In Conversation with Pooja Goyal

In the next edition of the “In Conversation With…” series, we are bringing you the inspiring journey of a serial entrepreneur.

Meet Ms Pooja Goyal, Co-Founder and COO of an Ed-Tech Startup, Avishkaar.

Pooja — The Early Years

Pooja Goyal is a chemical engineering graduate from IIT Delhi and holds an MBA from INSEAD. After realising that chemical engineering didn’t hold her interest, she started exploring other avenues. She joined a firm called Feedback Ventures as a strategy consultant. After a brief stint with them, she moved to the Bay area in the USA and worked with companies like Palm and Adobe. She started her entrepreneurial journey with Intellitots, an early-year education company. Intellitots was involved in the research and development of innovative, fun and learning-oriented programs for pre-primary and primary years.

Intellitots to Avishkaar

The growing up years of her elder child fascinated her. She constantly thought about how the human mind functions. She also realized that there wasn’t enough focus on early childhood education in India and decided to do something in that space and along with her batchmate from IIT, she founded Intellitots.

Pooja described her journey as one with a lot of twists and turns. “It involved many risky decisions which are very hard to explain now. What is clear is that you don’t think your way forward, you build your way forward. Spreadsheets with a list of pros and cons will only take you so far”, she said.

Intelletots ran profitably for several years before being acquired by KLAY. She remembered leaving it as one of the toughest decisions at that time. “Intellitots was a big part of my life and suddenly it went away, leaving a big vacuum”, she recalled pensively.

And then, after spending some time under the blue-sky thinking and wondering what to do next, Pooja joined Avishkaar in March 2020 as the co-founder. Avishkaar was founded by Tarun Bhalla in 2014 and was in the business of setting up robotic- labs in schools. She joined Tarun to build Avishkaar into a global brand for robotics and coding education for the K-12 sector.

COVID-19 Effect on Business

Since Avishkaar’s primary business is to set up robotic labs in schools, covid impacted it directly as schools were closed for a significant period during 2020–21, which nudged them to make a vital change in their business model.

“As our B2B business came to a standstill, we realized that we need to reach the children directly and develop a consumer business”.

“We were also very fortunate that a lot of passionate people were with us. And because of the shared passion and excitement that the team has about the mission, most of the team members stayed with us”, she stated.

Latest Initiative: The SheEO Club

SheEO club supports women entrepreneurs to build scalable venture-funded businesses by increasing access to capital, mentorship by world-class experts and an exclusive community of women leaders.

Last year, she put out a tweet, that she would make herself available to any woman entrepreneur who wanted to discuss the challenges and opportunities in the area they were working and she got more than 100 requests.

“I started allocating a specific time for this. Then, I thought why should I limit this to myself and not invite other women also who have been through similar journeys. That’s how the SheEO club came into being. Since then, a lot of entrepreneurs and VCs have come forward to speak to the women entrepreneurs”, she said smiling.

Coding as part of Curriculum in New Education Policy

She says coding is just one of the tools from a bigger toolbox that we need to make available to children to prepare them for the world of tomorrow. Critical thinking, understanding of data, the ability to work in teams and the ability to express are equally important skills to have.

She believes that “NEP-2020 itself is a great guiding document. But the most critical part would be how we are going to implement it. Our education system is very complex, so it will take time to change. However, our children should have the opportunity to learn those skills in schools that are going to be critical for the world of tomorrow.”

Children from being Consumers to Creators

“The one thing I noticed while working with children and parents is that most of the parents struggle to control the screen time of their children. Our focus was on what we can do outside of the screen which is super interesting also aligns with the child’s internal state of curiosity while being fun”.

She believes that children are inherently very smart; we just have to give them the right tools and let them explore. Future of Edtech

Pooja thinks that what we are witnessing in the current Ed-tech business, is just the tip of the iceberg. It has become an $8 trillion industry worldwide.

“Technology has spread its tentacles into every sphere of our life: from our social structures and beliefs to our professional and personal life. Every industry, whether it is hospitality, commerce, transport or retail, has gone through significant changes in the past decade. The same is going to happen with education too. Some of the historical structures that exist right now are going to break apart. But it will take time”, she said.

According to Pooja, similar to what other industries have gone through, the education sector will also become more efficient with a technology layer on top of it.

“At first, capacity maximization would take place. We are moving towards a zero margin cost industry, similar to what happened in the transport industry with the arrival of tech-enabled companies like Ola and Uber. The second thing is, we are coming into an era where, whatever you want, comes directly to you, you don’t need to go anywhere. The flexibility of customers is becoming paramount for the companies”, she explained.

Desirable Changes in the Education Sector

“Every child learns at a different pace and with different methods. But our education system doesn’t pay attention to that. Apps like Netflix and Spotify, understand our choices and preferences better than our system. A child spends most of her time in schools but nobody in the system knows what the child’s preference is”, she said thoughtfully.

Her recommendations for improvement in the education sector are:

• A hybrid structure (instead of the brick and mortar structure), to make education more efficient and most importantly, accessible to a larger population.
• Personalised learning for children. Using data to understand children will help us to design the system better.
• An understanding that degrees and grades should not be the yardstick for measuring a child’s ability. Having a huge Youtube follower base is as significant an achievement as getting good grades in the board exams.

Advice for the Budding Entrepreneurs

• The journey of an entrepreneur is full of ambiguity. You have to decide at every step. She believes a bad decision is still a hundred times better than not making a decision at all.
• Pretty much everybody is waiting to say no to you. So, don’t say no to yourself before others do.
• There is a time for the convergence of thinking and there is a time for the divergence of thinking. If you converge too early, you will not be creative enough to think out of box solutions and if you keep on diverging, you won’t be able to reach anywhere.
• Building a tribe of like-minded people is very important, especially for a woman. You should have two networks; one should be your support network, which will make you feel good and the other should be your challenge network which will push you and keep you motivated.

Pooja Goyal’s journey is an inspiration for all budding entrepreneurs. Her vision for the education sector in India is what we would all love to see happening in the future.

We truly believe that her words will act as a guiding light in the journeys of many women entrepreneurs.

Originally published at https://shaktipreneurs.org on June 4, 2021.