Transcript
Speaker: I'm Simran. I'm Mulchandani. I'm ah the co-founder and CEO of a company called Rangit. We're based in Mumbai and um we started in 2019 and I'm excited to talk to you today about Rangit.
Speaker: Simran, welcome to the Founder Thesis Podcast. You are the CEO and co-founder of Rangit, which is a social enterprise building a teacher-led learning platform. Before we talk about what exactly is Rangit, I'd love to learn about journey to building Rangit.
Speaker: Great. Akshay, firstly, thank you so much. It's an ah absolute honor to be on your podcast. You know, you and I started chatting a couple of months ago, and it's been great ah sort of coming up to this point and preparing for it. um Yes, Rangeet is um my life passion. It's my ikigai.
Speaker: um it's It's what I get out of bed for every day. And um um I feel super excited about, but none of this would have been possible um without the journey I have gone through in my life. um I really believe that I am at that, you know, the the way you are in life is a, is some total of the experiences you go through. And if you actually look at life through the lens of everything is a learning and making me go towards that particular journey,
Speaker: um life can be a damn good experience, whether it's tough, whether it's easy, whichever way, it's always about learning. So I think I'd like to trace my journey, perhaps back to my first job.
Speaker: um I went, you know I grew up in Mumbai um and I was fortunate ah At the age of 18, 19, I went to an Ivy League college in the US. I went to Brown University. I studied computer science.
Speaker: um Incredible times. you know I went from perhaps never seeing a computer to working on like the most advanced computers in the world and learned a lot. um And Brown really kind of ah you know equipped me for the life ahead.
Speaker: My first job was in New York. I worked at JP Morgan, the huge investment bank. um This is pre-Chase. This is back when it was a small, beautiful bank. ah um And um I worked in the sales and trading area. I worked in the area of, um you know, macro trading. So, um you know, not equities that everyone is familiar with, but much more fixed income, foreign exchange, derivatives.
Speaker: And It was an incredible time as a you know mid to late 20s. I was based in New York. you know My wife and I had recently gotten married. Life was wonderful. um I was um you know working with some incredible people. ah This was actually, ah just to but put this in context, this was pre-Y2K.
Speaker: That was a big deal. And pre-Euro. So when you talk about foreign exchange trading, we had actually a European trading desk that was like, what, 10 currencies. So it wass really interesting times. I myself was trading some of the European and ah Canadian.
Speaker: And one day, because of my computer science background, my boss, who I absolutely love and played such a big role in my life. And I say this because i want, ah you know, people.
Speaker: are such a huge part of who you are. And, ah the you know, and bosses can be so important. So Dean Williams, my boss, um just pops this out of nowhere and says, Simran, would you like to go to Singapore? You know, the currency the currency market there is getting a little exciting. My wife was from Singapore. Oh, is from Singapore, sorry. And, um you know, i was like, nah, love New York too much.
Speaker: Five months later, um the Asian currency crisis blew up. And Dean again, in his, you know, inimitable, subtle Welsh manner said, Simran, I need you to go to Singapore for a couple of weeks.
Speaker: but I'm like, I'm sitting in New York watching volatility. And that's what you want as a trader, right? Volatility going through the roof in Singapore. My colleagues in Singapore telling me how amazing it is. And I'm like...
Speaker: Couple of weeks, I'll do it. Got on a flight, went out to Singapore, sit down. And my boss in Singapore, another amazing gentleman, Bansuan Wong, um sat down and he gave me a lot of responsibility and I was hooked.
Speaker: And three days later, like it was so crazy, like the global heads of all my businesses were in Singapore. They offered me to move to Singapore. I loved it. You know, this is 1997, 1998, 1999. I learned a lot. I then diversified, traded new markets, new currencies, learned about finance in incredible ways.
Speaker: But something in my heart didn't feel right. I started looking for meaning. And I started thinking that every year is a race.
Speaker: It's a race to bonuses. And and and and the and you know I don't know if you know the Pink Floyd song, Time. and There's this wonderful line there that says, every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time.
Speaker: And I started trying to figure who is Simran? Where is Simran? Where is he going? And I just didn't have the time to figure that out. And that hamster wheel continued.
Speaker: And then one day, my One of my very, very dear childhood friends, Ashutosh Fatak, a musician, had come to Singapore and he gave me this incredible idea about this music company.
Speaker: And, you know, I want to raise i want to do this since like early 2000s. I want to change music in India. It's all Bollywood. ah There's so many great musicians. We need to support them. um You know, sessions musicians, original musicians. We need to do this. We need to we need to change the world of music in India.
Speaker: I got intrigued. Because I had this little sound in my head. I want to change the world. i want to have meaning. And um i got interested. He needed to raise money. I brought my finance background to it. We wrote a business plan. And then he looked at me one day and he said, but how am I going to run this?
Speaker: And I got convinced. And I moved back to India with my wife and two babies in tow. And we started Blue Frog. And ah Blue Frog is a it wasn't purely a music company, right?
Speaker: So Blue Frog, in its right at the beginning, Blue Frog was meant to be this support system for sessions musicians ah and composers and music producers who made advertising jingles and original music.
Speaker: Excuse me. We also wanted to do something around developing budding musicians and talent. So things like we thought of a record label and and we thought, okay, if we start all of this, let's create a music stage where they would be able to perform. We'd bring in acts from around the world. We do like all this amazing stuff. And then we would promote all these artists.
Speaker: And so that's what Blue Frog became in its initial days. um And um yeah, it was amazing, I have to say. um Huge, like I said, you know, if you keep if you keep your heart open and you learn at every point, every point has its meaning. And so we built an incredible brand, a brand that even 10 years after closing still has its cachet.
Speaker: And, you know, from the outside, It must have looked amazing, but I can tell you it was really hard work. um I had no F&B experience and I was literally, you know, I mean, me and my you know partners, etc. we We worked, you know, it was it was tough.
Speaker: um It's not an area I have expertise and I built some expertise, but really i didn't have it But we still built an incredible brand. um We were an icon in Mumbai.
Speaker: And there were two articles that I will point out that corroborate my belief that we were an icon. The first one was an article in Forbes on our fifth year.
Speaker: And it was an incredible... deep dive into our journey. And I figured that's the makings of an icon. you know yep But the other really cool thing, which I think is the, the oh, there's three, sorry, three.
Speaker: The second thing was Time Out, Mumbai did an article and kind of the byline headline of it was the music scene in Bombay had two eras before Blue Frog and after blue phone that's huge nice and the third was amazing international recognition where the independent you know the independent of the uk said wrote did and did a piece on the top 10 music venues in the world on that on that list was the sydney opera house madison square garden
Speaker: Blue Frog and seven others. And so that was really cool. So I believe we built a brand and we built a brand, like I said, it's it it's its it has its cache even today.
Speaker: But, you know, we made our mistakes. um We expanded too fast. and You expanded beyond Mumbai or? Yes. So our first expansion was to Delhi. um Bombay was doing exceptionally well. It was, you know,
Speaker: um You know, it it right from day one, in fact, it it was doing really well. um Quick segue before I talk about our expansion. One of the things that I found incredible about Blue Frog, i don't know if you've read the book, um Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Speaker: um I watched the movie, if that counts. Okay, so it does, it does, in fact. um So there was this scene, and about the original one with... um What was I forget the actor, but the original one. You walk into this tiny little room and then you open a door and you go into this magical space.
Speaker: If you remember the movie, that's exactly what Blue Frog was like. You came down this little gully into this mill compound. completely, um you know, ah not expecting anything. You open this tiny door, you walked into a little hundred square foot, 50 square foot reception area.
Speaker: And then you open the door and then you saw Blue Frog. Anyway, that was, nice I would, i would actually stand. 20 meters from the door in the early days, just watching people as they came in and the number of jaws that would hit the floor was I can't even count.
Speaker: But anyway, we had incredible musicians from around the world. We built a beautiful brand, but we expanded too fast. We went to Delhi. um And I feel like Delhi was um ah a mistake from the not not from the perspective of going into the city, but we bit off more than we could chew. We didn't understand the market as well as we could have. And that's probably the first place where I started learning the concept of human centric design and learning engineering.
Speaker: Who are you building for? We went into Delhi to build for ourselves, unfortunately. So those were a few things we bit off more than we could chew. we It would have been a huge success to be in Delhi if had we done it slightly differently. um We then opened in Pune, we opened in Bangalore, but the overall problems we faced and the kind of financial problems we faced as a result of a lot of the problems we faced in Delhi kind of weighed down on the entire company. mean, it's, you know, the whole thing kind of sank.
Speaker: We had to recapitalize the company. I was not particularly aligned with the direction that we were planning to take. So in 2015, after 10 years, starting this baby from scratch, you know, um and um seeing it grow and seeing the the amazing heights it had reached to.
Speaker: um I exited Blue Frog with um my laptop, a pair of sneakers that I forgot I had, the first bottle of Absolute Vodka that we opened in the club, which was signed by everyone.
Speaker: um It was a memento, which I still keep. um And I exited with the ah the first employee of Blue Frog, who now has become my co-founding partner in Rangit.
Speaker: um And that was my exit. Was it... ah An amicable exit? Exits are never clean, right? hi Yeah, but i think I think what's more important is what I learned.
Speaker: um It was my my journey. my Because i again, it's all, you know, what you know i think I think things things kind of can be amicable or not. We all learn and we move, right? That's more important. um And for me, I'd like to, you know, i think I think I want to focus on the positives and what led me to who I am today.
Speaker: um It was extremely hard, I have to tell you. It was like losing a child. um But I was so incredibly supported by my family.
Speaker: My wife, Renisha, my kids, Ishaan and Samara, some incredibly close friends, my parents, my brother um he'll be happy that i spoke about him narayan uh who told me that i had to let go um and um i was it was more important that i was present for my family than because i had a lot of guilt about the investors who came into blue frog uh who are also incredibly close friends of mine and my brother narayan really talked some sense into me saying you got to go
Speaker: um And of course, my Rangit co-founder, Karishma, who's been a rock in my life. um And with this support, I slowly climbed out of my failure.
Speaker: And I'd like to tell you a story, if I may, about a very important part of my recovery. So It was tough going.
Speaker: um You know, Karishma and I started another company. it was all right. um It still exists. But Again, there was that me searching for me, you know, and that me was missing, you know, that that passion was missing.
Speaker: And so Rineshad and I sat down and decided, because we all, we love travel. So we decided that travel as as ah as a quest to develop something as a quest as family would be very important for my overall recovery.
Speaker: So we tossed around a lot of ideas, but we chose to climb Mount Kinabalu in Borneo in Malaysia. Now, for most people, Kinabalu may not be such a challenge. It's 15,000 feet, um probably a cakewalk for most people. But for me, post-Blue Frog, I've always been very healthy, but maybe that sort of running a nightclub lifestyle ain't the best for you. um And at 90 odd kgs,
Speaker: um it was hard for me. But I trained, I trained very hard. And I want to just tell you about the day we were climbing, because there's a lot happened prior to that. But the day we climbed, the four of us set off.
Speaker: um And as we got past 12,000 feet, we were all kind of, ah except for my son, my son's like Superman, um my poor daughter started getting um serious altitude sickness.
Speaker: So Everyone knew how important this journey was for me um because it felt like a mission, you know, and I couldn't fail. And so my wife, Ranisha, told me, you and Ishan go on.
Speaker: You've got to do this. And so we keep going, Samara and Ranisha behind. I'm feeling really melancholy about it. And as we get up to 13, 14,000 feet under moonlight, it was a beautiful moonlight climb. And we where we were summiting in the morning.
Speaker: um I was stopping every 20 steps, I have to tell you. I was unable. I was gasping for breath. I was ready to give up. And something, another musical kind of connection in my life was the the song Speed of Sound by Coldplay.
Speaker: um And those lines, how long do I have to climb up on the side of this mountain of mine, um kind of became an anthem for me. Mm-hmm. And I have to say, Ishan didn't give up on me.
Speaker: And I get a bit emotional when I talk about this. You know, he said to me, come on, Dad, we've come this far. I'm not letting you give up. Wow. And I just, and he was 15.
Speaker: he's ah He's a cricket player. um I support him. And I tell him to go. But he supported me that day. And I wouldn't have made it to the top. And nursed by him, I got to the top and I realized as this this massive realization that this mountain peak was not my landing spot.
Speaker: It was not my destination. It was actually my launch pad. And I realized how lucky I am because i had Ishaan by my side. I have my family waiting for me, my family, friends and colleagues who knew how important this for me, this was for me.
Speaker: And they were willing me from afar. I felt that energy. I literally sensed it. I knew I couldn't avoid the hardship of climbing, but I knew I was going to win.
Speaker: And at the top of that mountain, so much came into perspective. I realized this major hack that if you think that everything is thrown at you for you to grow and learn from, not to wallow and collapse, you will grow.
Speaker: And I carry that up to today. So just a few things like it made me cognizant. If I think back of my blue frog days, it made me cognizant about i have how I have to prepare better for every challenge, how I have to prepare better for the people I serve. I think that's where we kind of failed, you know, as ah as you know, there's the personal learnings. But then what do you take away as ah as an entrepreneur?
Speaker: You can be emotional about it. But what do you do? And so I felt we didn't we expanded too soon and didn't understand our markets. And this has become the lifeblood of Rangit.
Speaker: These are the things that we carry. And i we're constantly asking each other, are we prepared? I learned that travel can be a brilliant tool, right? um But I also really wanted to think of travel not as...
Speaker: a traveler. um But I wanted to think about it as a committed human being, not as a tourist, but connecting to the people and the rhythm of the spaces you go to.
Speaker: Whether it's climbing a mountain at 3 a.m. or whether it's diving with sharks, you need to resonate. You need to resonate with the destination of your life. You must have discovered an opportunity, a space to build a business in.
Speaker: ah yeah ah So what exactly was that space? Right. So, the last yeah. So, so, so the last thing I want to say about this and how Rangit came about was what i learned was that when you open your heart, the universe does come in and that's when Rangit happened. That was the opening. So, you know, post Blue Frog, Karishma and I are running another company.
Speaker: And one day, um An ex-JPMorgan colleague of mine invited me to teach in a private school, sorry, public school in Malad, in Mumbai.
Speaker: Education was always extremely, extremely important to me because of the way my wife and I brought up our kids. We always believed that, you know, education is crucially important and everyone needs a chance and things like that.
Speaker: And so I quite unsuspectingly went to teach and was teaching this fourth grade class English. So there are eight year old kids in the class. There are 12 year old kids in the class.
Speaker: Why, you might ask me, why are there 12 year old kids in the class? All the girls were 12. In fact, there were some older than that. there wasn' a There was a um a girl with certain you know ah mental challenges also in the class.
Speaker: And so I'm standing at the front of this class, teaching them articles. And I'm thinking to myself, damn, these kids are screwed by a birth lottery. This was literally the result of a birth lottery.
Speaker: You know, you do get your free meal in school. But how is this school bringing these kids out of poverty? How are they ever going to get out of it? And I figured that they are. That's it. This is, you know, some of the girls were sexually abused at home.
Speaker: You know, my my my colleague who asked me to come in to teach told me stories about how he'd have to go into the bastis and force the kids to come into class. And so That day I spoke with Karishma and I said, what are the things that we hate in the world?
Speaker: Let's actually list them out and let's think about how we can create something. And I had no idea what it was, but we had to do something.
Speaker: Now I didn't want to teach math or science or something better, but I started thinking about what do kids need? What do these kids need? And I thought, you know, okay they need what now is called the 60s confidence, creativity, communication skills, so on and so forth.
Speaker: We need that. But we also needed to address certain challenges. No point giving someone skills when there are so many problems around gender. societal inequity, climate. Climate's a very, very big part of, you know mental health, physical health. And so that's where these ideas, these big ideas of Rangit started 2019-ish.
Speaker: And one day I was, so we started building these workshop type things. So we had these four, five, six, three hour workshops on these different topics.
Speaker: And one day my old friend from university, Anir Choudhury, who was then working for the government in Bangladesh, he was basically actually in charge of digital transformation for the entire country.
Speaker: He was visiting me in Bombay and we were stuck in a Ganpati procession in Mumbai going, I was dropping him to the airport and we were catching up after many years. And he's like, so you're telling me more about this thing you're doing in education.
Speaker: And I told him and he said, Would like to come to Bangladesh to meet the government and also BRAC? BRAC is one of the largest NGOs in the world and they do a lot of work in education.
Speaker: so would you like to come and meet us? Because we've had some pretty um disturbing events in the country. A bunch of young boys who had studied in America, so you wouldn't imagine it, you know, had come back and carried out a terrorist attack in one of the most affluent parts of Dhaka.
Speaker: And they were highly shaken by it. but How did this happen? Not Madrasa train, not this, not that. Just, you know, how did it happen?
Speaker: I was excited. So we, the Rangita army went to Bangladesh and they were very smart about how they planned that week. They made us go to the poorest schools in tin sheds in the in in like rice fields. we were We went to the biggest schools. We where we saw for international schools. And then we we we had a long meeting and they were really gracious.
Speaker: The entire management team of BRAC, education, plus Anir and his team from the government came and they told us one very simple thing that was blindingly obvious.
Speaker: They're like, okay, how important is this Rangit thing to you? yeahp Like you will never scale as the three hour workshop. Your schools don't have time. And that was again when I realized, okay, I want to scale, but I didn't think of mine.
Speaker: customer, human centric design all over again. so that's when our seek social, emotional and ecological knowledge curriculum came into place.
Speaker: We took all these things in the world that we didn't like, and we package them. And so we built three learning umbrellas, self, society and ecology.
Speaker: And we realized we needed a catchy name for it. So Sik came from that social, emotional and ecological knowledge. And Sik came into being um my colleague, Karishma, who I'll talk about, you know um you know, when we talk in in in a bit, um has done a spectacular job in building this magical play-based teaching methods.
Speaker: um you know And so we learned so much from our work in Bangladesh. um In fact, just pre-COVID, we were invited to go meet the the Department of Primary Education.
Speaker: They wanted to adopt Rangeet across the primary education platform. And i was literally booked to fly into Dhaka March 15th. and i had to cancel and we were devastated.
Speaker: But today I can tell you, thank God, we were we were not ready. okay We were absolutely not ready. And so we learned so much. So that stepping stone to today, again, if you embrace it, so we learned,
Speaker: A few things. Our curriculum was on the right path. and Of course, it's been growing and it's nothing like it used to be five, seven years ago. It's much more advanced today. But we learned that we needed to distribute in a very agile way.
Speaker: We need to distribute it in a way that it was measurable. So what we were doing in Bangladesh was we were printing, printing people who said that the planet mattered. We were printing, teaching manuals, okay? And distributing them around the country.
Speaker: Nuts, right? So we built an app, we built a measurement platform. And I want to point out exactly that we built an app for teachers, okay? This is not an app for children because you can't scale that way.
Speaker: And I truly truly believe in, I have to say again, fortunate, the journey has been kind. You know, in today's day of social media addictions and digital media, etc. AI, we made the right choice.
Speaker: We built for teachers because no machine can ever teach you how to be a human being. So right from day one, Rangeet was built for teachers. And so we were distributing these teaching books, but then we built an app, like i said, the app, the measurement system.
Speaker: We made it super reasonable so that it could be adopted at scale. um And then COVID hit. So we started and again, would say for us, at least COVID became a little bit of a godsend, a little bit from Rangit's point of view, because we had to stop because we were in person when we were not intending to go online.
Speaker: So few things happened around COVID that were crucial. One is we got a knock on our head that we had to stop. The second is that we got another knock on our head that, hold on, hold on, hold on. We don't have time for all this nice to have shit. Sorry, Ash. We're fine. No, yeah we don't have We don't have time for this nice to have stuff.
Speaker: Okay. We need to teach children maths. We need to teach children language. What a mistake that was by the education departments, but we'll come to that. During that time, Rinesha, my wife joined Rangit.
Speaker: because we needed to really rationalize who we were and build. we went we didn't What I loved about our response to COVID was we built.
Speaker: We didn't give up, we built. And we built the app, hardcore. in I am a computer scientist, so I brought all my energies into it.
Speaker: Karishma brought her empathy to the table and designed for children. Rinesha brought her legal and research framework and looked at everything through an absolute magnifying glass.
Speaker: But we met three people in those days. We met Kathy Hersh-Basek. And this is all thanks to COVID on Zoom calls, on conferences. So we met Kathy Hersh-Basek.
Speaker: I met this lady who's in a, you know, who's like considered one of the leading childhood education specialists in the world. She's written a book called Einstein Never Used Flashcards.
Speaker: Met her, fell in love with her on the spot. She's like a 12 year old at heart. Messaged her on the Zoom chat saying, I need to meet you. This is who I am. We she's on our board.
Speaker: okay She works at the Brookings Institution and she has guided Karishma every step of the way. She's had her team work with us. So Rangit is not just something that came out of our fiction, but we really went deep to make sure we're building for communities, but we're building it properly.
Speaker: We met Sean Bellamy. Sean Bellamy um is the founder of the Sands School in the UK. And Sean, again, is but because one of the heartbeats of Rangit.
Speaker: He says this amazing thing. He says,
Speaker: where where ah you know education is designed for a previous generation. Is maths useful if there are no animals left to count? is language. We have amazing language teachers. But what if there are no forests left to describe?
Speaker: And he said this to me one day and I was like, bam. And he's on our board. And he really helped us. so So Kathy was pedagogy, heart, play-based teaching, right?
Speaker: Because the science is clear. Teaching happens best when you kids interact with each other. Today, what are we doing? We're isolating children. We're keeping them separate. We're making them compete against each other. We're making them memorize.
Speaker: Kathy taught us that that's the only way it works is when you bring people together and you empower the teacher. Sean taught us that democracy in education is what matters and emboldened us to believe in this dream that we had, that we need to develop children for the future.
Speaker: And one of our other founders, um advisors, David Sawyer, who unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago, really made us think big. He thinks he thought of scale and he made us understand how to communicate for scale, how to build for scale.
Speaker: And so these two that was, you know, again, it comes back to grabbing life and sucking the marrow out of the, you know, the marrow or the bone of life. So it was about COVID was tough.
Speaker: Doesn't matter. What can we do? This is a tough experience. How can we move forward? And so that's so so so Rinesha joining Kathy, Sean and David joining. And I can tell you one thing, it wasn't easy.
Speaker: So we won a prize right there. ah We won the Jacobs Foundation. It's a Swiss foundation. We entered this prize. um They have this contest and we entered it and we won a nice little prize, cash prize, which helped us to build. Like a grant.
Speaker: It actually, no, it's just a, yeah, it was just, it's a grant, but it's like literally like a prize. And in fact, I forgot to mention BRAC were wonderful. They actually paid us for some of the work we did in Bangladesh. So we bootstrapped Rangit with revenue.
Speaker: We weren't running around borrowing from Peter to pay Paul and all of that stuff. We never went down that path. We first demonstrated, and this I will say again, comes back to learnings. It was my finance background, but also learning from Blue Frog.
Speaker: We never overextended ourselves. We looked for revenue at every stage. So BRAC came in, the Jacobs Foundation. These two became our ground, our foundation.
Speaker: Then change was in the air. Kids were coming back from school, completely shattered. And because that same child who in 2020 was, let's say in grade two, came back to school in 2022 in grade four.
Speaker: Now think about that. He or she has not learned what it takes to go from two to four. By the way, he's forgotten everything.
Speaker: Now, there are 250 million children in school in India. We sit in our little ivory towers in our cities and we've had Zoom calls and um we had um walks and we had X and Y and Z and ra our holiday homes.
Speaker: By the way, we all know that that wasn't the reality for 99% India. in In fact, in my own home, my daughter was studying for the IB.
Speaker: And in the next room, oh ah our domestic helper, our cook, who's been with us for 20 years, she and her son moved in with us because we wanted them to be safe with us. yeah He was studying.
Speaker: What he was studying and what she was studying, night and day. he She was progressing, he was not. So these kids, these 99% of the 250 million kids went back to school. They had witnessed serious abuse at home, alcohol abuse from their you know family, violence, children getting married off.
Speaker: And you want to teach them math. And that's when that's when change came. So in 2023, NCF came out with its new policy.
Speaker: Learning needs to be more experiential, <unk> etc et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, we need to teach children about wellbeing. Wellbeing really started off around then, wellbeing.
Speaker: And all the hard work started paying off. OUP, Oxford University Press approached us. The then MD of OUP had seen a paper that we had written and he said, SEEK sounds like it is the leading wellbeing curriculum in the country.
Speaker: And they invited us to write um India's first well-being workbook series for grades one to eight. It's called My Happiness and Me.
Speaker: We worked with a fantastic team at Oxford University Press. um Amazing people, Vinita Lal, um who were really open, I have to say. This was the beauty of it. This was what struck me the most. Vinita and her team were so open.
Speaker: They came and said, okay, well-being. Well-being means mental health. And we're like, no, no, no. Well-being is not just about mental health. Well-being is what makes a child feel whole. And so it's mental and physical health.
Speaker: It's about exercising your rights. Well-being is about the unfairness you see in the world and what you can do about it. And well it well-being is about what you can do about the climate crisis.
Speaker: If you take any one piece of this out, the child's well-being is going to suffer. They went for it. And so we built this eight workbook series, My Happiness and Me, that's being sold in a number of all the top end schools in India.
Speaker: So that was a big plus for us. Around the time the UN ah noted that Rangeet was a best practice in SDGs four and five. And Brookings wrote an article about us, a paper called What Children Need to Learn and How They Learn Best.
Speaker: And this is crucial. So this is written by Kathy. So the what children need to learn was children need to learn the skills of the future. Right. We're going to have billion children.
Speaker: Now, this is not a small problem. A billion children around the world, specifically in so in the developing world, who are not going to be ready for the job market. And Citibank actually just last year, so this is not just Brookings and education think tanks.
Speaker: Citibank just last year talked about this, that who are they trying to hire? They had a tech conference in Singapore. So our curriculum was featured. in the what children need to learn.
Speaker: But then the crucial bit is how they learn best. And it's through play-based learning. And when I say play, I don't mean they just come to class and play. It's through stories, art, games.
Speaker: Why? Interaction. Interaction makes everything better. And so we were written up in this book, in this paper. And then two years later, I was invited by Brookings to speak at the Center for Universal Education's 10-year strategy session.
Speaker: And Rangeet was actually a part of this 10 year strategy session and we presented Rangeet and it was a pinch pinch me moment. you know I'm in Washington DC at the world's greatest think tank talking about what we are doing in India and the kind of impact we are seeing in India.
Speaker: And then the cogs and the wheels started moving. Policy tailwinds were behind us. Experts around the world were behind us. and learnings from my past and my colleagues past were behind us.
Speaker: I have an amazing team um without whom we would never be here. um Karishma, Renisha, Anir. And it's that nimbleness that we learned. It's that learning from failure. It's that strength. It's that resilience.
Speaker: All of that started seeing us grow. And so we've got some amazing people along the way, you know apart from Cathy, Sean and David. you know um We work with this amazing um NGO in Dehradun, Asra Trust, Shaila Brijna Transit.
Speaker: They've been our oldest partner. And the it's almost like our lab. Their teachers are incredible. um We work with Pratham. So Pratham actually executes Rangit's programs. So ah we are, let me let me put it this way. We are, I told you, we've got an app and we have our curriculum.
Speaker: Our curriculum sits on our app. The teachers conduct it. And at 500 rupees a child a year, we are able to bring Rangit to two students.
Speaker: Now, you might ask, what is 500 rupees? 500 rupees is 1% of what India spends in the public school system. And it's so important that you need to do that.
Speaker: So we're able to do that because of technology, etc, etc. One of the greatest things that happened to us was when we walked into Farida Lambay's office. Farida Lambay is one of the co-founders of Pratham.
Speaker: They just celebrated their 30 years. We walked into her office and I had no idea what to expect. Here's this lady sitting in her chair, listening to us and then called one of our very important people into her office, Kishore.
Speaker: And word for word or in a better way even explained what Rangit is to them. And I was gobsmacked. She's the most playful, amazing woman and she really supports us. So we work with Pratham.
Speaker: And then I see one of the most amazing things that happened to us was the BMC has adopted Rangit's programs, the prop Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation.
Speaker: And that's big. They run 1100 schools in Mumbai and they educate 300,000 children. And Prachi Jambekar, who's the deputy commissioner education,
Speaker: i'm I'm amazed when I see things like this. When I see an IAS officer who is just committed to progress, just committed, like you think, oh, how are we? be No, boom. This is what keeps us going as a country. These these are the, this is the lifeblood. And so today we are now expanding into 250 schools of the ah you know government, I mean, of the government,
Speaker: BMC. So today we are in, you know, Bombay, Puna, Puna government schools. We have an MOU with the government of Rajasthan, rising Rajasthan, where we work in four districts.
Speaker: Of course, in Muttarakhand. We work with an NGO in Nigeria, amazing NGO there. um And yeah, i mean, I think, you know, engines of growth have begun.
Speaker: And it's amazing because we took the time. And remember what I said about my learning from Blue Frog about rushing it or entering markets with a Never again.
Speaker: We're taking our time. If someone tells us, oh, okay we need some time to get back to, I'm like, good job. Let's do this slow. Because we're seeing that, you know, we're seeing all of these events taking place because we are investing time.
Speaker: We have a team that goes and learns from teachers. We have feedback that comes through our app. And this is the reason why we are able to, because every teacher's feedback is coming.
Speaker: to us. You know, we um we recently we met with 70 teachers from the Cathedral and John Connan School in Mumbai, my alma mater, who we are starting to work with in the new year.
Speaker: And all the feedback they gave us, boom, straight in the app. You know, so so literally our life's dream is we've reached this point.
Speaker: We're working in BMC schools. We're working in Other government schools were working in very poor schools in parts of Pune and Rajasthan. Very. BMC schools are actually really advanced, I have to tell you.
Speaker: But we're some poor, poor, poor schools across the rest, Nigeria, etc. And we're in the cathedral school. And that's proof of concept that we've built not for one...
Speaker: sector of society, but we've built for all children. We've built for all con constructs, all kind contexts, any language.
Speaker: We are building some AI into it to help us to support our teachers more. That's it. We will never build AI to replace teachers. It's only to support teachers more.
Speaker: But we're literally at this amazing inflection point now. that that's going to see Rangit achieve our goal, a big audacious goal, which my dear college friend, Anir laid out in front of us of reaching a hundred million children.
Speaker: And Anir actually joined us because strange confluence of events. My friend who gave us our first break is now part of our team. He's leading growth and scaling. He lives in New York.
Speaker: And because of his position in the Bangladesh government, um he understands scaling. Scaling is a different beast. You know, i'm I understand being an entrepreneur and a product builder.
Speaker: One of my friends told me, he asked me to tell him about Rangit. I said, I explained things. He goes, you don't know how to sell it. You don't know how to grow it. You know how to build it.
Speaker: And so Aneer is there to take us forward. um And he pushed us in 2025, he pushed us to go to the World Economic Forum.
Speaker: And I'm like, what are we doing here? Like, literally, like, I hate conferences. I feel like there are professional conference goers who go and then they do nothing. That's how I genuinely feel.
Speaker: But we went and through some people, we met the president of the Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Margarita. She loved what we do.
Speaker: She's absolutely...
Speaker: believes that social media divided us and AI is going to replace us and she wants to fight that. And so she started this project called the Human Change Foundation and the Human Change Project.
Speaker: And Margarita invited us this year to go to Davos to speak. And so I was on a panel um this year talking about how Rangit brings human centric classes into classrooms in India at scale. 500,000 children at scale are experiencing this.
Speaker: Anir talked about how the teacher is the the pinnacle of education. Don't ever think like COVID did. Don't ever think of replacing the teacher. And so this is just like I had my launch pad on the top of the mountain.
Speaker: This is, Davos this year was ah is our launchpad. We've reached 500,000 kids. In 2026, we're going into four countries in Africa.
Speaker: We're scaling up in our Indian system.
Speaker: We're struggling from time to time, but we're ready. And we've weve we've belayed the platform, you know, for, you know, but we're 300 for one in the 30th over and we have 20 overs to go.
Speaker: Amazing, amazing. How do you handle language issues? Like different states, different countries may not have English fluency. Yeah, absolutely. um So since it's an app, you know, that's the beauty of it, right? Right.
Speaker: So we have language, we have, um it it goes through stages. Okay. Now we've actually practice practiced it in India because we have English, Hindi, Manathi, Bengali already.
Speaker: How did we do it? Karsma writes in English, right? And then we have these um translation companies. Again, you don't go to any translator.
Speaker: I'll give you a funny story. We went to Bangladesh. We translated into Bangla. The teachers said to us, This is like Shakespearean mangler. No one's understanding it. You know, so there's different types of translations. So we found translation agents who understand how to do it. So first cut is we give the the English out.
Speaker: They translate. It comes back. Okay, then it goes to and again, this is learning. It goes to language, native language speakers in Rangit.
Speaker: So if we say, for example, when we started working in Marathi or Hindi, Our coaches, you know we have coaches that support teachers. So they train teachers, they support them, so on and so forth. So they themselves are educators and they know how to work with teachers.
Speaker: That's our hands and feet on the ground. So they check it. And until they are confident, it doesn't go out. Also important is context.
Speaker: So like languages like Hindi, Marathi, of course, you're in Marashtra, but languages like Hindi have different cultural meaning in Rajasthan versus Madhya Pradesh versus Jharkhand versus Uttarakhand.
Speaker: So you need to be careful of that also. Always be open, always listen. That's the key. Listening is the heartbeat of what we do. So that's how we deal with language and also culture.
Speaker: I'll give you a funny story. We were teaching. We were training a bunch of teachers in Nigeria in English. And we realized that they were doing something wrong constantly.
Speaker: I spoke to the head. she she's ah She's very, very good. She deep went in, figured it out. They were just too shy to tell us that they didn't understand our accent.
Speaker: so So many things matter. You have to always be open.
Speaker: Give me an example of a typical deployment, you know, from the time a school says we are interested so onwards.
Speaker: So um rather than a particular school, I'll talk about a system, right? Let's talk about sort of what we've done in Bombay. Okay. Now, We work very closely with the foundation called the Improving Lives Foundation.
Speaker: They're based out of Mumbai. um And right from the start, we've worked with Rushwa Parihar who runs Improving Lives Foundation. We met each other and um he wanted to improve education and he saw Rangita as a way to improve education from a holistic heart standpoint.
Speaker: So um Improving Life Foundation and Rangeet will approach the, will do advocacy. So there are two major levers for Grow. There's advocacy and there's teachers.
Speaker: And into that you need to feed product and then that costs some money. Right? so
Speaker: All of this happens simultaneously. So, for example, we've let take Bombay, for example, we approach the BMC. They were very open. They said, OK, go try this out in twenty five schools. OK, we went to government aided schools. We got 50 schools there.
Speaker: So this you were working with 70 schools in one year, you know. 250 teachers, you know, some 20,000 kids. That's roughly the initial part because that's the kind of scale we need to make sure, you know, we're not interested in, it's not that we're not interested, we're interested in working with any school, but that's what moves the needle.
Speaker: We've got a 200 million problem to solve. So got to make sure we can do it.
Speaker: So we line up the schools, we get the permission, and then we approach funders. So for example, we approach corporates who are interested in working in Bombay. Right? Because corporates have different geographical lenses and some want to do health, some want to do farming.
Speaker: So we go to education, we go to Bombay and we've been very lucky. Nidlon Limited has really supported us here, Improving Life's Foundation.
Speaker: So we go, we talk to their board. The funding actually goes to Improving Life Foundation. So we've got the entire statutory piece properly covered and then Improving Life Foundation pays Rangit for execution.
Speaker: So we go in with our teachers, ah with our coaches, sorry, we go in and we execute. And now we've been doing this for years. You know, we've reached up to 500,000 kids.
Speaker: um But the future might look a bit different. So till now, we've been doing a lot of the training and support ourselves. And I would say in Bombay, we will continue to do that because that's our lab. That's where we learn.
Speaker: Because never forget, 20,000 kids is going to be different to supporting 50,000 kids is going to be different to supporting 1 million kids. Everything's going to be different. So you need to keep learning that scale game.
Speaker: But in elsewhere, we certainly want to work with NGOs who are better at the execution piece than us. We're not the best at the execution piece. I will tell you that. There are NGOs who've been doing this for 20 years.
Speaker: And that's why we were very fortunate that Farida Mehmed Pratham loved what we do and so has taken it up. And so we do this together and they do the execution and they do it a lot better than we do.
Speaker: But they love the product we bring. So that's probably the future. We will work with NGOs, we will bring the product, we will jointly raise funding and we will support the NGO. So we support their master trainers to support at scale. So but currently there are three or four early experiments happening.
Speaker: There's an NGO that called Agastya who works across the country with 600 community centers. Think about that. There's like in each community center has some, you know, I think they said like 40 or 50 kids.
Speaker: They want to scale this up because see what's happening is now the penny has dropped. Math and science, etc. is important, but you go to you got to put your children in a position to be better learners, better leaders, better carers, better ready for the future, future citizens of the country.
Speaker: And that's not going to just happen if I can do trigonometry. And so all of it's important. And so they're starting to to talk to us because they're hearing about us.
Speaker: And so that's going to be the future where we work. very Look, the problem is so large, Akshay, that we have to do this together. You're not going to solve this education problem if you think you're the best, if you think you're alone. It will never work.
Speaker: So we have to work. We have to work with everyone and we're open. We love to work with other people. So that's we start off with we we build the unit. Just like a forest works, you know, each tree knows what it does.
Speaker: But together, the forest is stronger. And so now we know how the tree works. We know how to execute Rangit. Now we bring in all the partners who are willing and we do it together.
Speaker: Okay, got it. ah What are the various funding sources? So I'm assuming it would be a mix of...
Speaker: funded by donors and directly funded by the school itself or the school. thating you So just help me understand that. Yeah. So one is, of course, you've you've hit the nail on the head. One is donors. One is schools pay us directly. So for example, like a a private school will pay us directly.
Speaker: um We work with JB Petit, Kathiru School soon, hopefully. Pawar Public Schools, we started working with them in Dombi Vili, et cetera, et cetera. So they would pay us directly.
Speaker: And we just, we quote them a per child cost and move on.
Speaker: Then, of course, there's this the CSR bit. What does the per child cost range from? So, if we do, as we scale, of course, it comes down. But we start in India. It's about 500 rupees per child per year.
Speaker: Okay. Yeah. So, in that, the school gets pedagogical support for the faculty plus the child gets an app. No, child never gets the app. Remember, with me okay i never gets only the teacher gets the app. Okay. so let me let me touch upon that for a second. How does it how does a classroom look?
Speaker: I'm the teacher. I have the app. What does the app have? It has the instructions and this is why it's scalable. It has the instructions, training, tutorials on how to run every classroom.
Speaker: But let me tell you this also, we encourage the teachers to use their own lived experiences. Right. So we may say, here's this particular story. But bring your own lived experience into it. and Not this minute, but I will tell you one story which will move you very deeply. So I've got this teacher here.
Speaker: Now, I've told you that Rangit is beautiful, right? It's beautifully illustrated. um If you allow me to stand up, in ah I'll show you some of the illustrations. But anyway,
Speaker: um
Speaker: There's a story, a five part story on trees. How do trees work together? And it sort of starts off with Miss Juniper, the treacher, because she's a tree who's a teacher who takes her saplings.
Speaker: Elm, oak, etc. on multiple forest walks where they meet Mr. Shiitake and his friends and they learn about the mycelium networks. They learn, they meet ah they they meet a slot from Central America called Rapide.
Speaker: um A slot Rapide, you know, just the and and they learn about biodiversity and so on and so forth. How do the kids see this? So the app is, if I may say, so engineered quite smartly, where if a classroom has basic smart TV, I'm not even talking smart board, smart board. OK, better. But a basic smart TV, the teacher will be going through this, press a button in the app and that TV through a back end engineering will show the entire storybook or the game or the poem.
Speaker: And then the teacher and the classroom interact with the resources meant for the child. So some of the teachers are like, oh, but what if I get a WhatsApp? What if I get a phone call? No, none of that goes onto to the screen. Everything is private.
Speaker: But the minute you need to show something. so So a lesson could be play this game with the kids. You're supposed to do this. this this is Here's the game. So only the game is shown. The instructions are never shown. gar it So that's how we ah that's how it's done. and and if there And if there's no smart board or if there's no smart smart TV,
Speaker: We print research what we call resource books and we send those out. So just just those bits that have to be shown to the child. So you are asking me what they get.
Speaker: So in that 500, they get full training. And the training is one and a half hours. Again, the training has to be easy because if it's day long training, you're not scaling.
Speaker: So... can be done on Zoom. In Bombay, we're planning to go into the URCs, the Learning Resource Centers, and getting hundreds of teachers at one time.
Speaker: And so again, because you're training the teacher and not the child, so you're you're getting that leverage of scale. Each child, you're reaching 40 kids, right? so So they get the full training.
Speaker: In the case of NGOs, we train the master trainers, then they teach and then coaches are constantly going you know through a program at to schools, understanding, learning, how they're doing.
Speaker: And remember, I told you about the feedback in the app. So that that that happens. We sitting right here in this office get the feedback from every teacher in a dashboard and then we can guide our coaching team. Hey, this particular teacher is doing very well. This particular teacher is not doing so well.
Speaker: Maybe we can buddy them up. Maybe you go visit them. So we're saving time by not visiting the ones who are doing superbly, but the ones who need support. And i talked to you a little bit ago about the two levers of growth. One is the advocacy piece and one is the teacher.
Speaker: No matter what the government tells the teacher, the teacher not motivated, the teacher will not do it. And so we've developed a community called the seeker community from our curriculum, the seek community. And we call each of our teachers a seeker.
Speaker: And we are just at the beginning, Akshay, we're going there. But the ultimate vision of the seeker community, we currently have like a thousand of them in a WhatsApp group sharing things and so on and so forth.
Speaker: But the ultimate vision is through the app we track the teachers who are doing better, the teachers who are putting in the effort, the teachers who are supporting others, sharing beautiful stories, which become impact stories for us, right?
Speaker: And we give them rewards, simple rewards like, you know, next year we're thinking of approaching a self, ah you know, like a loyalty based program. And, you know, through the app, they can, they get points and they can, um you know, exchange these points for certain things. so Remember that this growth comes when teachers are motivated. And so, and and that's something that Anir brought to the table.
Speaker: He built a community of 600,000 teachers in Bangladesh, starting with 23. And so he's spearheading this effort of bringing Sikh and that thought of excitement of the seeker community to everyone.
Speaker: And so that's how a general, that's how it looks in general. um And typically, You know, if we think of, again, step back to business for a second.
Speaker: One thinks about, you know, your cost of customer acquisition. One thinks about things like that, right? um Obviously, you want long-term customers. So education is quite sticky in that sense. If you have a great product, you have good support, you're seeing the impact.
Speaker: A school may take a year to give you a decision, but once they're on, they're on. And so it's a, you know, customer, the lifetime value of a of a customer is pretty high.
Speaker: ah What kind of revenue do you do currently? So currently we are at about a half a million dollars. um And I think the year to come, of course, mean, we've already got signed contracts that are going to see a big jump to that.
Speaker: Amazing. Amazing. Let me kind of... end with asking you to summarize advice which you wish you could have told your younger self.
Speaker: your What are like those top three things you wish you could have told your younger self?
Speaker: So, yeah, let me think about how I can connect the dots from years ago to today. um I think Ishan pushing me up the mountain told me that I have to always demonstrate empathy.
Speaker: um that's That's something that's crucial.
Speaker: Listening to your communities, listening to who you're building for. um That's something that's crucial.
Speaker: And would say this is something that it's not just my work, but my life. with mike with my kids, Ishan and Samara. I mentioned you earlier Ishan plays cricket for Mumbai.
Speaker: um And you know how tough that is, you know, in terms of, and i tell my kids this and I tell myself this, that, you know, if I could tell my younger self this, what I tell my children, that we tend to get so caught up in the now Where am I today?
Speaker: How am I doing relative to X, Y, Z? Am I doing fine? What am i doing? All of these things. I just think that like when you, again, like just open your heart to learning and lessons um and you do what you love.
Speaker: I think doing what you love, there is, I learned this at, in my mid forties. And I want my kids to know this in their twenties, that there is no race.
Speaker: There is no rush. You know, you're told when you come out of school, you must do this. When you go to college, then you have to get a job. Then you have to do this.
Speaker: I know people who in their late twenties were doing incredible jobs and who are lost today. Conversely, I know people who are lost in their twenties who are flying today. Life is so long.
Speaker: If we can just be committed to the things we love, be open and do what you love and not worry about time. I think that everything is, you know, and everything works out. you Be a risk taker.
Speaker: Fail. i So I'm a huge believer in failure. um No, no i don't want to do it too often, but I'm a huge believer. So there's this book called tim ho called um Adapt by Tim Harford, Why Success Starts with Failure. It's like my Bible.
Speaker: um There's another book, which again, massive impact on me called Anti-Fragile by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He wrote this book about how to grow through failure.
Speaker: So there is no English word which is the opposite of fragile. Resilience means that resilience means you are go through something tough and you're fine.
Speaker: And he gives this amazing example of what are what are resilient things and what are anti-fragile things. And anti-fragile is, you know, the in Greek mythology, there's hydra.
Speaker: You cut off one head, 10 grew in its place. If you take that metaphor, if you look at life, not with fear, but with courage and say, okay, what did that what can I learn? And this is my blue frog learning. What can I learn from this?
Speaker: What is my journey? And so, yeah, so that's that's that's the stuff I would tell my younger self. and Just hug life and um embrace it and learn from it.
Speaker: And you love I wish I knew that and in my 20s. I would have been much more chilled along the way. you have Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, Simran. It was a real pleasure.
Speaker: Thank you. Akshay, it was wonderful.
