Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo (Part 1)

Pallav is a serial entrepreneur and one of the cofounders of Knowlarity. Readers may recall our Knowlarity story as told by Ambarish Gupta. Pallav’s newest venture is a fantastic case study in positioning and Go-to-Market Strategy for EdTech.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Pallav Pandey: My parents were both government employees. My grandfather belonged to this place in UP called Etawah. I grew up in Delhi. I studied in a government school and then went off to IIT Kanpur. I studied Electrical Engineering. That is how I got into the professional life.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you come out of IIT Kanpur?

Pallav Pandey: 2000.

Sramana Mitra: I remember 2000 as the year when the dot-com market crashed. I was doing my startup as a Founder CEO. It was the first ever fashion e-commerce startup. It was full of AI at that time. Then the dot-com crash happened. I remember the year vividly. It was a disastrous market collapse.

Pallav Pandey: That’s correct. We got our offer in 1999 from this crazy company called Nvidia. We were early employees. When we got offers, it was still 1999. Silicon Valley was hot. Suddenly, the meltdown happened. People used to work as engineers two months back were now delivering food. Fortunately, our company was less affected, because we were in hardware. Nvidia, at that time, was doing well. I worked with them for three years and then I came back to India.

Sramana Mitra: What did you go back to do?

Pallav Pandey: I wanted to contribute back to India. I used to volunteer for a lot of non-profits. I thought maybe I should do something more. That would be not be possible with me working full-time in the US. I came back to India and started my first venture. That was a political consulting company. It’s quite crazy. I managed to convince my boss.

I said, “Gopal, I need to go back to India in the non-profit sector.” Nvidia used to have six-month projects. Then he said, “I promised you I’ll let you go, but there’s so much work here. I would not be able to tell you when to go. You just book your tickets and let me know.” I booked my ticket on the same day for one month later. I came back to India. My visa expired. They processed my new visa, sent it to me, and said, “Come back.” It was not that I was doing some great stuff in India. I was still figuring it out. I thought that this is my calling.

Sramana Mitra: What political campaigns were you working on?

Pallav Pandey: It was a lot of fun. India had gone through this whole EVM evolution. All the voting shifted to electronic voting around 2002. The government started publishing data around how each of the polling booth is voting. While the individual vote is a secret, the government releases data on every thousand people who vote on the same machine. You could take the data and figure out how people are voting in different elections and make sense.

If you were to layer that data with other data, you could create a more scientific way of managing the polls. I thought maybe we’ll do something around this and make elections in India more predictable. If they were to become more predictable, our politicians might have a lot more job security, so they’ll become less corrupt. It was a crazy thought. I was young. I was 24.

I pitched to a lot of parties that I can do this for them. Some people started laughing at me. Eventually some people gave me work. It started from there. I did this for five years. Then I ended up working a lot with some political party. I did a project for Navin Patnaik in 2009. We advised him in a campaign. We came to the conclusion that they should break up from BJP in Odissa. They could still win the election. They actually did that.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo
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