September 29, 2024 • 32 mins
Episode Overview
In this special two-part episode of the Startups Dilse Podcast, we bring you the inspiring journey of Sabari Raja, Managing Partner at JFF Ventures. Host Anthony sits down with his former SMU B-school classmate to uncover a story of determination, innovation, and success against all odds.
Part 1: Breaking Barriers and Building Dreams Sabari Raja's story is one of relentless pursuit and unwavering spirit.
In this episode, we explore:
This episode is more than just a success story; it's a masterclass in grit, willpower, and the relentless pursuit of one's goals. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a student looking for inspiration, or someone facing seemingly insurmountable odds, Sabari's journey offers valuable insights and motivation.
Coming Up in Part 2
Stay tuned for the second part of our conversation with Sabari, where we'll dive into her transition to venture capital, her role as Managing Partner at JFF Ventures, and her perspectives on supporting the next generation of founders. Don't miss this compelling two-part series that proves no dream is too big and no starting point too small when you combine passion with perseverance.
#StartupStories #WomenInTech #EdTechInnovation #VentureCapital
In this special two-part episode of the Startups Dilse Podcast, we bring you the inspiring journey of Sabari Raja, Managing Partner at JFF Ventures. Host Anthony sits down with his former SMU B-school classmate to uncover a story of determination, innovation, and success against all odds.
Part 1: Breaking Barriers and Building Dreams Sabari Raja's story is one of relentless pursuit and unwavering spirit.
In this episode, we explore:
- Her humble beginnings as a farmer's daughter in rural Tamil Nadu, India
- The courage it took to leave home and pursue higher education at Louisiana State University
- Her foray into the world of Educational Technology at Texas Instruments
- The entrepreneurial spark that led to the founding of Nepris, bridging the gap between students and professionals
- "My biggest cheerleader has always been my husband"
- "My first big lesson learned is If I'm partnering with someone, I need to make sure that both of us are able to take the same level of risk"
This episode is more than just a success story; it's a masterclass in grit, willpower, and the relentless pursuit of one's goals. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a student looking for inspiration, or someone facing seemingly insurmountable odds, Sabari's journey offers valuable insights and motivation.
Coming Up in Part 2
Stay tuned for the second part of our conversation with Sabari, where we'll dive into her transition to venture capital, her role as Managing Partner at JFF Ventures, and her perspectives on supporting the next generation of founders. Don't miss this compelling two-part series that proves no dream is too big and no starting point too small when you combine passion with perseverance.
#StartupStories #WomenInTech #EdTechInnovation #VentureCapital
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand new episode of Startups.
They'll say. I am excited to be joined by my
friend from my B school here, Sabury Rajah, and we're
recording this on a Friday afternoon. So Subury, thanks so
much for taking the time on a Friday afternoon before
you get into the weekend to chat with me talk
about all the fun things you've done in your life,
which I'm sure is going to be super useful for
(00:33):
people listening and people watching. So welcome to the show
of Subury.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thank you, Anthony. I appreciate the opportunity, and it's always
nice to connect with an old friend.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, I must say, I mean I've probably learned more
about you in the last few weeks of talking than
I learned through the two years of MBA because you
and I were in probably different batches at that time,
different study groups. I mean, our parts probably crossed only
on our trips to Chile and to China. Right, I'm
so glad I know you better and congratulations on all
(01:03):
your success since since B school. So the other thing
I have I have to say is you're the second
guest from Tamil Nadu for those for those who don't know.
My first guest on the podcast was Vision of super Money,
and he has a startup based in Kimittor and Sbury
happens to be from the same state as I, which
is in the southern part of India called Tamil Nanda.
(01:26):
So I'm happy that in my first ten episodes, I
have two folks from my home state.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Not just not just from the home state. I'm also
from near kim went to school in Comba, so you
must have some affinity towards going What can.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I say, there's a lot of smart people from I
guess I agree. Actually, yeah, so maybe let's start with that, Sabury,
Why don't you tell our folks here a little bit
about you know, where you come from, how did you
come to the US, and uh, yeah, where you are today,
and then we'll obviously double coming to them and get
(02:02):
to know more about you.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Absolutely, thank you so much for this opportunity. I'm excited
to share my story. So my background, you know, just
like most other people in our network, coming from you know,
South India. Of course, if you if you get good grades,
you're supposed to become an engineer or a doctor. And
so I became an engineer, you know, like I did
(02:24):
go to undergrad. I did go to undergrad in Coimbatoor
and Kumar Gul College of Technology, and then I grew
up mostly in rural South India, right, Like most of
my family is all into farming. You know. My husband
always jokes that why don't you tell people exactly where
(02:46):
you're from, because you're not from Coimbatoor, you know. So
I think I'm like if people know the geography, depending
on how much you know about that area, accordingly, I
will keep moving my location of where I'm exactly. So,
so I'm actually from near Polachi, Like my parents live
on a farm on the border of Caroline Tamil Nadu.
(03:08):
So you know, for people who know Polace can give
more details. It's it's further and it keeps going further
and further down closer to the western guards. You know,
it's a beautiful area. We wake up to hearing peacocks
and I always go back and wonder, like why I
left the place, you know. So, but most of my
family for generations have been farming, so my exposure was
(03:34):
very limited. You know. Also, you know, while my parents
gave me a lot of opportunities. They themselves did not
have college degrees, you know, so for me, but there
was always this push and aspiration to study and diet
good grades and do something and have a career. And
(03:55):
so when I actually I went to boarding school all
my life because there was no schools around where where
I'm from, or at least no good schools. That was
very common in my family. So I went to boarding school,
started did most of my schooling in Combatur, did my
engineering degree there as well. So so the long story short,
I did the final layer of engineering. There was you know,
(04:17):
either you go start working or you know, you end up.
At that time, there was a lot of you know,
interest in doing your masters abroad. I didn't think my
parents were going to let me leave, you know, you
know how it goes. I've never even left the state
at that point, and probably the farthest I've gone is
the neighboring state to Bangalo. I never even traveled past
(04:39):
Banglord at that point. So some of my friends were
writing gr and I said, okay, I should also try.
You know, it sounds like so fabulous to go so
far away and see the world, And that's really sort
of set the thing in motion. I didn't think my
parents were going to agree to this, but somehow I
think they also got sucked into this, you know thing.
(05:00):
Once the ball was in motion, and that was my
biggest risk, my first, biggest risk I've ever taken. And
I had never even gotten on a plane up until
that point. That was my first flight trip. Everything was new.
Ended up at LSU for my master's in computer science
(05:20):
and people always ask me, how did you pick LSU
of all schools, And literally at that time used Peterson's
guide and picked only schools in the South that were cheap.
And we were looking at how many books are in
the library, and that's how clueless we were, you know.
Like so basically like zero exposure, no idea what I
(05:41):
was doing, and not much confidence. But there was always
that inner push to try something, do something, take that
next step and get out of your comfort zone and
take that risk and see what happens. You know. There
was always that inner motivation to continue doing that, even
though I didn't have the confidence abilities at that point.
(06:01):
So that led me to I did my master's at
LSU and my first job from campus. I ended up
at Texas Instruments in Dallas, and I happened to end
up in their education technology and I never even knew
AT tech was a thing. It really wasn't a big
thing at that time. And that's where even though I
hadn't gone to K through twelve schools in the US,
(06:24):
being at TI working on products that went into classrooms.
That's really how I first got exposed to education technology
and then sort of trying to think what is next?
What is next in my career. Then it became a
parent I needed to sort of get a business degree,
and that's how I ended up at SMU where I
met you, and you know the story for what happened
in those two years that really sort of opened up
(06:45):
my network and opportunities and gave me the courage to
take that first step towards entrepreneurship. My first idea was
literally the idea that we pitched in school for our
entrepreneurship class. We can talk a bit about that later.
I don't want to go into all those details, but
you know, literally left my job, tried something didn't work.
(07:06):
I was like, Okay, I need to try again. And
then the company that I started in ne Epris in
twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen mainly was using my lived
experience where I grew up on a farm, had zero exposure,
zero social capital. But I was coming at it from
I have this technology background. I was shocked to see
(07:27):
in the US that even like you know, ocean support
in this country, also many students didn't have access. I
could sort of see myself in them, and rural school districts,
underserved school districts, students didn't really have that exposure or access.
And I got connected to a lot of different groups
(07:50):
around the country sort of talking about this problem and
how to we solve it. I felt like a lot
of people, industry, government, education, everybody coming to talking about this,
but technology wasn't playing a role in connecting the dots.
So it was sort of that perfect moment right where
I can relate to this problem because I myself have
had the lived experience and my work and background sort
(08:14):
of bought me there, and I could sort of see
this next generation of kids through that same lens, and
clearly I saw a problem and that's really what I
set out to do. So started the company, grew, the
company ended up getting acquired end of twenty twenty one,
and then stayed on for a year to see it
(08:34):
through merger and a rebranding, and along the way, I
really sort of built my personal brand in the industry,
grew out of my you know fears and you know
hesitations and imposter syndrome and all of that. Really found
myself in this process and really got comfortable with who
I was, what I was trying to do, and build
a great network of people around me. And that is
(08:57):
what led me to what I'm doing right now. One
of my the investors reached out to me and said, Hey,
come join me to start a venture fund that's also
investing in found restrict yourself, that's balancing impact and scale
and education workforce as Hey, I've been on the other
side of the table. I've gone through the journey for
eight years. You know, I'm always about learning new things
(09:19):
and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I never
really intended intended to become a full time investor, but
here I have, you know, been doing this for a
year and a half.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah, great, great story, Subrie. I know you write your book.
I'll be sure to buy it.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
As soon as I get some time.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And yeah, so that's uh, there's so much to unravel
from what you said first up you know, I mean,
I know a little bit about ed tech, and I'm
assuming people who are listening know the high levels of
it as well. Maybe since you've been in this industry
for a bit, say, I mean, I tried to connect
(09:56):
the dots between TI being TI more on the hardware
side of things. I mean, at least that's what they're
known for. Made me wonder what were they doing on
the ed tech side of things?
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Right?
Speaker 1 (10:07):
So maybe, yeah, if you could talk a little bit
about ed tech and maybe how it's evolved, and then
that's what kind of led you to also figure out
saying oh, here's a gap and which gave you the
idea for the startup. So can you educate us a
little bit on ed tech itself and from where it
was so probably where it is right now?
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yeah? No, No, I think that's a great question because
I've had the privilege of seeing the tech market grow
and become a real industry. Right because when I started
at TI, I'll probably date myself here, like twenty plus
years back, tech was the etic division of TI was
(10:48):
called the calculator group. Like everybody knew the graphic calculators.
That was education technology, right, But then eventually like software
became a part of it, and then more and more
beyond the hardware, software solutions started sort of you know,
showing up in classrooms and then actually had an opportunity
to work with a lot of publishers while I was
(11:10):
at TIS well. So if you think about the large publishers,
mostly for decades, they've been selling content in the form
of printed books, where the opportunity like, really, I feel
like this last fee years we've seen drastic changes with
technology in education because it then content then became sort
(11:32):
of digital content, right, that was a tremendous opportunity. There
was a whole slew of startups that really sort of
leveraged that transition, and everybody, like publishers who were very
comfortable in printing books for many many decades, had to
change quickly. But then you saw some people go away
and new entrants come in. That was like sort of
(11:55):
owning the digital content space. So as we were seeing
b on the digital content, then the evolution and ethtech
then became I think a lot of people in India
can relate to this, Like then it was more about
you know, tutoring and online like as online as technology
was evolving, where you know, virtual connections became like a
(12:19):
real possibility bendwith you know, improved within technology. You know,
what was available to us, what you couldn't imagine, like
you know ten years before that you could do now,
like you could actually have a live conversation online. Even
in the early stages. Then you saw like a dearth
of tutoring platforms come out, right. You saw some big
(12:41):
players really sort of become unicons in this space. So
education technology sort of evolved from like digital content, then
it became connections, virtual connections. Then then for a while
it was like you know, you have you know, like
the smart boards in the classroom, Like once you have
(13:02):
certain different types of hardware, Like we went from what
is what are those things where you put those plastic
sheets on transparents in from and from there it went yeah,
you know what I mean, right, So from there it
went to like every classroom had a smart board, and
then like now you have the smart boards, like then
you have the digital content that goes on the smart boards.
(13:22):
Then you have other technologies and tools that are starting
to think about interactive learning, you know, adaptive learning, and
then everything sort of digital content became sort of in
the form of assessments, and so it took his sort
of I've had the pleasure of seeing a ticky ball
from the sprint textbook to a lot of different technologies,
(13:46):
where now the problem is like the opposite. There is
like thousands of technology and tools in a in a
school district that they are not not even sure how
to navigate all of that, right. So so when I
started looking at this industry, like literally, Zoom had just started,
(14:07):
like the company Zoom had just started, and that was
a game changer because we were sort of going to
that next level of video conferencing becoming such a day
to day tool, and we leveraged that in order to
build our platform. So the problem that we set out
to solve was, you know, there was so much content,
(14:27):
there was so much curriculum, but we were still like
there was such a big gap between classroom learning and
what was happening in the real world. So when we
started building, we were seeing a lot of career and
technical education conversations like okay, now you know, going beyond
the math and the reading, and saying, how are we
actually preparing students for the future of work? You know,
(14:49):
how was this actually applying in the real world? And
that was the problem we set out to solve. We said,
employers are left out of this conversation. Education is here,
employees are here. There is a big gap in between.
How can then we leverage all of these new technologies
to really connect the dots. That's really what my process.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
That's great. I mean, my mind was still in the
transparencies that you were talking about.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
The transparencies.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yes, yes, I still remember going to N I. T
in Chennai and I used to give presentations and transparencies.
So those are the days. But you've come up. We've
come a long way, for sure.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
So correct. Correct.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
One of the last things you mentioned about, you know,
the industry connection from what you learn in school to
how it is applicable in real life. You know, how
is it going to make a difference for that student
coming out of the classroom? Right, how do you measure
success for that sly in the in the model, I mean,
should was there a metric that you had to say, Okay,
(15:53):
we're bridging the gap and here's what success means if
we do X, Y and Z as part of now.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, Now, that is actually the heart of every education
technology company, right like every a tech company. To some
extent is an impact focused company because you're trying to
create move the needle and outcomes with an education. This
is a question that we today, even till today, we
battle with because depending on the type of solution you're developing,
(16:22):
it's not an easy answer to that, you know. Like,
for example, if I was developing something for college students
which was going to help them find a job right
out of college, right, then I can easily measure my
outcomes and say, Okay, eighty percent of the students that
have used my platform have landed a job within the
(16:42):
first three months or whatever, you know, after graduation. So
the but what we were trying to do was one
of the hardest things to do is we were saying
even sometimes like when students come to high school, it's
a bit too late. You know, this exposure needs to
be embedded into the day to day learning, not something
that happens once a year during career day. They need
(17:03):
to be you know, if you're learning about rocks in
second grade, you need to be talking to a geologist.
So it was a very much like a I'm going
to change the world kind of you know idea where
we were trying to move mountains we were trying to
change teacher behavior in the classroom of how they teach.
We're trying to bring external industry people virtually into the
classroom to you know, teach alot, not really teach, but
(17:25):
bring relevance to what students are learning. So when you're
trying to actually change the way second graders learn, measuring
that outcome of okay, did this kid who actually talked
to a geologist become a geologist? I mean it's very hard.
You know, like you're in second grade, so it's very
hard to measure sort of that outcomes and efficacy because
(17:48):
you're going like way down in the grade level, because
we believe that it needs to start there, right, and
it was always hard to sort of as an impact
focused company, measure that. So we worked we worked on
like intermediate measurements, Like we said, is the student more
engaged in the classroom, you know, did they understand the
(18:09):
concept better? Did they learn about a career that they
never knew before. So we worked with some third party
you know, universities and other researchers to come up with
sort of intermediate measurements, and then as they move into
middle school, thinking about did this actually influence how you
take your electives in your high school. You know, like now,
because you spoke with an accountant. Even if they say
(18:32):
I don't ever want to do accounting, that's a way,
you know, so because a lot of times, a vast
number of kids actually drop out a first year or
change their you know, majors in the first year. So
so even that was a win. So we had to
get creative about how to measure intermediate successes because the
ultimate goal of measuring you know, going into a job
(18:53):
was very you know, sort of far.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Let's sort of a measurement.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean eventually like once they then
they're like in middle school, they're making choices about what
high school electives to take, and that was an indication
of their interest. So there were points along the way
you were trying to measure these things, but it was
not straightforward.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, it's awesome what you did with netwis because I
mean a lot of times, I mean, you know, when
kids are in middle school. When my daughter is in
middle school and we randomly asked the question to her saying, well,
do you want to become you know, where's your head at?
You know, that sort of thing. A lot of times.
I mean, obviously they have their interests, but it's also
kind of influenced by what their friends want to do
(19:39):
at times.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, which.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Is funny, right, but yeah. I mean I've seen at
least maybe in fifty percent of the cases. I mean,
if a kid is interested in something when there were
five or ten and they have a passion for it,
I mean, eventually they'll be doing something related to it.
I mean, you know it's up to the parents and
to the teachers to find that, nurture that, and you know,
(20:02):
give them the fat way to take off, right, I mean,
so yeah, I think that's that's what you're doing. So
that's very commendable. So the let's go back a little bit.
I mean, obviously you had a great exit with all
things worked out with Nebrisk, but let's probably go back
to maybe twenty eleven, twenty twelve. I guess somebody is
that when you really wanted to come out of TI
(20:25):
and wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah, yeah, twenty twolve, I think, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, So so what made you actually want to take
that risk? I mean you had a I mean I'm
assuming you know, TI was a stable job, and you
were having fun there. But I mean what really forced
you to think on the lines of saying, hey, I
feel a need, I see a gap in the system there,
and I think I can build a company off of it.
(20:52):
I mean, how do you get to that realization?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, now, to some extent, it's not knowing what it
takes to build a company, you know. Like, so, I
think it's the same reason why I just decided to
come to the US to do my master's at the time,
given where I came from, right, It's always there was
that there was always that sort of what's next, what's next?
And I was always had the tentensic motivation to do stuff,
(21:17):
you know. But one thing around that time, that was
a great place to really sort of grow in your career.
They give you a lot of flexibility, You have a
lot of options to move around and try different things.
I was really sort of doing well sort of growing
up in my career within TI and I could have
easily sort of said, okay, this is be content with that.
But I think it's kind of a disease, you know,
(21:38):
Like you're like, Okay, I want to do more. I
want to So I think the combination of that with
my MBA, and then at that time I actually took
an emerging market opportunity with Tim. I actually moved to
India for eight months. I had two little kids at
that time, so ended up moving to India really to
sort of evaluate the India education technology market. I had
a lot of opportunities to work at all levels with
(22:00):
the Ministry of Education, TENCIT and all of those and
sort of evaluate. That was more like an intrapreneurship, right,
Like I was alone in this country, trying to understand
the market, build a business case, put a budget together,
put a team together, convinced like the higher ups that
there is an opportunity here. Got to do all of that,
but then when it was time to sort of execute it,
(22:23):
there was some like I forget what the reason was,
for some reason where they decided to sort of stop
all emerging market projects or something like that happened, and
that was like a setback for me. I was like
put so much effort into it, and then always internally
I was always like I see a problem even within
the company, and I'm like I'm going to put together
(22:44):
a proposal. I'm going to present it to so so.
But in a large company, sometimes, you know, there's a
lot of politics and people are not always open to
you know, young like people coming and presenting random ideas
because people have been leaders, have been there for decades
and they's sort of set in their ways and you
can't really move the needle that fast within a large organization,
(23:08):
even if there are good people. And that was though,
Like I tried to do that a couple of times
and I got a lot of pushback and that was
frustrating to me, you know. So when the MBA happened
and we had put together a business plan and thought
this idea could actually be something, and I had to
have a conversation with my husband at the time because
(23:28):
I didn't start the company in my early twenties right, like,
I had two little kids, had a house and mortgage,
a certain lifestyle that we had. We were a comfortable
to income earning family in the US, and so if
I have to go try something, it means like for years,
I'm not going to be able to get this pay.
So I needed to have that conversation first. And for me,
(23:50):
my biggest cheerleader has always been my husband, and he
was like, of course, go for it, right, So having
that support at home was also super helpful. I imagine
if I if I had to fight my battles at
the house, I don't know if I could have done,
you know. So it sort of felt like everything sort
of lined up, and I ended up starting the company,
(24:13):
the first company that was completely about something completely different.
It was still education technology, but it was about how
to use gaming to help students learn and understand math
concepts better. So spent a year trying to get that
off the ground, and it took me a year to realize, like,
one thing is starting the company with someone who has
(24:33):
the same risk tolerance su you know, like I had
already had this critical conversation with my husband, I said,
forget about half half of FOURT salaries. It's not going
to comet. Are we going to be okay? You know?
But but you know, I ended up partnering with someone
who probably was a single learning member and their family
they couldn't take the same level of risk and that
(24:54):
they hadn't had those you know, critical conversations like you
can't raise friends and family funding and pay yourselves in
the dollars a month. You know, you have to go
without taking a pay until you get your MVP get
the product out in the market race even when you
raise seed funding, no founders paying themselves market rate salary.
So that was my first big lessons learned is if
I'm partnering with someone, I need to make sure that
(25:17):
both of us are able to take the same level
of risk. There were other issues with that product, even
though it was a very very it was a very interesting,
you know solution. The ability to actually develop sort of
game based content for a full you know subject, it's
a very capital intense I didn't think of all those
(25:39):
things different as the first time entrepreneur. You're like, oh,
I love this idea. I'm going to go change the world, right,
And then you're like, well, yeah, that was also a tick.
It's basically a tick is helping students learn Mac through
game based learning, you know. So, and that basically what
we realized was one was you know, like, like both
(25:59):
the founders sort of didn't have the same risk risk profile, right,
the other person wasn't able to go for too long
without taking a full salary. That was a you know that,
that's a big barrier. And then next is the product
itself was very ambitious and lofty, and as first time entrepreneurs.
We just couldn't go raise money to build the product.
(26:20):
We had to build the product before money came. So
it's a cart before the horse, right Like, so, so
you know, we couldn't really build We could maybe build
one problem, right, but then how are you going to
sell like one problem to a school. In order to
sell something to a school district, you need to have
(26:42):
some volume of content. And then by the time we
realized all this and calculated the costs of doing this,
we were not going to be able to take take
it off the ground. So we had to pull the
plug within a year. And that was devastating because I
had left a perfectly good job to start this company
and it failed badly very soon. Right, But now that
(27:05):
I look back, a lot of those lessons learned we
were super valuable. As painful as it was. As painful
as it was, you know, like we didn't even put
legal dogs in place. We took friends and family money.
I eventually paid it off, but but you know, because
I'm like, I still need to be invited to family dinners, right, so, so,
(27:30):
but it was so stressful, Like, you know the fact
that I took friends and family money and this never
went anywhere. There's nothing to show. But I reached out
to a lot of people at the time to ask
for feedback and help. And I then I kind of
got into a rut, like I was like, oh my god,
what am I doing. I was just sitting at home
(27:52):
doing nothing. And I started interviewing, thinking okay, I'll just
go back to work. But I wasn't like in any
sort of hurry, you know, Like it was very quickly
I was getting into that like, oh yeah, I'll wake
up late and just hang around the house. And you know,
it's so quick how you go from I'm motivated to
(28:12):
build a company too, I'm not going to do anything
for a while, you know, And so so that actually
one of my friends reached out to me. It was
three months into that. I was intervene here and there,
but nothing like, you know, I had a great offer.
I hadn't taken it. I was still thinking I gave
myself two years to start a company. Maybe I need
to think about it a bit. And then one of
(28:33):
my friends had reached out and said, hey, there's a
STEM education event going on and Richardson, you should go
attend really right up your alley. And that was the
point that changed. I even at that time, I was like,
I don't know if I want it's already too late.
I don't know if I want to get ready and go.
And I actually finally went, and I'm glad I did
(28:54):
because I actually walked in late, you know, And I'm like,
when you walk in late, like the worst thing that
can happen is somebody who's like up there talking, stops
talking and says, oh, you there who just walked in,
Come over here and you know, and take the front
row seat. Right Literally, I'm not even making this up.
Because I sit in that, I make my walk off
(29:16):
shame and I go sit in the front row seat.
And then in that table was Kent, who was like
the general manager for TIDLP, which was a different business unit.
Sam who was with the Irving ISD. His wife I
think was a CTO of Irving ID and he was
also working there. Pam who was a teacher at McKinney ID,
(29:38):
a career in technical education teacher. She was teaching principals
of engineering. These were my tablemates that I was, you know,
made to sit and long story short, this that event,
I was in that room for the whole day. There
were industry leaders, government, education leaders, everybody talking about, you know,
there's not enough kids coming out of this pipeline having
(29:59):
this ski to take the jobs, Like what are we
doing to bridge this gap in education? And that was
evident to me, like there was a lot of people
who there was companies like company leaders from Intel, General Motors, Rateton, Lockheed,
all the local school districts, the Chamber, the economic development
you name it. Like everybody was there, right, and you
(30:22):
have a nice happy hour the end of the day.
Everybody is really motivated. They have good intentions. But what
I saw was like technology wasn't playing the role in
connecting the dots right. And so the same night I
drove to my friend's house who then became the co
founder and CTO of Nepris. We were throwing stickies up
on the wall at eleven o'clock. His first thing was,
I'm sure that somebody's has a platform where they're connecting
(30:45):
industry in education. There were a lot of mentoring platforms,
but not like how we were envisioning or saying, if
you're learning about, you know, soular power, you should be
connecting with the renewable energy expert. You know it wasn't
going at that level. So that was really there was
a clear problem. I was there, you know, and it
(31:05):
was being at the right place at the right time,
but also listening and seeing what the problem is. And
then I got super excited about it. So I'm like,
we did some you know, analysis, and there's really not
like an apples to apples competition, and to some extent,
like this college and career readiness and career exposure was
(31:26):
just these discussions were just starting to happen in Attech
and Zoom was just founded, and so it's sort of
everything you came together. It's coming together, right, It's and
it was not easy because it's not easy to build
a product that requires teachers to change their behavior. It
(31:46):
took I mean, you should have seen my very first
five year financial model was beautiful, you know, but then
it took it took much longer to get there. That
concludes part one of today's episode with Sabari Raja.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Tune in next week for part two.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Hope you enjoyed it and thank you for tuning in.
Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand new episode of Startups.
They'll say. I am excited to be joined by my
friend from my B school here, Sabury Rajah, and we're
recording this on a Friday afternoon. So Subury, thanks so
much for taking the time on a Friday afternoon before
you get into the weekend to chat with me talk
about all the fun things you've done in your life,
which I'm sure is going to be super useful for
(00:33):
people listening and people watching. So welcome to the show
of Subury.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thank you, Anthony. I appreciate the opportunity, and it's always
nice to connect with an old friend.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, I must say, I mean I've probably learned more
about you in the last few weeks of talking than
I learned through the two years of MBA because you
and I were in probably different batches at that time,
different study groups. I mean, our parts probably crossed only
on our trips to Chile and to China. Right, I'm
so glad I know you better and congratulations on all
(01:03):
your success since since B school. So the other thing
I have I have to say is you're the second
guest from Tamil Nadu for those for those who don't know.
My first guest on the podcast was Vision of super Money,
and he has a startup based in Kimittor and Sbury
happens to be from the same state as I, which
is in the southern part of India called Tamil Nanda.
(01:26):
So I'm happy that in my first ten episodes, I
have two folks from my home state.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Not just not just from the home state. I'm also
from near kim went to school in Comba, so you
must have some affinity towards going What can.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I say, there's a lot of smart people from I
guess I agree. Actually, yeah, so maybe let's start with that, Sabury,
Why don't you tell our folks here a little bit
about you know, where you come from, how did you
come to the US, and uh, yeah, where you are today,
and then we'll obviously double coming to them and get
(02:02):
to know more about you.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Absolutely, thank you so much for this opportunity. I'm excited
to share my story. So my background, you know, just
like most other people in our network, coming from you know,
South India. Of course, if you if you get good grades,
you're supposed to become an engineer or a doctor. And
so I became an engineer, you know, like I did
(02:24):
go to undergrad. I did go to undergrad in Coimbatoor
and Kumar Gul College of Technology, and then I grew
up mostly in rural South India, right, Like most of
my family is all into farming. You know. My husband
always jokes that why don't you tell people exactly where
(02:46):
you're from, because you're not from Coimbatoor, you know. So
I think I'm like if people know the geography, depending
on how much you know about that area, accordingly, I
will keep moving my location of where I'm exactly. So,
so I'm actually from near Polachi, Like my parents live
on a farm on the border of Caroline Tamil Nadu.
(03:08):
So you know, for people who know Polace can give
more details. It's it's further and it keeps going further
and further down closer to the western guards. You know,
it's a beautiful area. We wake up to hearing peacocks
and I always go back and wonder, like why I
left the place, you know. So, but most of my
family for generations have been farming, so my exposure was
(03:34):
very limited. You know. Also, you know, while my parents
gave me a lot of opportunities. They themselves did not
have college degrees, you know, so for me, but there
was always this push and aspiration to study and diet
good grades and do something and have a career. And
(03:55):
so when I actually I went to boarding school all
my life because there was no schools around where where
I'm from, or at least no good schools. That was
very common in my family. So I went to boarding school,
started did most of my schooling in Combatur, did my
engineering degree there as well. So so the long story short,
I did the final layer of engineering. There was you know,
(04:17):
either you go start working or you know, you end up.
At that time, there was a lot of you know,
interest in doing your masters abroad. I didn't think my
parents were going to let me leave, you know, you
know how it goes. I've never even left the state
at that point, and probably the farthest I've gone is
the neighboring state to Bangalo. I never even traveled past
(04:39):
Banglord at that point. So some of my friends were
writing gr and I said, okay, I should also try.
You know, it sounds like so fabulous to go so
far away and see the world, And that's really sort
of set the thing in motion. I didn't think my
parents were going to agree to this, but somehow I
think they also got sucked into this, you know thing.
(05:00):
Once the ball was in motion, and that was my
biggest risk, my first, biggest risk I've ever taken. And
I had never even gotten on a plane up until
that point. That was my first flight trip. Everything was new.
Ended up at LSU for my master's in computer science
(05:20):
and people always ask me, how did you pick LSU
of all schools, And literally at that time used Peterson's
guide and picked only schools in the South that were cheap.
And we were looking at how many books are in
the library, and that's how clueless we were, you know.
Like so basically like zero exposure, no idea what I
(05:41):
was doing, and not much confidence. But there was always
that inner push to try something, do something, take that
next step and get out of your comfort zone and
take that risk and see what happens. You know. There
was always that inner motivation to continue doing that, even
though I didn't have the confidence abilities at that point.
(06:01):
So that led me to I did my master's at
LSU and my first job from campus. I ended up
at Texas Instruments in Dallas, and I happened to end
up in their education technology and I never even knew
AT tech was a thing. It really wasn't a big
thing at that time. And that's where even though I
hadn't gone to K through twelve schools in the US,
(06:24):
being at TI working on products that went into classrooms.
That's really how I first got exposed to education technology
and then sort of trying to think what is next?
What is next in my career. Then it became a
parent I needed to sort of get a business degree,
and that's how I ended up at SMU where I
met you, and you know the story for what happened
in those two years that really sort of opened up
(06:45):
my network and opportunities and gave me the courage to
take that first step towards entrepreneurship. My first idea was
literally the idea that we pitched in school for our
entrepreneurship class. We can talk a bit about that later.
I don't want to go into all those details, but
you know, literally left my job, tried something didn't work.
(07:06):
I was like, Okay, I need to try again. And
then the company that I started in ne Epris in
twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen mainly was using my lived
experience where I grew up on a farm, had zero exposure,
zero social capital. But I was coming at it from
I have this technology background. I was shocked to see
(07:27):
in the US that even like you know, ocean support
in this country, also many students didn't have access. I
could sort of see myself in them, and rural school districts,
underserved school districts, students didn't really have that exposure or access.
And I got connected to a lot of different groups
(07:50):
around the country sort of talking about this problem and
how to we solve it. I felt like a lot
of people, industry, government, education, everybody coming to talking about this,
but technology wasn't playing a role in connecting the dots.
So it was sort of that perfect moment right where
I can relate to this problem because I myself have
had the lived experience and my work and background sort
(08:14):
of bought me there, and I could sort of see
this next generation of kids through that same lens, and
clearly I saw a problem and that's really what I
set out to do. So started the company, grew, the
company ended up getting acquired end of twenty twenty one,
and then stayed on for a year to see it
(08:34):
through merger and a rebranding, and along the way, I
really sort of built my personal brand in the industry,
grew out of my you know fears and you know
hesitations and imposter syndrome and all of that. Really found
myself in this process and really got comfortable with who
I was, what I was trying to do, and build
a great network of people around me. And that is
(08:57):
what led me to what I'm doing right now. One
of my the investors reached out to me and said, Hey,
come join me to start a venture fund that's also
investing in found restrict yourself, that's balancing impact and scale
and education workforce as Hey, I've been on the other
side of the table. I've gone through the journey for
eight years. You know, I'm always about learning new things
(09:19):
and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I never
really intended intended to become a full time investor, but
here I have, you know, been doing this for a
year and a half.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah, great, great story, Subrie. I know you write your book.
I'll be sure to buy it.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
As soon as I get some time.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And yeah, so that's uh, there's so much to unravel
from what you said first up you know, I mean,
I know a little bit about ed tech, and I'm
assuming people who are listening know the high levels of
it as well. Maybe since you've been in this industry
for a bit, say, I mean, I tried to connect
(09:56):
the dots between TI being TI more on the hardware
side of things. I mean, at least that's what they're
known for. Made me wonder what were they doing on
the ed tech side of things?
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Right?
Speaker 1 (10:07):
So maybe, yeah, if you could talk a little bit
about ed tech and maybe how it's evolved, and then
that's what kind of led you to also figure out
saying oh, here's a gap and which gave you the
idea for the startup. So can you educate us a
little bit on ed tech itself and from where it
was so probably where it is right now?
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yeah? No, No, I think that's a great question because
I've had the privilege of seeing the tech market grow
and become a real industry. Right because when I started
at TI, I'll probably date myself here, like twenty plus
years back, tech was the etic division of TI was
(10:48):
called the calculator group. Like everybody knew the graphic calculators.
That was education technology, right, But then eventually like software
became a part of it, and then more and more
beyond the hardware, software solutions started sort of you know,
showing up in classrooms and then actually had an opportunity
to work with a lot of publishers while I was
(11:10):
at TIS well. So if you think about the large publishers,
mostly for decades, they've been selling content in the form
of printed books, where the opportunity like, really, I feel
like this last fee years we've seen drastic changes with
technology in education because it then content then became sort
(11:32):
of digital content, right, that was a tremendous opportunity. There
was a whole slew of startups that really sort of
leveraged that transition, and everybody, like publishers who were very
comfortable in printing books for many many decades, had to
change quickly. But then you saw some people go away
and new entrants come in. That was like sort of
(11:55):
owning the digital content space. So as we were seeing
b on the digital content, then the evolution and ethtech
then became I think a lot of people in India
can relate to this, Like then it was more about
you know, tutoring and online like as online as technology
was evolving, where you know, virtual connections became like a
(12:19):
real possibility bendwith you know, improved within technology. You know,
what was available to us, what you couldn't imagine, like
you know ten years before that you could do now,
like you could actually have a live conversation online. Even
in the early stages. Then you saw like a dearth
of tutoring platforms come out, right. You saw some big
(12:41):
players really sort of become unicons in this space. So
education technology sort of evolved from like digital content, then
it became connections, virtual connections. Then then for a while
it was like you know, you have you know, like
the smart boards in the classroom, Like once you have
(13:02):
certain different types of hardware, Like we went from what
is what are those things where you put those plastic
sheets on transparents in from and from there it went yeah,
you know what I mean, right, So from there it
went to like every classroom had a smart board, and
then like now you have the smart boards, like then
you have the digital content that goes on the smart boards.
(13:22):
Then you have other technologies and tools that are starting
to think about interactive learning, you know, adaptive learning, and
then everything sort of digital content became sort of in
the form of assessments, and so it took his sort
of I've had the pleasure of seeing a ticky ball
from the sprint textbook to a lot of different technologies,
(13:46):
where now the problem is like the opposite. There is
like thousands of technology and tools in a in a
school district that they are not not even sure how
to navigate all of that, right. So so when I
started looking at this industry, like literally, Zoom had just started,
(14:07):
like the company Zoom had just started, and that was
a game changer because we were sort of going to
that next level of video conferencing becoming such a day
to day tool, and we leveraged that in order to
build our platform. So the problem that we set out
to solve was, you know, there was so much content,
(14:27):
there was so much curriculum, but we were still like
there was such a big gap between classroom learning and
what was happening in the real world. So when we
started building, we were seeing a lot of career and
technical education conversations like okay, now you know, going beyond
the math and the reading, and saying, how are we
actually preparing students for the future of work? You know,
(14:49):
how was this actually applying in the real world? And
that was the problem we set out to solve. We said,
employers are left out of this conversation. Education is here,
employees are here. There is a big gap in between.
How can then we leverage all of these new technologies
to really connect the dots. That's really what my process.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
That's great. I mean, my mind was still in the
transparencies that you were talking about.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
The transparencies.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yes, yes, I still remember going to N I. T
in Chennai and I used to give presentations and transparencies.
So those are the days. But you've come up. We've
come a long way, for sure.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
So correct. Correct.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
One of the last things you mentioned about, you know,
the industry connection from what you learn in school to
how it is applicable in real life. You know, how
is it going to make a difference for that student
coming out of the classroom? Right, how do you measure
success for that sly in the in the model, I mean,
should was there a metric that you had to say, Okay,
(15:53):
we're bridging the gap and here's what success means if
we do X, Y and Z as part of now.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, Now, that is actually the heart of every education
technology company, right like every a tech company. To some
extent is an impact focused company because you're trying to
create move the needle and outcomes with an education. This
is a question that we today, even till today, we
battle with because depending on the type of solution you're developing,
(16:22):
it's not an easy answer to that, you know. Like,
for example, if I was developing something for college students
which was going to help them find a job right
out of college, right, then I can easily measure my
outcomes and say, Okay, eighty percent of the students that
have used my platform have landed a job within the
(16:42):
first three months or whatever, you know, after graduation. So
the but what we were trying to do was one
of the hardest things to do is we were saying
even sometimes like when students come to high school, it's
a bit too late. You know, this exposure needs to
be embedded into the day to day learning, not something
that happens once a year during career day. They need
(17:03):
to be you know, if you're learning about rocks in
second grade, you need to be talking to a geologist.
So it was a very much like a I'm going
to change the world kind of you know idea where
we were trying to move mountains we were trying to
change teacher behavior in the classroom of how they teach.
We're trying to bring external industry people virtually into the
classroom to you know, teach alot, not really teach, but
(17:25):
bring relevance to what students are learning. So when you're
trying to actually change the way second graders learn, measuring
that outcome of okay, did this kid who actually talked
to a geologist become a geologist? I mean it's very hard.
You know, like you're in second grade, so it's very
hard to measure sort of that outcomes and efficacy because
(17:48):
you're going like way down in the grade level, because
we believe that it needs to start there, right, and
it was always hard to sort of as an impact
focused company, measure that. So we worked we worked on
like intermediate measurements, Like we said, is the student more
engaged in the classroom, you know, did they understand the
(18:09):
concept better? Did they learn about a career that they
never knew before. So we worked with some third party
you know, universities and other researchers to come up with
sort of intermediate measurements, and then as they move into
middle school, thinking about did this actually influence how you
take your electives in your high school. You know, like now,
because you spoke with an accountant. Even if they say
(18:32):
I don't ever want to do accounting, that's a way,
you know, so because a lot of times, a vast
number of kids actually drop out a first year or
change their you know, majors in the first year. So
so even that was a win. So we had to
get creative about how to measure intermediate successes because the
ultimate goal of measuring you know, going into a job
(18:53):
was very you know, sort of far.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Let's sort of a measurement.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean eventually like once they then
they're like in middle school, they're making choices about what
high school electives to take, and that was an indication
of their interest. So there were points along the way
you were trying to measure these things, but it was
not straightforward.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, it's awesome what you did with netwis because I
mean a lot of times, I mean, you know, when
kids are in middle school. When my daughter is in
middle school and we randomly asked the question to her saying, well,
do you want to become you know, where's your head at?
You know, that sort of thing. A lot of times.
I mean, obviously they have their interests, but it's also
kind of influenced by what their friends want to do
(19:39):
at times.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, which.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Is funny, right, but yeah. I mean I've seen at
least maybe in fifty percent of the cases. I mean,
if a kid is interested in something when there were
five or ten and they have a passion for it,
I mean, eventually they'll be doing something related to it.
I mean, you know it's up to the parents and
to the teachers to find that, nurture that, and you know,
(20:02):
give them the fat way to take off, right, I mean,
so yeah, I think that's that's what you're doing. So
that's very commendable. So the let's go back a little bit.
I mean, obviously you had a great exit with all
things worked out with Nebrisk, but let's probably go back
to maybe twenty eleven, twenty twelve. I guess somebody is
that when you really wanted to come out of TI
(20:25):
and wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Yeah, yeah, twenty twolve, I think, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, So so what made you actually want to take
that risk? I mean you had a I mean I'm
assuming you know, TI was a stable job, and you
were having fun there. But I mean what really forced
you to think on the lines of saying, hey, I
feel a need, I see a gap in the system there,
and I think I can build a company off of it.
(20:52):
I mean, how do you get to that realization?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, now, to some extent, it's not knowing what it
takes to build a company, you know. Like, so, I
think it's the same reason why I just decided to
come to the US to do my master's at the time,
given where I came from, right, It's always there was
that there was always that sort of what's next, what's next?
And I was always had the tentensic motivation to do stuff,
(21:17):
you know. But one thing around that time, that was
a great place to really sort of grow in your career.
They give you a lot of flexibility, You have a
lot of options to move around and try different things.
I was really sort of doing well sort of growing
up in my career within TI and I could have
easily sort of said, okay, this is be content with that.
But I think it's kind of a disease, you know,
(21:38):
Like you're like, Okay, I want to do more. I
want to So I think the combination of that with
my MBA, and then at that time I actually took
an emerging market opportunity with Tim. I actually moved to
India for eight months. I had two little kids at
that time, so ended up moving to India really to
sort of evaluate the India education technology market. I had
a lot of opportunities to work at all levels with
(22:00):
the Ministry of Education, TENCIT and all of those and
sort of evaluate. That was more like an intrapreneurship, right,
Like I was alone in this country, trying to understand
the market, build a business case, put a budget together,
put a team together, convinced like the higher ups that
there is an opportunity here. Got to do all of that,
but then when it was time to sort of execute it,
(22:23):
there was some like I forget what the reason was,
for some reason where they decided to sort of stop
all emerging market projects or something like that happened, and
that was like a setback for me. I was like
put so much effort into it, and then always internally
I was always like I see a problem even within
the company, and I'm like I'm going to put together
(22:44):
a proposal. I'm going to present it to so so.
But in a large company, sometimes, you know, there's a
lot of politics and people are not always open to
you know, young like people coming and presenting random ideas
because people have been leaders, have been there for decades
and they's sort of set in their ways and you
can't really move the needle that fast within a large organization,
(23:08):
even if there are good people. And that was though,
Like I tried to do that a couple of times
and I got a lot of pushback and that was
frustrating to me, you know. So when the MBA happened
and we had put together a business plan and thought
this idea could actually be something, and I had to
have a conversation with my husband at the time because
(23:28):
I didn't start the company in my early twenties right, like,
I had two little kids, had a house and mortgage,
a certain lifestyle that we had. We were a comfortable
to income earning family in the US, and so if
I have to go try something, it means like for years,
I'm not going to be able to get this pay.
So I needed to have that conversation first. And for me,
(23:50):
my biggest cheerleader has always been my husband, and he
was like, of course, go for it, right, So having
that support at home was also super helpful. I imagine
if I if I had to fight my battles at
the house, I don't know if I could have done,
you know. So it sort of felt like everything sort
of lined up, and I ended up starting the company,
(24:13):
the first company that was completely about something completely different.
It was still education technology, but it was about how
to use gaming to help students learn and understand math
concepts better. So spent a year trying to get that
off the ground, and it took me a year to realize, like,
one thing is starting the company with someone who has
(24:33):
the same risk tolerance su you know, like I had
already had this critical conversation with my husband, I said,
forget about half half of FOURT salaries. It's not going
to comet. Are we going to be okay? You know?
But but you know, I ended up partnering with someone
who probably was a single learning member and their family
they couldn't take the same level of risk and that
(24:54):
they hadn't had those you know, critical conversations like you
can't raise friends and family funding and pay yourselves in
the dollars a month. You know, you have to go
without taking a pay until you get your MVP get
the product out in the market race even when you
raise seed funding, no founders paying themselves market rate salary.
So that was my first big lessons learned is if
I'm partnering with someone, I need to make sure that
(25:17):
both of us are able to take the same level
of risk. There were other issues with that product, even
though it was a very very it was a very interesting,
you know solution. The ability to actually develop sort of
game based content for a full you know subject, it's
a very capital intense I didn't think of all those
(25:39):
things different as the first time entrepreneur. You're like, oh,
I love this idea. I'm going to go change the world, right,
And then you're like, well, yeah, that was also a tick.
It's basically a tick is helping students learn Mac through
game based learning, you know. So, and that basically what
we realized was one was you know, like, like both
(25:59):
the founders sort of didn't have the same risk risk profile, right,
the other person wasn't able to go for too long
without taking a full salary. That was a you know that,
that's a big barrier. And then next is the product
itself was very ambitious and lofty, and as first time entrepreneurs.
We just couldn't go raise money to build the product.
(26:20):
We had to build the product before money came. So
it's a cart before the horse, right Like, so, so
you know, we couldn't really build We could maybe build
one problem, right, but then how are you going to
sell like one problem to a school. In order to
sell something to a school district, you need to have
(26:42):
some volume of content. And then by the time we
realized all this and calculated the costs of doing this,
we were not going to be able to take take
it off the ground. So we had to pull the
plug within a year. And that was devastating because I
had left a perfectly good job to start this company
and it failed badly very soon. Right, But now that
(27:05):
I look back, a lot of those lessons learned we
were super valuable. As painful as it was. As painful
as it was, you know, like we didn't even put
legal dogs in place. We took friends and family money.
I eventually paid it off, but but you know, because
I'm like, I still need to be invited to family dinners, right, so, so,
(27:30):
but it was so stressful, Like, you know the fact
that I took friends and family money and this never
went anywhere. There's nothing to show. But I reached out
to a lot of people at the time to ask
for feedback and help. And I then I kind of
got into a rut, like I was like, oh my god,
what am I doing. I was just sitting at home
(27:52):
doing nothing. And I started interviewing, thinking okay, I'll just
go back to work. But I wasn't like in any
sort of hurry, you know, Like it was very quickly
I was getting into that like, oh yeah, I'll wake
up late and just hang around the house. And you know,
it's so quick how you go from I'm motivated to
(28:12):
build a company too, I'm not going to do anything
for a while, you know, And so so that actually
one of my friends reached out to me. It was
three months into that. I was intervene here and there,
but nothing like, you know, I had a great offer.
I hadn't taken it. I was still thinking I gave
myself two years to start a company. Maybe I need
to think about it a bit. And then one of
(28:33):
my friends had reached out and said, hey, there's a
STEM education event going on and Richardson, you should go
attend really right up your alley. And that was the
point that changed. I even at that time, I was like,
I don't know if I want it's already too late.
I don't know if I want to get ready and go.
And I actually finally went, and I'm glad I did
(28:54):
because I actually walked in late, you know, And I'm like,
when you walk in late, like the worst thing that
can happen is somebody who's like up there talking, stops
talking and says, oh, you there who just walked in,
Come over here and you know, and take the front
row seat. Right Literally, I'm not even making this up.
Because I sit in that, I make my walk off
(29:16):
shame and I go sit in the front row seat.
And then in that table was Kent, who was like
the general manager for TIDLP, which was a different business unit.
Sam who was with the Irving ISD. His wife I
think was a CTO of Irving ID and he was
also working there. Pam who was a teacher at McKinney ID,
(29:38):
a career in technical education teacher. She was teaching principals
of engineering. These were my tablemates that I was, you know,
made to sit and long story short, this that event,
I was in that room for the whole day. There
were industry leaders, government, education leaders, everybody talking about, you know,
there's not enough kids coming out of this pipeline having
(29:59):
this ski to take the jobs, Like what are we
doing to bridge this gap in education? And that was
evident to me, like there was a lot of people
who there was companies like company leaders from Intel, General Motors, Rateton, Lockheed,
all the local school districts, the Chamber, the economic development
you name it. Like everybody was there, right, and you
(30:22):
have a nice happy hour the end of the day.
Everybody is really motivated. They have good intentions. But what
I saw was like technology wasn't playing the role in
connecting the dots right. And so the same night I
drove to my friend's house who then became the co
founder and CTO of Nepris. We were throwing stickies up
on the wall at eleven o'clock. His first thing was,
I'm sure that somebody's has a platform where they're connecting
(30:45):
industry in education. There were a lot of mentoring platforms,
but not like how we were envisioning or saying, if
you're learning about, you know, soular power, you should be
connecting with the renewable energy expert. You know it wasn't
going at that level. So that was really there was
a clear problem. I was there, you know, and it
(31:05):
was being at the right place at the right time,
but also listening and seeing what the problem is. And
then I got super excited about it. So I'm like,
we did some you know, analysis, and there's really not
like an apples to apples competition, and to some extent,
like this college and career readiness and career exposure was
(31:26):
just these discussions were just starting to happen in Attech
and Zoom was just founded, and so it's sort of
everything you came together. It's coming together, right, It's and
it was not easy because it's not easy to build
a product that requires teachers to change their behavior. It
(31:46):
took I mean, you should have seen my very first
five year financial model was beautiful, you know, but then
it took it took much longer to get there. That
concludes part one of today's episode with Sabari Raja.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Tune in next week for part two.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Hope you enjoyed it and thank you for tuning in.
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