Teacherpreneur - the bridge to entrepreneurship

It is rather a mixed experience to be a teacher.

On the one side, there are many great stories of considering teaching as a noble profession and how it transforms students. a teacher being given a more important position than a parent. good incidents are always there.

on the other side, there are so many criticisms. the height of criticism is from Bernard Shaw.  "a person who knows what to do will go ahead and do it. a person who does not know what to do will go ahead and teach". can we ask for a better criticism than this?

May be we can reason out from the famous symbol of yin and yang.
                                                             

When there is total darkness, lights starts to fill. and when there is only light, darkness starts to engulf. An amazing graphic representation of a profound concept.

In the days of guru's, the guru was an expert. expert in every sense or at least to the local community. naturally the respect from society and eventually from the students. There are only 2 choices. learn from the guru by what ever means. some how earn the good will of the guru. the other choice is to self-learn.

Some guru's tend to misuse this privilege and that leads to people without expertise to enter this forte.

A person with expertise will generally have more or less committed his/her life for the cause. for people who do not commit their life, it is just a means of life. quality slowly fades away.

Then comes the books. books in printed format slowly throws away the need for expertise. Students and society look for people having access to books. books that are neither affordable nor reachable. The hay days of people without expertise.

So, how does a common man identify or evaluate a good teacher. This leads to institutionalization of education. At least a community and a well defined system can bring in some discipline and away with pretenders.

Even this cant for long. Now, the community or the institution gets an upper hand. commercialization of education sets in.

Once again evolution takes over. What you sow is what you harvest. of course it happens across generation. The holy grail of internet steps in.

With the advent of internet, the need for books are no more relevant and eventually the relevance of a teacher. a teacher without expertise in this context. This leads to lack of trust in institutionalization of education.

Going by the trend and applying yin and yang philosophy, we may predict that the days of guru are in the offing.

The likes of Sal Khan (khan academy), vsauce, veritasium, engineering made simple, brian douglas and many more. In such an institutionalized world, individuals are taking center stage. unbelievable.

Add to this sugata mitra's grandma pedagogy. just keep saying "i never knew how to do that". Just motivation.

The only difference is that the gurus of early days where local celebrities but now the gurus are global celebrities.

A teacher of today has to aspire to be a global guru.

And what happens to educational institutions. let us compare an industry and educational institution. Apart from buildings, people with different skills sets, machines etc, there seems to be only one differentiation.

It is just a matter of survival. Industry has a product and strives to keep the secrets. Educational institution has the objective of sharing knowledge and tries to keep it open.

May be a balanced approach would be for educational institutions to create prototypes or proof of concepts and industry may focus on commercialization. May be that is the bridge. The bridge that helps students to cross over to employment in the respective industry. Better still cross over to the adventurous land of entrepreneurship.

So, a modern day teacher should be capable enough to interact with the industry, build a bridge and get the students to know that there are bridges across, leading to the land of opportunities. Hence the name teacherpreneur.

To the preneur list of entrepreneur, technopreneur and edupreneur, we have managed to add studentpreneur and now teacherpreneur.

Evolution takes over again......

The story of a Tag Line

Aatrral Academy

         - The temple of acceleration

The standard procedure in a starting is a company is to have 3 things. A name for the institution, A tag line and a logo.

The tag line and logo are not mandatory. However, once in a while, someone asks for them and we have to have a convincing reason for not having it too.

The company name. we need to have one and should be unique for the purpose of government registration. Apart from being unique, it is good if it can convey the message of our business.

Aatrral Academy. We have a name. Aatrral meaning Energy in Tamil language. Academy goes with out saying. There comes my personal experience that "Every one is unique" and has a "potential". So, the objective of our institution is facilitate our members inherent potential (energy) or assist them to find theirs (if they have not found it yet).

On to the tagline, we began with "Identify Potential. Create Value" . This again extends the scope of our offering to learning, research or entrepreneurship. My strong belief is that these three are inseparable. A purpose driven learning would lead to value creation for the individual in terms of monetary and societal standing.

Time went on. close to two years. Over this period we have been into science history. Rather evolution of science. During the exploration it occurred that the core concept in science is acceleration and that is the reason why Newton-Apple story has become so famous. It is usual for us to remember the story and forget the concept. Thanks to Prof shankar Ramamurthi's video lectures from Yale. He goes on to emphasize that force is the central concept of science. once we understand that, most of science will be easy. The part that does not fit into the most being quantum mechanics.

There is the clue. but force again was having two concepts. Mass and acceleration.

In the course of writing an article on acceleration, it suddenly occurred, why is that newton had to wait for the apple to fall?

The possible answer. Out of all the concepts, when we start approaching science with acceleration as the central theme, the whole puzzle seems to fit in. That is the story of acceleration in the tag line.

And accelerator is another word used in the entrepreneurship parlance. so, we get a common word that signifies both.

We would have heard, work is work ship. To worship we go a temple. Temple also stands to represent the point of focus.

That's the story behind the tagline "The temple of acceleration" .

So, we have a name and tag line. What about the logo?

Have engaged an expert to come out with a logo based on the following inputs.

- Newton says acceleration is due to a force (and that is due to mass)

- Einstein says the that is fine, but force itself manifests as a space-time curvature

- The Galileo's Law of Inertia states "unless there is an acceleration, the body remains at rest or in uniform velocity motion"

- Philosophically speaking, change is the only thing that is constant. Change requires acceleration and hence acceleration becomes the key.

The logo is expected have a representation of space-time, the focal point and may be a spice of spirituality.

Giving the company a name took close to a week. The tag line took close to 2 years. Lets wait for the Logo. Sometimes even waiting for something is an enjoyable experience. 

God creates startups

This is what happens when we start thinking too loud. So loud that the decibel levels go beyond our sensible range and happened to end up plagiarizing even the title for this post from Stephen Hawking best seller "God Created Integers"

So, what has God to do with startups? Well, it is the Angels who guided me to this. Of course, i came to know of angels through venture capitalists. One leading to the other.

I am not alone. Most of us get ideas. Since it is our idea, we always feel it is got to be ground breaking and the greatest ever. Its only natural. As per cosmic intelligence theory, the same idea would have occurred to many of us at the same instance. We generally like to, rather choose to ignore this theory. After all, it is just a theory. Against common wisdom, against human nature, at least at this moment, we would like to be alone. All alone. From this state of being all alone, we would like to go and be every where. what a contrary?

The idea or concept has to take the shape of a service or a product. Now the real game starts.To play this game, it takes time, effort and money. The last of these; the money, comes first and is MOST valued. Yes. in capitals.

As one leads to other, to realize the idea, we need money; the most important ingredient. Where does the money come from?

This brings us to the landscape of venture capitalists, Angels, Impact Investors and God. We have not considered banks here as they look for collateral's; just that you have money in another form, and you see, you end up paying interest on the money you already possess. The game gets interesting.

Go to a VC. Well. I hear you screaming, "come on. grow up man". Yes. I think I understand what you mean. Money begets money. If you have enough money, you have access to more money. if you have commercialized your idea and looking to expand or rake up more money, then go to a VC. There is a rule of thumb here. "go to a venture capitalist when you don't want money".This is my interpretation. You may refer to a book "Entrepedia" by Professor Nandini Vaidyanathan.

Go to an Angel Investor. Literally they are angels. They offer a helping hand. They share the risk.  You have a working model and there are a few early adopters, Angels are there for help.

There are also a rare breed of Investors. The impact investors. They are rare because, the moment they come in, they don't ask for an exit. It is very difficult that you can go to them. They will have to find you and come to you. They will find their way through your family, friends and well wishers. Impact investment does not need to be in the form of money alone. They can be in terms of time, effort, early adopter or just a reference.

Now coming to the end of our story, you are at the very beginning, you just have an idea. We already agreed and added adjectives to your idea like ground breaking, disruptive, innovative etc. What do we do? Where do we go? This is when God comes in. You see, you don't have to go anywhere. God comes in. I am not joking. Just got to believe. It is only you; all alone. It is you who made a choice to be all alone.

Since we are alone, only thing to do now is to look within and there we will find God. Hence the title "God Creates Startups". As much as we began with plagiarism, we shall also end with plagiarism. The end being picked from "Anbae Sivam" Movie.

"When people don't laugh at your goal, Your goal may be too small"

                                                                              - Mr.Azim Premji

The Studentpreneur

Is engineering education still relevant?

One of our friends raised this fundamental question.

Why are people trying to improve the quality of something that is irrelevant? Wow, this gets interesting.

I had been toying with the idea of Studentpreneur for a loooong time; 3 years is a pretty long time to me.

So, we had Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs and now it is time or era of  Studentpreneurs.

So what is the concept of Studentpreneur?

Simple. Just start a bit early in your life. how early? May be in school or college.

Oh. that sounds studpid.

Yes. What makes an entrepreneur? An idea that is related to a service or product. Added with time, money and more importantly belief and commitment, an entrepreneur is in the making.

An Intrapreneur is someone having every other element of an entrepreneur sans the idea. Treating the organization working for as his/her own organization. It is like this. Let us say the salary is 50000INR per month. If we treat this as a profit out of business, which is 10% net on the higher side, then the turnover required is 5,00,000 per month. As a rule of thumb, this would require a minimum of 30,00,000 in capital investments.

Now, the case for studentpreneur, Information, study and research material are available at the click of a button. no more dependency on a teacher (poor teacher!!!). Market is global and not confined. parents foot the bill. Bill for tuitions, boarding and also entertainment.

A student can try to figure out his passion, try out an idea. Time, money, resource, lab. All are available. A typical bootstrap model. Support from family and friends. If the idea succeeds, you become an entrepreneur. in case the idea fails, you end up an Intrapreneur. A typical win-win.

As a student you can offered to fail. Fail any number of times. The world says, "Failure is the stepping stone to success". But the moment we loose the student tag, become an entrepreneur and happen to fail, the earlier quote is no more valid and the world will step on us. We become stones literally.

Industries actually do interviews for elimination and not for selection. The criteria for selection is just the hope that, people who are not eliminated may perform. But if you are a Studentpreneur, there is no need for an interview. It will be only a discussion. How does that sound? Ridiculous you think.

Welcome to the world of Studentpreneurs and micro-entrepreneurs. Thats the future. The future in the hands of younger generation.