The Beginnings

1. To carry a training program, we had to rent out a place locally in Chennai on conditions that it had to live up to my standard of experience, which I want to offer.
2. Money was suddenly involved in terms of lakhs. I don't want to handle it. We gave that responsibility to another team member with trust. Although I am partly scared of money management, what's more, interesting to me is the work we do as a team.
3. Marketing and Sales cost a little less because we unconsciously built on top of our team's influence of our own campus. Still, we put up a design team to build testimonials & another call to action.
4. Pay an experienced and certified trainer for the students to get the most out of the program.
5. If there was a need to recommend a hotel to stay nearby, we used to ally with Hotel to customize for students for safety and security. No outsiders are allowed.
6. The team grew to more than 7-8 people. I did not ask for the pay, and none of my team did. They asked for fun, time to spend together, group lunches, and day-outs. Gratefully, Charan accepted those conditions to bear costs replacing the pay.

We went on in series for 3 mega events and until cracks began to appear.

• We always did business on an average of 5 lakhs/week as part of any outside student event. We were great at maintaining this consistency in the scope of business, financial expectations, and scope of education we offered, not affecting each other.
• On average, turnout would be 200 students with a growing audience organically outside our influence.
• We built connections with local government school headteachers to offer free trials to three government schools in towns.
• We had support from the local political party to become complementary to our marketing and investment efforts. After all, my perception of politics isn't that bad as I thought it to be.
• The team began to become more closely Knit together, day by day.

Cracks begin to appear.

1. As we moved away from the college's governance, we brought a large set of students to these events as attendees meant that we were doing business out of college. Some staff brought negative talk around this.
2. I brought in teammates who were great at work. But they weren't great at interpersonal skills. That includes me.
3. Some of my actions were self-centric during the discussions. Although I know I was right, I failed to make my team realize the rightness of it.
4. Two years later, one of my teammates described to me that one of the other female teammates felt too much uncomfortable. This is the consequence of my unconscious way of treating every team member as a close friend and assume what I said/done is interpreted the way I meant.
5. Some of the most important people of the team who handled key components like marketing had disagreements. These, for me, were based on personal inconsistencies which were out of my control.
6. Team members were here on campus for placements in the first place. Even though I take help from Charan to pay monthly the same way companies on avg would pay. It is still not 'placement in college.'

Vision unfolding

I wanted the age group between 10 - 16 learn to code.

Roots of the Problem

1. For people of Generation X, television and talking in the neighborhood was a major source of truth. The success of computer tech firms post-Gen X that is the 1980s created jobs so much that even Gen X'ers have a fair chance to join and get good jobs. The Y2K bug is a good example...
2. Tech companies needed talent too quickly and can afford to upskill staff if necessary. (Which is still a standard, and general universities escape.) The only premium institutions like NITs, IITs, and BITS were quick choices to run the hiring across.
3. Parents who missed the benefits of 'Job wave' in the 2000s badly want their kids Gen Y not to miss the 'Job wave'. So they rushed to build a culture under the assumption that his Gen Y kid when he gets to premium institutes will win a job and will never go through the problems that Gen X had gone through. They never anticipated newer problems would arise.
4. Nevertheless, it worked! Premium education institutions who bring jobs to the table and market it the same way still lead even with ever-increasing education costs, especially for higher studies.

What would it take to convince decision makers to invest in upskilling the child in programming?

1. If I had a lot of cash, I am fairly certain that marketing it plainly a CTA: having kids code for free will make us go like Khan academy.
2. Suppose I would go a little aggressive, without a tangible result like 'getting a job' as universities do. It will backfire as it did for WhiteHat Jr.
3. Anyway, we didn't have that much cash. Under Charan's investment, even if I pay myself 20k/mo, our team would run out of cash in a year.

If programming is about problem solving, wouldn't it make sense having a kid solve the an problem that parents are aware of?

• Exactly, this statement was Northstar when I was having conversation with Arun, one of my team members 4 years ago on footpath at 11 pm in Chennai.
• We fairly knew that if I can go to a school, get ten 12-14-year-olds form a team, host a Bootcamp for a week to have kids build an app that (for example, let's say) translates parent's native language to English, would impress decision-makers. They would be proud of their child's accomplishments.
• The current tools, APIs, and SDKs have the necessary abstractions that an average 12 yr can absorb to put into practice.
• All I need to come up with fair per weekly pricing and my team to be upskilled to learn and adapt quickly and improve the content material.
• It required infrastructure investment, as per me. I requested if Charan could invest 10 Lakhs to buy some products from Google Education and Microsoft Education programs.
• I asked some of my team members if they would be interested in upskilling themselves as certified educators. We know how it goes, excitement at the start and slowing down next.
• With this, we would be devising a strategy based on true outcomes from the child themselves.
• It wasn't the time of Covid - 19 when my answer was shaping to the start. If it were, I would probably turn myself to B2B to have my tied education institutions and have my team members teach the teachers first to stay in business. Help them use asynchronous work tools.

Final Thoughts

It's not at all likely, I will try to get into that again anytime soon. I have lots of exciting new things day to day that I enjoy.