, and Airtel could help test the product in the lab.
    I should say they facilitated everything around technology development and that help  for us.
    Sachi: Most of your team is from NITK. What do you think excited people to work with you??
     Amar: At college we were always perceived as being friendly guys, we were not considered geeks. People knew us as these are cool chaps and straight from heart. They do things right and they don’t lie. When they say something they mean it. I think this reputation seems to have paid off. So our friends are always willing to work with us.
    The open approach we have followed has helped us all through.
    Sachi: How do you envision yourself in the next 4 or 5 years?
     
    Amar: I think I should be still be rocking. Doing something that excites me something in the tech space. Hopefully Brizz tv, will be a much bigger company – more than just in terms of revenue. We intend to create something meaningful out of India that world finds useful.
    Sachi: If I could mention, you represented India at the Intel UC Berkeley Challenge. Could you tell us how that experience was? How did it help? 
     
    Amar:
    The trip gave me a free trip to Berkeley – I saw a parking space “Reserved at all times for Nobel Laureates” – that excited me as I had never seen a Nobel laureate. I felt extremely excited about the concept.
    The competition was good too, we didn’t win the competition but the experience was pretty good. The exposure was pretty useful for us.
    Some of the competitors from China were doing a bio-oil business – this got me to think of the Indian context where we do 90% business and 10% technology. The kind of innovations from these countries seems to be more technology focused than us. It was a feeling like we could see the future being built here.
    Sachi: You are an MBA and an Entrepreneur – It is generally felt that this combination doesn’t work best. What do you have say about it?
    Amar: 
    It is like telling people who have pistol are dangerous because they can fire!!
    MBA to me is a tool; it is good to have that. It tells you something beyond technology that you could use – you could value add.
    To me personally I have seen If I am not having MBA, things would have been little slower.
    It gives you a market focus, structures your thought.
    If there is a question is “Does the MBA make a better entrepreneur?” I cannot answer that question. But I  am going to  say it  never going to be a harm  it only helps as long as you know how to use it like a tool and it works in  some person’s hand and does not work some else.
    Besides the large network that an MBA provides if you have graduated from a top institute, it gives you a different way of looking at things you know. I am personally excited of doing an MBA.
    It definitely adds value to my team, my company – but I am still a techie at heart. If you consider MBA to be a tool it would be a good perspective. – It never harms, it helps
    Sachi: What message would you like to send across to all the readers?
    Amar: Since I am a techie at heart, I would talk about technology. If you are a technology person, build your technology product first. Build it so well that world just cannot ignore it. People just cannot take their eyes off it.
    If you look at Indian web companies, there is lot of things as an engineer I never liked. The scope to improve is vast. You can make it 50% or 100% better than what it is today.
    Keep your eyes open. Don’t listen to the markets. The market’s foresight is pretty short – a quarter of a year.
    Do not believe when any one says you need leadership and all of that. All these are secondary. If you are good person given a chance, you can be a good leader.
    Build your character and just keep building a good product.
    Sachi:  Thank you Amar, taking your time to this interview. Thank you once again.

  • Entrepreneur’s Interview – Edu next ventures – A Finishing School business

    Sachi: Good Morning, Swaroop and Vivek, Thanks for coming in for this interview. Swaroop and Vivek are founders of “edu-next ventures”, which operates in the education space. 
     
    I would like to begin the interview with getting to know your background briefly before you could proceed with what edu-next does.
    Swaroop: I am basically from Bangalore. I am a graduate of KREC Suratkal, and then I did my MBA from IIM Bangalore. I then worked with Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) as a consultant for a short while and then I moved to Dell Analytics where I worked in their marketing analytics team. We are now running this venture called Edu-Next which essentially a finishing school for business graduates. We have been working with business schools in India, to provide a careercounseling and mentorship to help students decide better as to what job they would get into and how do they mould themselves to ensure that they get the job.
    Vivek: Hi, this is Vivek and I am a graduate of KREC Suratkal,batch of 2006.
    Sachi:How did the idea of finishing school come to you?
    Vivek: During one of us when brainstorming at IIMB we decided that we would work in the space of education and for obvious reasons we landed at the idea of finishing schools – because it is right at the surface. We wanted to skim the surface first and then see how we can work in the other areas in education.
    In terms of how we came to the idea itself – India being a very competitive environment does not give enough time to people to think about what they want to do in life? or how they move forward? where they want to grow? What they want to do for the rest of their life?
    They are in a hurry and experience enormous peer pressure – thisdrives most career decisions. People do not reflect and think what they done in the past, what they are doing now and what is the personality type, what are their carrier goals, what they can do, what they can’t do, what are the strengths and so on. They approach placement and interviews in a rather unprepared or underprepared fashion. We have also gone experienced similar things.
    Individually for me the dilemma was – MBA or no MBA? Should I stick to my own domain or move to something else?How do I shift?What do I need to make this shift? Where do I shift to?These questions are commonplace –especially once people start working. So we want to address this first at the post graduation level and then move to even more impactful level – under graduate and then Pre-University.
    In an education driven society like ours, it’s very important for people to make the right decisions about where they want to be, so that they can deliver the best and not be unhappy about where they are, or the decisions they made.
    Swaroop: One of the reasons why we got into this space is that I am personally very passionate about education.
    I have also seen a lot of heart burn with my own batch mates in MBA who honestly felt very lost!We took the job we got out of campus. But somehow the ability to say this is what is important for me, this is the kind of person I am and this is what I want to choose is lacking even in the best Institutes – We want to reduce that heart burn.May be say after 5 years of working post MBA, how do you ensure that you are doing the right thing? How do you ensure you are happy?
    Thesearenot easy questions to answer! And each one has his own questions and must find his own answers. We are trying to use different ways to get students to think and make them ask themselves these questions – we provide a platform for them to make the right choice. This was the primary reason we started this venture.
    We alsorealize that sometime it’s too late at the MBA level to take these decisions – Probably they are better off beingmusicians. But that is the question we will answer later. Given that fact that you are doing a MBA, how do we help them to make better choice?
    Sachi: It was pretty clear about how you went about starting it. 
    You are targeting the PG section of the education system, and you also realize that most of the career choices are made at the +2 levels.How are you addressing that at the movement?
    Swaroop: We are not addressing that at the moment, because we need to learn a lot in that space.
    The approach would be slightly different because we still are in a society that promotes engineering because it give a job that pays Rs. 25,000/- or promotes being a doctor. What about being a physicist or mathematician or an artist or a star. While there is increase consciousness that people can have different kinds of career choices, we still are not mature enough to accept some of these things. We have to still figure out a way to address this problem.
    There is a sufficient heart burn in MBA world itself for us to address the problem and establish ourselves as a provider of quality career services or career guidance and then we will work at scaling it to other sections of education.
    Vivek: Primarily post graduation is one venuewhere you are not left with many choices– a PhD or a job. So there are very few things that you can have to choose from after post graduation,and that is where we are saying what choices they have made; learnmore about these people and then probably move to under graduation and others.
    Sachi: What is your vision for Edu-next?
    Swaroop: The first,I really want Edu-next to be a respected name in the space as – providers of quality career servicesand career guidance/ counseling. We have some challenges I would like to address.
    Firstly there is always a distribution in terms of quality of students. Our challenge is to understand this difference in inputs and be able to cater to the difference needs that different kinds of student have. If you take a tier one B-school and comparing with a tier four B-school, the expectations from the course, what is available after the course are so different. We cannot apply the same logic everywhere. So for us able to figure out how to suggest the correct thing for a person is one challenge that I would like to address, and that would go a long way in building our reputation.
    The second thing is we are inherently a very people driven business. The biggest problem is how do you scale something like this? Can you build enough tools and bring in enough technology so that sitting out of one city in India we are able to reach a large population. How do you start adapting to different contexts – I don’t even want to restrict it to India, how do you address somebody in US or Brazil or NewZealand?We want to make it a very large forum for people to come and get this service. That is what I am really looking at from the ‘B’ school angle.As far as rest is concerned it is still work in progress, we will keep you posted.
    Sachi: This question is not directly related to edu-next but would love to ask you – What motivated you to be entrepreneurs?
    Vivek: I will be very candid about this. Soon after Engineering, it is a lot of multi pronged peer pressure that you see. Friends went on to do M.S, went on to do MBA and other things – some studied Mathematics, some stuck to their own domain and completed their masters and somebody else doing PhD and othersstuck to their own job. The people in the job would slog it out from 9 to 5 and go out on weekends – Even I went through the same things straight of college. We worked hard and but still like everybody else who has hungry to do more, especially from a college like ours. We had to do something more to satisfy – Probably do much more than what we are doing at present.
    MBA? M.S? I asked all these questions to myself and I could not answer most of them well – after a post graduation what next?And given the personal choices that I have made such as where I want to stay, what I want to do and amongst other things, it was not an easy decision to make. Entrepreneurship was also a buzz word during an early 2000, and is even now. We just dabbled with few things – trying to do that, trying to do this. It was more experimental, not knowing where the journey will go.
    Being a first generation entrepreneur, it is not very easy to push yourselfto quit your job or do something of your own. Soon I started enjoying the process and not knowing where I to go, itself was fun. You can push yourself that much harder in not in terms of effort but in terms of how much we can take? How many things you can give up?
    You generally compare yourself with peers who after MBA buying cars left right and center, Going to the Dalal Street and getting their pay packages. You are still stuck between a Volvo bus and a BMTC normal bus or even an auto rickshaw because you cannot afford to.So this is a hard decision to make. But that is what probably is the right choice! You know once you have made the right choice.I think you will have to experiment a little, not everyone is sure what they want to do unless they try different things. So I started doing whatever I have to do being my own.
    Swaroop: I am a crazy control freak!  I cannot work for any one. Money is an obvious issue, we will all make money eventually. A very close friend of mine says “we will all die rich”. I have immense faith in his statement. So money is a motivator, as is the immense wealth to be created as part of running your own business but I think the greatest kick is that “I decide what happens to my company, my fortunes”. That is the primary reason why I started off on my own. Opportunity wiseI didn’t have any problem; I could have gotten any job I wanted but that wasn’t what I was looking for.
    Sachi: In your journey of entrepreneurship, what are the learning that you havethis far?
    Vivek: I would like to keep it extremely crisp– In terms of the learning, know what you are trying to do, have the right people with you, stay in touch with all your friends especially entrepreneurs who have taken the off-beat route, because they are the one who can talk with and probably you can relate to. It is extremely important to prioritize as an entrepreneur.
    Swaroop: It is ok to not know really where you are headed to and you will figure out along the way. The most important thing is to ensure that working with people who are right for you. There are certain kind of people whom you can work with and certain kind of people you cannot!From personal experience I can tell you that it is very important to choose your team right. It is a good team that can pull off anything.
    The other thing is you have to build good will along the way. It is very difficult especially when you have graduated from a top tier Institute.You tend to come with this baggage of entitlement, I am from here, and I have to be given this. Very quickly I have learnt that unless you have something of value and you can prove it, nobody is going to give a damn that you are from certain Institute, or you have gotten a certain degree. It’s humbling in that sense and I am better off now. I am very happy I got rid of my excess baggage that all good institutes put on to you when you graduate and that’s been the best learning so far.
    Sachi: What is your message for aspiring entrepreneur?
     
    Swaroop: Like they say, the fastest way to solve a problem is right through it.Unless you get in, you are never going to solve the problem.I know lot of people who sit at the dinner table and say, I have got this brilliant idea, I have got the excel sheets, I have got the ppt, I know the VC and all that – but you just frustrate yourself out! Sitting with all the plans and complaining about how corporate life is not or you.
    But If you are not goingto jump in and do it, it’s not going to happen. You have to have reasonable plans etc all that jazz would be there,but the tipping point is to say, I am going to get out tomorrow, I am going do this for a while and make sure it works.
    We have tried this part time and it doesn’t really work.We have to do it full time and give it what is due. And at least I realize, the faster you get in, the easier it is – because, as you get older, fatter and slower and richer, entrepreneurship becomes more and more difficult. It is like trek to Manasa sorovar. It is best done when you are fifteen. We could possibly do it only by 30. Anything later you might succumb to heart attack, so do it quickly.
     Vivek: I have two things,
    One – If you have worked in a corporate set up before, and learnt to de-jargonize. Big organizations jargonize to prove their worth! Keep it simple.
    Second- Do not fall into the trap of theory of entrepreneurship. If you have a good idea and you think you can pull it off and if you can prove to yourself that you can do it – Forget the scaling, forget everything else. I mean, how would it grow? Will it become a billion dollars business? All such similar questions – probably a hundred of them. The first starting point is you need to be convinced about the idea itself. These points might have been studied, but don’t go by the book at times, do it yourself. It is ok to go off the book that you can always come back and join later on.
    Sachi: Thank you Swaroop and Vivek for this wonderful interview.