How Did You Get to Masai?

On this episode, we talk to Prateek Shukla, Co-Founder and CEO at Masai School

Prateek is an IIT Kanpur Graduate, a Teach for India Alum and Ex-Founder of Grabhouse, a real-estate tech startup that was acquired by Commonfloor and subsequently by Quikr. He’s a second time entrepreneur who is picking up his first love of teaching. 

India has 444 Million People that are in the 0-18 Years Age Bracket. That’s 400 Million people coming into the workforce over the next 15 to 20 years. For them to be contribute to India’s economic growth, we have a mammoth task of giving them the right skills.

We have over 45000 College and Institutes in the country and you would think we are slowly but surely building capacity to educate and train the 400 million people over the next 2 decades.

But, the grim reality on the ground that a large majority of students graduating from these institutions have NO employable skills. For example, of the 1.5 Million engineers that graduate, only 3% secure high paying technology jobs. The situation is even worst in Business and Humanities courses. The education industry is a money-making, recession proof business that’s being run purely on the fact that every parent wants their kid to hold a ‘degree’. It doesn’t matter if it’s useful or not, the societal shame from not having one is good enough reason to pour money into getting your child through college for 3 to 4 years.

The lack of employable talent coming out of college is HUGE problem to solve if we want to achieve The Indian Dream of becoming a large developed economy with a high per capita income. And to solve this problem, whatever we done so far isn’t working. The core reason why colleges suck in India is because there’s no incentive alignment. The college gets their fees regardless of the fact that the student might not even get a decent job after graduating. But, what if colleges got paid only after the graduating students earned.

And that’s where I find the model of Outcome driven education or Income Share Agreements very very interesting. It’s a model where the institute only gets paid after students start earning a baseline salary. What this also does is it opens up education to talented students who previously who couldn’t afford high fees of these colleges.

On the episode today, we have Prateek Shukla, Co-Founder and CEO of Masai School who is pioneering the Income Share Agreement or outcome driven model of education India. Masai is a 3 year old startup that helps students learn coding for free in a 6 months, military style coding bootcamp. They work with students with no coding or computer science background, and train them through their rigouros program. They have an income share agreement where they can make up to 3 Lakhs as a cost for the education, only and only if the students get a salary of more than 5 Lakhs per annum.

There’s no doubt Vocational Training is key to make large sections of society employment ready and productive. Only on the back of skilled talent, can you build large industries that contribute significantly to the GDP of the country. We’ve seen this play out in China where they used skilled labor and technology to build the world’s Manufacturing hub.

For India, a similar opportunity lies in being the Software hub of the world. And for that to happen, we need to train millions of students every year. Over the next 50 minutes, I talk to Prateek about the thesis behind Masai School, how they teach students, what are the execution challenges of training 7000 Students, and about their partnership with National Skill Development Coloration.