I grew up in a small town in Karnataka where the nearest decent school was 35km away. My co-found…
T=0: The Decision
Four years at Google Bangalore. ₹22 LPA — the number every engineering college graduate is told to chase. I had chased it. I had it. I was commuting 90 minutes each way through Bangalore traffic to sit in a building working on features for a market I barely lived in.
I grew up in a small town in Karnataka where the nearest decent school was 35km away. My co-founder had built a basic e-learning prototype for rural schools and couldn't get engineers to look at it because the TAM wasn't interesting enough for VC-backed salaries. I left Google and joined him. My family thought I had lost my mind.
1,000 rural students on the platform. Series A before I run out of savings.
6 Months Out
DPIIT registration, GST, state education board approvals — the Indian regulatory stack for edtech is brutal. Six months in, we have the product and 80 pilot students. We have no revenue. The bureaucracy cost us 3 months we did not expect.
“Get a CA and a government liaison on retainer from day one. The compliance maze is not optional and attempting it without experts is a full-time job in itself.”