17min chapter

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104. Inside Supernova: Providing An AI Tutor For Every Child

Rise and Play Podcast

CHAPTER

From Hyper-Local Delivery to AI Tutor: The Journey to Supernova

The guest speaker shares their background and journey leading up to the founding of Supernova, from growing up in a small town in India to selling a startup. They discuss their passion for education and the motivations behind starting Supernova, highlighting the broken state of education and the potential of AI tutors in transforming the industry.

00:00
Speaker 2
And I'm here today to go through your journey, how you started. So welcome Rishi to the podcast. Thank you so much, Sophie.
Speaker 1
Thank you for that kind introduction. Yeah, very happy to be here.
Speaker 2
So let's begin maybe before Supernova. And now make sure to link to the show notes on video and trailer, because I think it's very self-explanatory what you're doing with Supernova. What have you done before? What is your background? Where was it in games, in business, in technology that led you to found Supernova?
Speaker 1
I come from this small town called Dindigal. Tamil Nadu, which is one of the 29 states of India. So a small town life and middle class family. And for a long time, I went to the same school, got on the same bus, went to my school for almost 12 years, right, same school in my town. And that was until class 10. And I was always a kid who was able to do well in exams, but anything related to those kind of things, anything that was very intellectual, I was able to perform well. So right after 10, my dad found this ad for this thing called IIT JE Coaching Center. Just to give you some context, IIT is the best engineering college of the country. But somewhere my father believed I could do it. And my dad was very much about what is essential and what is just things that you can look at without a very grounded kind of a person. So most of the time, if I wanted a new shirt or I wanted to go somewhere on a trip, even those things he would think twice before spending, a lot of times he'll advise me to stay within your means, et cetera. But when it comes to education, he never holds back. And it cost a lot to prepare for this entrance examination. Somehow, he took a loan, et cetera, and put me in this school that was good at getting people through IIT examinations. So then I went to Chennai and then my whole life changed because suddenly I'm living in a metro. Chennai is one of the six, one of the top cities of India. I was lucky enough to get into IIT. There, you're surrounded by ambitious individuals. Everybody is like IIT just to give you some context, one of the pictures of Google is from an IIT. So I start coding, et cetera. And that's when I start dabbling with startups, building things, putting out in the market. I built this thing called Myra Medicine along with Anirud built it. I took care of product data science there. It was a hyper local delivery startup. We scaled it to $15 million, sold it to another company in a met lives, spent a bunch of time there. And by this time I understand how to build product, what is technology, how do you know, what is an MVP, how do you trade, things like that. And then when Myra Journey came to an end, I could basically wanted to see what I wanted to do with all of these skillsets. And for me, I went back to my roots, what made me who I am, is education as you can see, the whole IIT thing. So I decided that there was a lot of problems to be solved in education and that's what we got started here.
Speaker 2
Before we get into the start of Supernova, and this is coming from my observation also, with quite many very intelligent people, entrepreneurs, and there's always the appetite to do more bigger, stronger. You know, it's almost a pursuit for statues, wealth, and you could have continued on that ride, like be the elite of the country and build, I don't know, the big unicorn of India, whatever it is in the tech, especially like Google and such. But you decided, anyway, introspect, go back to your roots, how could I use MyScale to do something meaningful for me that means something to me and at scale with impact. What was the process for you? I don't know if there's some events that happen or it's by nature, you are someone still connected to your roots. What differed you from maybe other entrepreneurs that I've seen would go just forward and be bigger, you know, chase this even more.
Speaker 1
So I think I'm not sure if I've gotten out of that loop yet because I think even in Supernova, the dream is to make it big, right? Some day India has 250 million kids, right? About three and a million kids actually, right? So you can imagine, you know, if you're building for India education and if you succeed, you know, it's going to be a legacy, huge thing. So I still think I am continuing on that dream of doing big things. Now, having said that, I had some criteria, it was not really, first of all, it was not like you asked me whether I'm that kind of a person. Actually, I think I was an entrepreneur and a person for sure, you know, doing things, taking risks, etc. But when I got into a job, I should admit that I did get into a very comfortable zone where, you know, there's not a lot of uncertainty, everything is just falling in place, you're getting money in the bank every month. So, you know, and it was nice. But somewhere I felt while it was nice and comfortable and all, somewhere I felt the longing for doing something that was meaningful, I couldn't be satisfied with a job where I know I had a small part of a funnel. I could improve it over six months. Somewhere it didn't feel meaningful to me. So there was always this like, maybe I should be doing something on my own. That's how this thing started from an ambition standpoint. Now, coming to education is very much broken even today, right? There's so many problems. I think we can go on and on about it in the podcast. So I felt there was an opportunity to do something that was going to be a lifetime of legacy work that you can be proud of. And that is super important because in startups, things don't always work out. So you need something else apart from money, etc, to keep you going. So because of those bunch of factors, I decided I can't be this happy. Worst case, I become a teacher, two teachers, maybe like 50 kids. That's still something worthwhile doing. But thankfully, that's not what it became today's much bigger than that. But that's how it got started here, from money, etc, to keep you going. So because of those bunch of factors, I decided I can't be this happy. Worst case, I become a teacher, two teachers, maybe like 50 kids. That's still something worthwhile doing. But thankfully, that's not what it became today's much bigger than that. But that's how it got started here.
Speaker 2
Let's begin with a foundation of supernova. I guess also you started with other people. And what was the phases for you to start supernova of what you wanted to solve in education in general, or even education in India, if you could give more context about it.
Speaker 1
See, the number one thing is India has 275 million school going in general. Maybe it's higher, coding the latest available official data point. Now, out of this, if you really think about how many do not have access to a good quality learning environment, it's almost 220 to 30 million. And today with AI, etc, you can literally build an AI tutor for every single site. And even for a high-percup time come country like US, it's pretty well understood in education that if everybody has a tutor, the potential that could be realized is just tremendous. So, that's a huge problem to be solved. That is number one. The number two thing about education and sometimes health care, etc. It's one of those things where being a human is a flaw. Basically, all of us, you know, this quote, everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Not this quote. It's one of those things, because it's basically what it means is, all of us want to be fit, nobody wants to go to gym. All of us want to be learned, nobody wants to study. So, when it comes to education, we are fighting against ourselves in some way, where it's very hard for people to go through these learning journeys and it doesn't have to be that way. Like, if you are sleeping in a classroom, whose problem is it, according to the classroom, it is the student's problem. It is not that the class was boring. It is that the student was not motivated. If you attend class for six months and you flunk, you are not capable. It's not that the six month program failed. It's that you failed in that six month program. So, you know, it's a very, education is one of those industries like that, which is super, if you start to think of it as like user product, gaming, that kind of a lens, it's very odd. It's like every problem, you put it back on the user. Hey, you are not capable. You are too bored. Right? So, and there is zero effort on our end to be like, maybe I can teach this lesson in a lot less boring way. Right? So, I think that kind of education can be a lot more compelling and it can be appealing to the user. So, you know, these two thoughts, a huge impact to be made, hundreds of millions of students and fundamental changes required here. And something like, you know, in the last few months, AI has also happened now. It's crystal clear for us. You know, if you put all of these things together, looking at something massively game changing here and lots of value to be built for hundreds of millions of people. So, you know, that's the kind of thing that we came in with.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And it makes a lot of sense in numbers. I could see you so far, development of the society. You know, it starts with education because those children that have access to education, like also you, but it took a lot of effort from your parents and investment. It's not a privilege that all kids can have. And then you get to build, you know, bigger things that have an impact. It's not the access of the story of every kid. And so here you also offering opportunity for even a country who knows if everybody can develop through English and other materials and be in a place that they can. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Yeah. So why should you not realize your potential because you come from a kind of social economic background, because maybe not possible to solve this today. That's not the case. We can make this happen. And, you know, there's zero reasons for us to hold back. We should make it happen so that every children can realize their potential. Right. So, yeah.
Speaker 2
Let's get into the application of it, which is what we call a tech. Yeah. Could you share more a bit about more about the journey of using AI, because I think it's so new that people are experimenting how they could use it. And I never solve a potential of it as a conversational tool, you know, and that's how I saw it through supernova. So, could you share my context and journey around the AI for supernova.
Speaker 1
Yeah, sure. So, see, like I said, I come from a very strong engineering background. Right. So, you know, in some ways, I'm not like that, like good at math, good at data science used to do data science for years now. Right. So, very naturally, initially we looked at AI systems for accelerating content creation. Right. Initially, it was doing very small incremental things like, it may generate questions with your name and your surroundings so that it feels personal to you. It would be like Sophie went to the market like that kind of a question will come to you. This can very small incremental things. Right. So, that's how you're dabbling with it. And in between once in a while, I'll try to build, you know, there's this vision of maybe this can talk or maybe it can like teach you math. So, we tried to build prototypes around it, but you know, it was always falling short. It felt like, you know, maybe a few more years will be there until then let's see where it goes. Right. And then around December when charge GPT came, that time that that's when 3.5 came, it was a huge thing. Right. And by this time, our prototypes are starting to work. Like what we thought was 5, 10 years away are suddenly like we're prototyping and it's starting to work. Right. And I think March when GPT 4 came out, it was, it was better than anything that I could have experienced. Like I was thinking these days, terms will get to 80% of a human today. I can confidently say RA tutor for English is better than most human teachers that you can find. Like the 99 percentile human teacher when it comes to its knowledge, you know, its patience and a bunch of other things. Obviously, humans have their advantages. But, you know, that happened in March. And by this time, we had already, you know, we are interacting with kids. So I moved, I lived in Bangalore right now. So I moved to 2nd day at 3rd day towns. So I lived there in 2nd day at 3rd towns. All me and a bunch of my teammates would do is go meet kids in these places, understand what are they doing. And for us, we are just not clear. Okay, the technology is good, but they really get used to it and what you do to make it usable. Right. So to accelerate that product development, I went and lived with these kids. Every day I'll come back in the mornings, we'll have time, right, where we'll build a new prototype, a new learning experience. Afternoons evening will go experiment. Then we'll have a bunch of learning. So my God, this is broken. This sucks. This is going. Right. And then you'll come back again, you do this. And then when you keep doing it, suddenly you're like, Hey man, this thing is actually starting to work. These kids are interacting, they're learning, they're having fun. I see something here. Right. And then so quickly by April, we had by this time we had done this enough that we had the first few months of content ready as we feed the journey. Yeah.
Speaker 2
I've worked on a few educational products. We discussed about it. And I saw the main barrier. You have two stakeholders. You have the children and you have the parents. Yeah. And here you're testing also directly with the children and you have access to test and iterate the product. Could you share more about that part on business model? Because this is one of the barriers of educational products. How much have you involved with parents in the process? And now how do you have access to schools and kids? Do you go? Do you work with schools? And yeah, where do you find your play tester children on a daily basis when you were building the product and iterating them?
Speaker 1
Yeah. So for play testing, that school is very cooperative. Because like I said, I come from this IID, which is good because a lot of people look up to IID and say, sort of like, you know, the pinnacle of academics here. So when you go tell these parents, Hey, I'm from an IID, I'm trying to solve this problem for children or go to schools and say, I'm trying to do this. And I'm building this new AI thing. You don't have to pay me anything. You just have to let me in your classroom for an hour. And I will make sure it's worth your while your kids will like it. I will teach them something new. They're like, okay, maybe this is okay saying IID and all. Okay, fine. I'll give it a shot. And when we go to the classrooms, we'll make it fun that the kids only like when you come back, so etc. And so we get a buy in like that. And then now we have access to lots of schools where if you want to do play testing, they're more than happy to welcome us and do okay, I'll free up a glass for you. Please come and, you know, interact with the kids. Right. So that's how play testing work. At the same time, what happened is a bunch of these schools found us to be very missionary. So they don't mind helping you if you're trying to do something noble. Right. So they said, I can't buy this, but I see you're trying to do something here good for the kids. So I can call parents teacher meeting where you can interact with the parents. Right. And so that was again, when we went to these dietary towns, we could see first hand who was going to buy our product. What are these people like? What are their apprehensions? Do they like this? Do they understand the technology, etc. Right. So we're getting a lot of insights, even on the selling side. And I got my first few users paying users like that. I'll go to these meetings. I'll talk to a lot of parents. Some people resonate with me and then say, okay, I know you've not perfected this, but you seem to be caring about this. So it's okay. Take my money and help my kid. Right. So that's how I got my first set of kids. And from there today, we figured out distribution. So I'll tell you what all they've learned right now. The first thing that we learned is the parent that we're going after is not this affluent parent. So I'll tell you why that matters. If you know, mass loss hierarchy of needs. You're first starting with basics, then slowly you're moving up to things like self acceleration, self esteem, etc. The crowd that we're dealing with are, you know, people that are middle class, you know, honest, very hardworking people that don't have a lot of money to throw around. So they're always looking out for, I need my son's life to be, daughter's life to be more secure than mine. So these parents, they don't resonate with things like gamification, making things nice. You know, they're not there. They are about, can you solve this problem for me? Will my child be able to speak good English so that they can get that job or do well in exam? Can they be good at academics? Things like that. Right. And you can't blame them. You understand where they're coming from. So that's when we started realizing the parent side of things. So from there, we traded it, we said, okay, if you want to build this company, let's build it on something that a lot of people consider to be tangible and real and important. And that is English and math. That's how we put it there. So choose something that's headache for the parent. Push it very seriously as a learning company. But back it with super strong gamification because the same parent will come back to you and fight with you if the kid cries to do your assignment. Right. If the kid does not want to use your app after buying, they'll be scammed. So that's where you need all the gamification in the world because the kid will not do something just because the parent bought it. It'll be like, I don't like it and throw away a wrap if it's balanced. So that's the balance that you have to strike. And there's a lot of things around distribution, etc. And you know, this is a 2, 2 and a half year journey. But now we know how to strike a balance between these two fake quarters.

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