From Mannarakoil To CEO Of Global Scholar: Kal Raman’s Journey (Part 6)

Sramana: Do you ask students or teachers to fill in personal profiles, or does your system function purely from collaborative filtering?

Kal Raman: We do it entirely via collaborative filtering because we have all the data we would need. We know your age, grade, test scores, scores last year, and state tests. We know your preferred language of learning. We know what we need to know.

Sramana: To gage the learning modules, you are able to make inferences about what engages the children based on the data sets you have?

Kal Raman: Correct. We are very, very big on security and privacy. We are careful on what data we input, and we do statistical modeling to ensure the references we draw are valid.

Sramana: How do you charge for this system? Who is paying and how does the money flow?

Kal Raman: The school districts pay us and we charge them per student, per year, or we charge them a license and support model. We can host the solution ourselves or put it in the schools data centers.

Sramana: When you are hosting and charging on a per student, per year basis, what is the unit price?

Kal Raman: We walk into any school district and give them a bold challenge. When they replace their current vendors solutions and replace it with our single solution we cut their ownership, including hardware, by 50%.

Sramana: Is it variable pricing then?

Kal Raman: It is variable pricing depending on how many modules they want to adopt in a year. We have 14 modules in the system, and they can buy the entire suite or just one or two modules. We still provide the power of an integrated suite even if they are using just one of our modules.

Sramana: If I were a school district and I purchased your entire 14-module solution, what would it cost me per student?

Kal Raman: It depends on the school district size. The bigger the size, the better the discount, and pricing is also affected by determining if you are going to host the solution or if you want us to host the solution. When we host it we bring the cost down. We operate a private cloud. The best way to figure cost is that a school district spends $200 per student, per year on technology. When they do it with us they will do it for $75 per student, per year.

Sramana: What kind of adoption rates have you seen as you bring this product to market?

Kal Raman: By the end of this year we should have a 26% market share in the U.S. We have anywhere from 10 million to 15 million students on our platform using at least one of the 14 modules. When we go into a school district, we tell them our vision. They tell us that it is exactly what they want, but that they do not believe that anybody can do it. We then show them a demo, after which they are impressed but worried that we are going to be super expensive. Once we tell them that we are 50% less expensive then they tell us that changing behavior and providing training will be difficult. We then show them the training videos and illustrate how it takes four days for their teachers to get up to speed, and that we have a train-the-trainer approach. After that, they are converts. All of our business growth has been based on customer recommendations.

This segment is part 6 in the series : From Mannarakoil To CEO Of Global Scholar: Kal Raman's Journey
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