Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 2)

Warren Barkley: One of the things we’ve seen worldwide is this movement in the pedagogy where teachers want to have very small bites of information which have project work attached to it. Then they let the kids work on that project inside or outside the classroom. A lot of teachers want that kind of learning to continue outside of the classroom when they go home. In providing that virtual learning space, it allows kids to work with whatever media they want and they can do their homework all together at the same time. It’s something that we see in many different countries.

Sramana Mitra: We are seeing this as well. Everything that you said are trends we are seeing as well. One thing that I picked up in your answer that I want to double-click down on is I imagine you work with K-12 mostly, right?

Warren Barkley: That’s right. We do have a little bit of higher ed, but almost 90% is K-12.
>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 1)

Warren is the CTO of Smart Technologies, a $500 million provider of virtual classroom solutions. He offers a window into trends in the space and ideas for new entrepreneurs to focus on.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as SMART Technologies. What do you do?

Warren Barkley: I’m the CTO for SMART Technologies. I joined about two years ago from Microsoft. I was at Microsoft for about 16 years. I did a whole bunch of interesting things there. I worked on WiFi, networking, and a lot of other cool projects over the years. Before that, I was a teacher and a principal. If I reach far enough back, I was a musician at one point. I didn’t get a Computer Science degree but I somehow figured my way out into technology.

>>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 7)

Harman Singh: I’m a fundamental believer that this is going to go a long way. No matter how much I have in the business, it’s the reputation that’s going to be there forever—not the exit. That was the gist of the whole thing. We are where we are and the investors are happy.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still maintaining the same logic in the business, right? You have this classroom product that test preps agencies around the world are using on a per educator basis. You’re selling this product using telesales from India. That’s the core of your business, correct?

Harman Singh: Correct. I’ll elaborate a bit more about that. We consider education service providers as a customer of ours. However, we want to broaden the definition from just education service providers. It could be community colleges or universities, but we don’t have K-12 right now. >>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging?

Harman Singh: On an average, $250 per educator per year. In those days, it was about $150.

Sramana Mitra: It was a per educator pricing?

Harman Singh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When you worked the test prep academy, were they buying for multiple educators? What would a test prep academy deal look like?

Harman Singh: About three to five trainers.
>>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you’ve read it, we’ve released a book called Bootstrapping Using Services where we deal with this topic extensively. We have companies that have gone up to $25 million in revenue using bootstrapping using services. This is a very viable strategy. However, you have to do it right.

Harman Singh: I agree with you. I wouldn’t do a lot of things I had done in those days. It survived only because of one reason—perseverance. There was nothing else that got us to this point.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. Frankly, I used to think a lot like you when I started out. That was a long time ago. I started my first company in 1994 while I was still a graduate student at MIT. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I’m talking of an era which >>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The angels invested on what thesis? Typically, investors look for investment thesis. What was the investment thesis?

Harman Singh: The thesis was that educators want to be connected to students over the Internet. That thesis never changed. The business model was unknown, but this thesis hasn’t changed. It wasn’t about B2B or B2C. This is all about whether educators can be connected to students online. We went on and the company Educomp invested some money into the business. The good thing was that we had users. Thousands of educators were using our product although for free. That was when we experimented by introducing a $50 a year membership. However, $50 per year is a very small amount.

>>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 3)

Sraman Mitra: In those four years, what kind of revenues were you pulling? How many people did you have? What was the scale of the business that you had built?

Harman Singh: We reached about a couple of million dollars in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: How many people did you have?

Harman Singh: We had about 50 people in India.

Sramana Mitra: So all your software development was in India all that time?
>>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were the specs that they wanted?

Harman Singh: There was a technology called Smile technology for education programs that wanted to deliver video-based along with some other content. These days, people would not know what that is. But in those days, it was really hot. We worked with professors and discuss what they needed. They had recording studios and we were the programming guys who put the whole thing together by integrating instructional design with technology. That’s when I got close to streaming media whether it’s real-time or video streaming. I was an engineer at that point but I learned a lot of about how business is done. I got into sales and project management. Those few years, we sold to many customers including our university.

Sramana Mitra: All of this was around the Smile technology of real networks to deliver video content?
>>>