Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you did had a major impact.

Pallav Pandey: They did that and they swept the election. While we were consulting them, something crazy happened. There was a batchmate of mine in the US. He was consulting for McKinsey. He was after my life. We were doing some interesting stuff, but it was person-dependent. I was also getting tired. Not to mention that the people I had to work with were not great people to work with and look up to in life.

I and my batchmate, Ambarish, had created a system that could do telephone calls using open source telephony. We convinced Navin Patnaik that we can do their telephony campaign. We can call up everybody in Odissa why they are breaking up with BJP. We got the data to call everybody.

We got good money for doing that. That led me to my first venture-funded startup. I slowly transitioned into doing my cloud telephony startup that was called Knowlarity.

Sramana Mitra: I was just about to ask you if this is a competitor to Knowlarity not knowing that you were one of the founders. I’ve met Ambarish.

Pallav Pandey: He’s now running his fund from New York.

Sramana Mitra: Before COVID, we had coffee in Menlo Park. He was thinking about what to do next. He had already left Knowlarity. We do know the Knowlarity story quite well. How long did you stay with Knowlarity?

Pallav Pandey: Five years. I and Ambarish were building it together – 2008 to 2013.

Sramana Mitra: My observation about Knowlarity is that selling to SMBs in India is really hard. 10 years ago, it was even harder. Indian consumers and small businesses want this high-touch selling and pay very little. This is not a sustainable business situation. Many entrepreneurs have come to realize that after trying it.

Whereas in the US, I see small businesses buying very easily. Zoho, for instance, has built this massive billion-dollar revenue business on small businesses without having to do high-touch selling. For a long time, Sridhar told me that was not going to India. It’s very high-touch. What happens after you leave Knowlarity?

Pallav Pandey: I moved on from Knowlarity in 2013. I took a little bit of break thinking about what to do. I did some angel investments. Then I started a company called FastFox. FastFox came out of an angel investment that I’ve done. We invested in a company which used to create information networks for real estate brokers.

WhatsApp was getting hot in 2014. Everyone is jumping on WhatsApp and so were all the real estate brokers. The single biggest problem in the Indian startup ecosystem is the whole problem of the real estate market being devoid of real information. Everything is just noise. If you go to classifieds, it’s full of fake listings. We said, “What if we were to create a platform where the information is real?”

There were broker groups in WhatsApp. The real information was flowing through that. We got into a lot of these broker groups and were able to read information from WhatsApp chat threads and put it on our platform. We got brokers to come on the app. The app was called BroEx.

It went completely viral in the broker community. In WhatsApp, there was no way to search the information. The information is not organized. We took that and organized it. We let brokers connect with each other on our platform and were making deals happen. There’s a lot of excitement in the brokers. I went to a real estate conference in Mumbai. There were brokers who said, “We love you guys. I made a massive deal thanks to you.” I came back from the conference and realized that I’d made zero Rupees.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing this for free?

Pallav Pandey: Yes. Even if you were to do the math and make it paid, it would not add up to much. We had no idea what to do with all these brokers using our platform as the information exchange. How do we monetize this?

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo
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