EXCLUSIVE: Meet Karl Mehta, a Silicon Valley-based Indian techie who wants to use tech to revolutionise the Indian education landscape

Karl Mehta is a name to reckon with in the tech world. He founded PlaySpan, which sold to Visa for more than $200 million in 2011. He was a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow in the program's inaugural year. He joined Menlo Ventures in 2013 as a partner to focus on finding and funding interesting and world-changing companies. He was also recently appointed by Governor Brown to the Workforce Investment Board of the State of California. Karl is the founder of several non-profit's including Code For India and Grassroots Innovation (to inspire engineers in the US and abroad to use technology to help India's urban and rural poor). He is the​ also author of 'Financial Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid on the best ways to get financial services to poorer people.

Well, his list of his achievements can go on and on. As the man has now found peace with working in the education sector, Business Insider spoke to him to ask him a few questions about his illustrious career, expectations from PM Modi’s Startup India initiative, his contribution to Indian society and much more. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

As you become a part of the Startup India, Standup India event, what are your expectations from Prime Minister Modi’s initiative for startups?

I see Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Startup India, Standup India’ as a gamechanger and something that very few nations in the world have done. Looking at the policy-level and ecosystem-level program by the government, I really can’t think of any other country where the government has shown strategic high-level involvement. Therefore, the event today will go down as a historic initiative. We have been consulting and offering our recommendations from Silicon Valley to the government about the policy changes that we expect. They have been very open to listening to our suggestions which in itself is a pretty big thing for us. We think that they are going to do some really strategic things.

How are you planning to support PM Modi’s Startup initiative?

Part of my focus is in helping create the startup ecosystem in the educational infrastructure in India. It is because we will need to train millions of people in entrepreneurship in the next few years in India to create the jobs for 1 million youth who are coming into the workforce every month. Government is very open to that. I am launching entrepreneurship courses from Silicon Valley on a public-private portal called ‘Skill Up India’, in support of Startup India initiative. I believe we cannot have a successful Startup India initiative until people are trained in startups.


Could you tell us more about Skill Up India?

After having built several companies and played the role of a VC and investor, my focus is now on education. I have realized that the fundamental building block of an economy and an ecosystem is education. And, the entrepreneurship education is very critical so that people do not make same old mistakes and are able to learn from existing success stories. If they still have to make a mistake, at least they make newer ones. I wish to bring that knowledge of how to create technology, products and build teams and companies. The problem with entrepreneurship and startup development in India is people who know how to do startups and can teach are not academics, they are practitioners, and people who teach entrepreneurship in business schools haven’t done startups themselves because they are academics.
From my own experience, I have taught classes on entrepreneurship in several US colleges as part of my giving back to the society, and I see this big gap and there is a need to bridge this gap in India. We need to bring practitioners who are already entrepreneurs back to teaching. My goal is to train 1 million Indians to learn about entrepreneurship in a very disciplined and rigorous curriculum that is built and taught by actual entrepreneurs and not academics, and that will help them prepare to take advantage of all these great things the government is trying to do to stimulate the creation of a startup.


What are the differences you see between Indian startups and its Silicon Valley counterparts, and what do you feel can we borrow from the US startup culture and its policies to enable a startup ecosystem in India?

Ease of doing business: It’s a catch all phrase and cliché I agree. But, this would cover taxation, investments, ability to start a company or shut it down, everything falls on ease of doing business.
There’s lot of emphasis on it already, and will drive a lot of risk taking by foreign investors while making it a less-hassle environment for entrepreneurs. In the US, to start or shut a business, there’s hardly any paperwork required.

Enabling ecosystem: We have great entrepreneurs in India but we can have even greater ones, and more in number. There will be more risk takers if we had an enabling infrastructure for them - training, education, availability of support services at every step like lawyers, accountants, and universities. Universities play a key role in enabling infrastructure and forming an ecosystem. US has benefitted a lot from Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, two of the biggest tier 1 universities. We too have to strengthen our universities.

After having worked in the education sector, how do you feel B-schools and engineering universities in India can make use of technology?

The Indian universities and education infrastructure are lagging behind tremendously on leveraging technology. Education sector not just in India but the entire world lags behind in the adoption of new technology. We have millions of people who have smartphones these days, but they don’t have access to education on their smartphones. So, the problem that I am trying to solve in India and worldwide is to make a billion people who have smartphones to become lifelong learners. In today’s society, we live in a knowledge economy, thanks to the internet. Whether you are a first-world or third world country, it doesn’t matter; everyone is competing at the same scale in a knowledge economy. And the implication at such a stage is to become a lifelong learner. The education institutions in India are hardly able to educate people in a four-year course and it’s sad that majority of students coming out of colleges are not employment ready. They don’t have any skill set to be employed. We have to completely overhaul, rethink and re-imagine the education In India. We have to bring more alignment between what is being taught in colleges and what is needed in the industry to bridge the gap. We have to make every person, whether in 30s, 40s or 50s to become lifelong learners. Use your smartphones not just for socializing and entertainment, but to learn. That’s what my company EdCast does - to bring the best knowledge in peer-to-peer learning and social learning on smartphones.

What are your recommendations to the government particularly in reforming the education sector?

The government should make micro degrees available because not everyone needs a 5-year college education. Today’s economy is rapidly changing. It’s sufficient to do a 1 month or 6-month course and become employable. We are bringing this concept in the US too. It means India can be the leapfrog and innovator in this completely new disruption in education.

Can you share key insights from your personal experience of working in the education sector so far?

In the US, the education sector is opening its entire content for the first time. Just like in the software sector, we had this movement called Open Source, we are now seeing a parallel movement in the education sector called Open Content. Universities like Stanford are making it available in the form of free online courses. I feel that all universities in India should be opening all their courses so that people can learn at their own pace, and they can learn whatever they want without any restrictions and barriers of cost and time. The second is to leverage new technology like mobile and social, and the third is to create the culture of life-long learning. These are the three learnings from US that I am trying to bring to India and it’s not that India would be imitating the West, but it can leapfrog and innovate on its own and show it as a shining example to all the countries because we have large scale problems no one else has, and there lies huge opportunities. Remember, we are the largest youth demographic in the world, not even China because they have ageing population.

What will be your eyes on at Startup India?

​Of course, PM Modi’s action plan. We have given our suggestions, now we want to sit back and hear what the government has to say. We will also be interacting with government officials, investors and entrepreneurs. I am looking to hear stories from Indian entrepreneurs themselves, the issues they face, whether they been addressed. This is just the beginning of a revolution, and we are here to engage ourselves and be a part of this journey.