¡@¡@My early childhood years were nomadic - my father was in the Indian Army and that meant we moved around the country quite a bit. So I ended up studying in several different types of schools across India and finished High School from an institution called Rishi Valley. What made this school different from the others was that its founder¡¦s philosophy encouraged students to develop and grow their own capacity for learning without external benchmarking or in other words, focus on doing your work to the best of your abilities without losing sleep over what you competitor might be up to!
¡@¡@ I did well at Math in High School, but had a terrific teacher for A¢Wountancy. So while I initially enrolled for a Bachelors' Degree in Math at the University of Madras I dropped out (!) six months later to pursue A¢Wountancy instead. On the way, I set up a travel agency that would aggregate business for larger agents and share its co¢Pission from airlines equally with its customers - only to learn the first rule of disintermediation rather rapidly
Citibank offered me a job in Foreign Exchange when I was 21 and a freshly minted Chartered A¢Wountant. It was an interesting time in India as the country was beginning to liberalize. I marketed hedge products to Indian corporate customers and got really interested in the arcane world of derivatives. The bank then transferred me to a trading desk in Bahrain where I dabbled in high coupon local currency debt from Lebanon and Turkey and earned my keep.
¡@¡@ After 10 years with Citibank, I switched to Credit Suisse First Boston to set up a derivatives business in what were then¡¥emerging markets¡¦ of Central and Eastern Europe. After practically living out of a suitcase for 18 months and getting strange looks from my 3-year old daughter each time I returned from a trip, I got the message. A bungee jump off the Victoria Falls bridge in Zimbabwe mid 1999, cleared up the cobwebs in my head and convinced me that I had to seriously think about doing something worthwhile with my life.
HeyMath! came into being because my partner Nirmala Sankaran and I witnessed first-hand that parents were anxious about Math education, kids were stressed out with Math and we wanted to do something about it. When we factored in dire projections of a shortage of good Math teachers the world over, things looked scary. Though neither of us knew much about education at the time, we felt strongly that the Internet had a huge role to play in delivering a solution, so we left our respective banking jobs, bootstrapped the firm and got going in the year 2000.
¡@¡@ Education is perhaps one of the purest applications of Web 2.0 because, to collaborate, to share and to learn from each other comes pretty naturally to teachers, kids and parents. At HeyMath! we are on a mission to change the way that Math is perceived, taught and learnt. Making this happen though, is a huge challenge and we believe that we are at the beginning of an incredibly exciting journey.
¡@¡@ I have two wonderful Sagittarian daughters (which means they don't stop talking), born on exactly the same day, six years apart and within minutes of each other. N0w just do the math behind the odds of making that happen. |
