Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your use case is quite broad-based. You’re focused on the telecom vertical, but the use cases are broad. It’s not productized. You’re providing professional services style of use cases on top of a common data handling platform.

Prashant Kumar: Yes. We are like SAP for telcos. The platform is agnostic to any vertical. The approach we have taken is very SAP-oriented. I’ll give you an example. If United Airlines buys Amtrak SAP’s procurement system, the underneath tech doesn’t change.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We’re hearing a lot about going into accounts through the teacher network. It seems to be working really well. You’re reinforcing the point by getting products in the hands of teachers through some sort of a freemium model and getting people to start looking at the product. There’s a virality to this. It seems like you’re seeing a lot of that. Could you speak more to that trend?

Stuart Udell: That is a trend. Teachers do like to talk to each other. It’s not just because they’re chatty. When they try a product, they’ll usually talk to other teachers first in the same grade. Then the other teachers will try it too. Then they go to their principal saying, “We’re all trying this individually. We’d like to unlock more tools.”

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Casewise from London and Scaling in the US

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Alexandre Wentzo is the former CEO of Casewise, an enterprise software company that started in London and scaled in the US. The company was self-financed and did $24 Million in revenue when we spoke in 2015. Our discussion focuses on some of the nuances of starting an enterprise software company in Europe and scaling it in the US. Casewise was sold to Erwin in 2016. You can also listen to our podcast interview here and watch the roundtable interview here:

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Do you operate as a product or a services company?

Prashant Kumar: We are primarily an ISV but we have a consulting part as well. We deliver use cases for the customers. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the Telefonica use case. It sounds like that is what you broke into the market with. What is that use case that you started with?

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When the teacher is assigning this reading through your product, is the student doing that reading at home?

Stuart Udell: Before COVID, about 46% of our reading was done after school hours. Since COVID, that number jumped to the high 80s and even touched 90%. The nice thing is, there are lots of flexible models that can really work here. The student can read individually at home. Then the discussion can happen in the classroom the next day. The classroom can mean physical or remote. Then there are lots of teachers who will tell kids to silently read for 15 to 20 minutes and discuss in the classroom. It’s a very flexible implementation model.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality (Part 1)

This is a deeply technical discussion about a specific layer of the technology stack where Data Engineering and other data related disciplines are handled.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Cardinality. 

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to go in a bunch of different directions in the next part of the interview. One, let’s start with the product and the model of how students are using the product. What is the infrastructure? How are teachers engaging? How are parents engaging to come up with a good outcome?

Stuart Udell: Our flagship product is actually the name of the company – Achieve3000. It represents two-thirds of our revenue. What Achieve3000 Literacy does so exceptionally well is that it’s built to provide equity and access for kids. It does that by helping the teacher differentiate instruction in the classroom. That’s something that all teachers think about.