Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: To what extent are your corporate clients specifying what areas they want learning content in, which then drives your strategy of finding people who can produce that content and deliver that content on your network?

Karl Mehta: When a corporate client sets up EdCast, they tell us the topics for which they set up channels. They will set up a channel on leadership or supply chain, for example. Those are all the topics that’s given to us. That goes into our content engine that brings either existing web content or it brings influencers that we know. Every enterprise has their own subject matter experts but they have not tapped into that. Our platform allows them to identify those subject matter experts. They can now share knowledge that is already sitting inside their company. That is a huge asset.

Sramana Mitra: How does the incentive psychology of this work? What are you seeing? Are people self-motivated to provide that expertise in courseware format? Are they identifying themselves or do you have go chase them? How is the content coming together from these experts?

Karl Mehta: In any community or network, there is that 90/10 rule. 10% of the people are overflowing with knowledge and they have the cognitive surplus. Then there’s the 90% of the people. The key thing is to identify within the community who are those 10%. Generally, the people who have that cognitive surplus are willing to share that knowledge because they’re looking for ways to share knowledge.

You have to give them the right tools because if the tools are not there, they’re not going to take the extra effort because they’re super busy. To the extent that we give them the frictionless tools, I think everybody in the world is very altruistic. In general, everybody is kind and generous. You just have to give them the right tools and hit them up at the right time. That’s the challenge.

Sramana Mitra: In your corporate network, there’s probably some amount of incentive to be identified and recognized as an expert in a domain that the corporation somehow acknowledges and recognizes.

Karl Mehta: Absolutely. You might have read a lot of articles in the last few months where a lot of companies are dropping performance reviews. Companies are dropping that because they are skewed, and it doesn’t really recognize the right talent and people. Peer-to-peer reviews are becoming very important now because it’s not about your boss sitting down once in six months.

What really is indicative of your performance is your peers. What EdCast allows to do with the knowledge network is depending on how much you’re contributing or how you’re helping others in your team, they are able to rate you. You score gets calculated every week, every month. That becomes a great indicator of how much you have been contributing.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You’re basically offering a personal branding platform for these internal experts.

Karl Mehta: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: You’re obviously going after these large clients. How many clients are taking advantage of this kind of systems?

Karl Mehta: We have several Fortune 500 companies as customers. We hit almost a hundred customers. This is just less than two years of the company and we just launched the product less than 10 months back because the first 18 months was the product development phase. We’re getting signups everyday because we’ve just created a self-service. They can get their company domain. That self-service is driving the best growth because we don’t need the traditional enterprise software sales model of planting sales people all over the country, and doing those long sales cycle. The product itself can sell and should sell. That’s our philosophy.

Sramana Mitra: To connect to your platform, you do need to sell. That’s not going to happen on its own.

Karl Mehta: Absolutely. Anything new requires a level of selling. We have to work towards less and less dependence on selling and more on getting people to experience it. If they experience it, they should just adopt it.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast
1 2 3 4 5 6