232: WHAT Is Wrong With The Eduction System? Math Genius Answers | Neelakantha Bhanu (CEO, Bhanzu)

[00:00:00] Is it a marathon? Is it a sprint?

[00:00:01] So I think for you to get to decently okay, I don't think you need to do a lot.

[00:00:05] The first time I won my national championship, I was doing five-digit or six-digit editions,

[00:00:10] if I recall very well, 10, 20 of those in less than 15 or 16 seconds.

[00:00:18] Every mental athlete's journey, or for that matter any athlete's journey, for instance,

[00:00:22] it bumps exponentially and saturates.

[00:00:26] Hello and welcome to another episode of the business and the domain. So I hope you like it.

[00:01:47] Hi Bhanu, welcome to the Startup Operator podcast. Hello, nice to meet you.

[00:01:48] Thank you so much lose your cognitive abilities. And that is when you discover math. And then your life changes for the better. I want to leave it at that. And I want you to explain to the audience what happened and what followed after that.

[00:03:03] Sure.

[00:03:04] So I think I was five years old, as you mentioned, I met event to be something which is life-defining in the orientation which I've gotten in terms of what I could be really good at because had I not gone through that incident I would have probably, you know, maybe never even discovered that I really like doing this and Yeah, I mean could have would have don't really know but I think that's yeah has been a life-changing experience. Nice

[00:04:21] What were the first few puzzles? I mean, do you remember I mean age 5 seems like a long long time ago There's no definite answer to that. But can everyone sort of pick up math? Again, right, I think the segue from puzzles to math is like an entirely different, you know, arc to go into. But puzzles are intuitive sense of solving. Now once you build that intuition over time, mathematics becomes a logical, you know, next

[00:05:40] step.

[00:05:43] Intuition can only take you so far, right?

[00:05:45] A naturally trained intuition can only make you solve 10 things, 20 things. conclusions of what those sequence of statements can bring you. Mathematics is the subject which makes those logical connections more seamless and build deeper connections. Today, if I ask you what is 6 plus 4, it's 10. You don't require intuition for it. That's because there's layers of intuition, a couple of millenniums worth mathematical

[00:07:00] knowledge which makes you roll up to actually get to an answer. Sure. I agree to that partially. Where my sort of difference in understanding mathematics is, at the end of the day, arithmetic is still you accepting numbers and you accepting processes on it.

[00:08:22] So you accept a bunch of truths and you create processes on it

[00:08:26] and you try to talk about. So as you try to become quicker and better at basic arithmetic, you find a lot of tools which enable you to think more first principles. If I tell you what is 39 times six, right? Uh, you would think about it. You'd think about how, how do I do this?

[00:09:41] And then I'm thinking about processes, processes.

[00:09:43] So I'm intuitively doing 13 to six and then nine and adding 54 to it.

[00:09:47] But when I ask you what is seven times six?

[00:10:51] Absolutely. So, if I need to take this and put it in computer science terminology, you're trying to change the operational complexity of a problem. The algorithm itself.

[00:10:52] And for you to change the operational complexity of a problem, you need to understand the problems in anatomy to such degree that there is no other way to do it than first principles.

[00:11:00] And that first principle, understanding of mathematics is my 10 years of journey in speed mathematical competitions. I started off fairly normally, right? I didn't really have a regimen. I was decently okay at something. So I think for you to get to decently okay, I don't think you need to do a lot. You can understand basics, practice a little, get understandings of what kind of problems there is.

[00:12:20] Just giving you an example, right?

[00:12:21] To be able to do three digit multiplications in your mind.

[00:12:26] To be able to do five digit multiplications in your mind. the first time I won my national championship. The first time I won my national championship, I was doing five-digit or six-digit editions, if I recall very well, 10, 20 of those in less than 15 or 16 seconds. So you're computing around 60 digits plus around 60 more inter-problem

[00:13:43] numbers that you need to look at. I'm going to sweat just thinking about... Around 67 numbers per second. And for you to do that consistently for three minutes,

[00:14:43] It bumps exponentially and saturates. You hit an inflection point where you can't run past it with the same methodologies you've done until now.

[00:14:51] You need to unlearn a lot of things.

[00:14:53] So I think that's where there are several more things which I've gotten added to my regimen,

[00:14:58] which is trying to be able to do stress tests, understand what are some deeper connections in these questions which we cannot rather see. I'm really envious of that. It's not the same for everyone. I mean, pretty much everyone has this horrendous experience when they're probably in the fourth or fifth or sixth standard, when the class zooms ahead and they're left behind. That could be algebra class, or it could be maybe the introduction to trigonometry or calculus or whatever. They remember that distinctly.

[00:16:21] And certainly, I do.

[00:16:22] Then I had to put in extra effort to catch up

[00:16:25] with the rest of them.

[00:16:26] Why do you think that is the case? The way mathematics is taught across the world, it is taught as a subject which you're absolutely good at or you're absolutely bad at. When we teach English to children, when we teach language to children, we don't do that. We don't do that. We don't tell someone that you're so horrible at this, that you should never do this again.

[00:17:44] People are okay at it and you're bad at it. And here's two things that you probably have to do. I can bet you that if you ask

[00:19:03] an eighth grader or a ninth grader out there, why does the number 10 come after 0, 9?

[00:20:01] Just imagine this, right? If you're both speaking to each other, I'm sure you had experience about how you learned English in school.

[00:20:09] How did you learn English?

[00:20:10] Were you ever restricted to speak because you couldn't memorize every word in the dictionary?

[00:20:17] Not really.

[00:20:18] Did your teacher ever ask you on saying, if you don't remember what's in dictionary entirely, you don't get to speak.

[00:20:24] You shouldn't speak.

[00:20:26] No.

[00:20:26] That's exactly what happens in math.

[00:20:28] You don't remember these formulae. as you're not good at math, go pick up something else. That's about it. So I think the mentality or the or the or the attribution of what outcomes are in mathematics, I think those have been bad. There can be a great orator and a very bad writer. There can be a great writer,

[00:21:41] who's a very bad orator. While we are willing to accept that in other fields,

[00:22:45] and relatable. I think teachers do a dreadful job of that. Really, really horrible. I mean, I can distinctly remember a couple of folks who made it more fun for me. Shout out to Mrs.

[00:22:50] Bala. I mean, she's watching it. Because I remember her explaining unitary method,

[00:22:55] for example. Everyone said you should do this one by whatever. But nobody explained the logic of it.

[00:23:01] And she got me to understand the core of it, do you set up the entire learning for a child so that they're curious? I can tell you 10 straight facts, right? And you wouldn't care. But if I build up a story to you on saying why the world would have been

[00:24:20] otherwise, if I go ahead and say, you know, computer stores, computers store data in ones and zeros,

[00:25:21] You care. Yeah.

[00:25:22] If I give you a statement, in fact, you don't.

[00:25:25] It's like for what Feynman says, right?

[00:25:27] I mean, to be actually able to derive everything, you know.

[00:25:31] And that's the beauty of physics for that matter, right?

[00:25:33] Because you can see the utility right in front of you.

[00:25:35] Exactly.

[00:25:36] And that's why, and that's why, right?

[00:25:37] So there is, so I think that's the first point, which is utility.

[00:25:40] There is curiosity.

[00:25:41] Yeah.

[00:25:42] And last but not the that, I think you need to enable them with wins, right, not losses. So I think as an educator, building curiosity through good storylines, and good story narratives, having a great amount of testing where you are not testing for immediate outcomes, but you're looking at prolonged periods of learning loops, which go forward, and showing them the utility

[00:27:04] in the world around them. If you, story narrative driven learning, outcomes will follow. We have seen 10 year olds being able to do

[00:28:21] phenomenal algebra, we have seen 13 year olds

[00:28:23] ace calculus, right?

[00:28:25] We have seen six year olds being able to do

[00:28:27] square roots in their mind. and they might agree with you on everything, but do they also kind of bring you down to reality in terms of, okay, my child has a test next week or next month, what are you gonna teach that can be immediately useful to my kid, right? How is everything that you're talking about accrue to actual outcomes from an academic's perspective?

[00:29:43] How do you convince those folks?

[00:29:44] So what do we need to understand

[00:29:45] about the consumer of educational products out there? two or four years later. Oh heck yes, I think utility is still what sells. And if I am here telling you that Banzu is creating a product which will only help you have better experience in learning for life, that's untrue, right? What I'm talking about is there's an entirely different regimen of the way in which you can start

[00:31:01] learning mathematics, which will make you go

[00:31:03] way ahead of your curve very quickly, right?

[00:31:06] If you're 10, by the time you're five months probably has seen an Abacus center next door. Yeah, there's one just down the road. Yeah, so it's not that Abacus gives you learning outcomes. I mostly think that it's not effective at all. But the reason why lacks of students go is because of the promise that you get better competitively. So that I think the innate nature of parents hearing that tuitions are not required, what's

[00:32:23] better is enriching a certain experience which the new things to people. I personally think the best way to do it is go with an intuition and be ready to iterate quickly. At least the Banzu, the way in which we have learned, we didn't start with saying here's the best product there is. Right? It's been three years or four years since we've been in the system,

[00:33:40] but Banzu started out as a research firm

[00:33:44] which was working on public sector schools

[00:33:46] almost five years ago. is I want to build the world's best math curriculum. That's not going to happen in one year. That's not going to happen in three. That's not going to happen in five. Because the world's best math curriculum is not better than others. It's the best. It's probably easier to get and build a better curriculum than everyone else in the market. But if I want to say that I want to build the world's best math curriculum,

[00:35:00] then I need to be constantly learning.

[00:35:03] I need to be constantly reiterating.

[00:35:05] Go with a set of core beliefs. in my journey has come through extensive amount of research, extensive amount of, you know, interfacing and interacting with whom you're building what for, instead of bunch of assumptions, to market research decks, which you create by talking to five consultants or a consultancy,

[00:36:20] that probably won't cut the bill.

[00:36:23] So we skipped a few steps ahead.

[00:36:25] Let's go back. I just started conferences when I was 15, if I recall very well, right? Talking about how mathematics can help your understanding of business. Back in the day, I come from a business family. My parents have been in the food tech ecosystem, in the food ecosystem for a very long time before. And for me, it was just explore what you would want to do.

[00:37:42] As a 17 year old, I went to reply to Hyderabad for a year.

[00:37:44] I dropped out from a computer science degree

[00:37:46] because I wanted to do math.

[00:37:48] I went to St schools thinking about all the things which I wanted to teach, there was a course where which I put together,

[00:39:01] there were a bunch of volunteers we had.

[00:39:03] We went into the school and we realized

[00:39:05] that whatever we built was trash

[00:39:07] because what's on the ground was drastically different. So I think as an 18 year old, I had that realization saying I had a dream journey with math. The truth on ground, however, is that people have an absolutely tough journey with it. And my learnings were about how I could connect the dots between mathematics and saying,

[00:40:20] Hey, this makes sense. Those were not offered and hence they're not good.

[00:40:24] It's not because I was better at math. It's a great initiative, which is doing phenomenally well. A little later, we got much bigger projects to take up during the pandemic. We exploring infinities, which today has been rebranded to Bhanzu, right, has catered to more than 2 million

[00:41:40] children, where we were streaming classes on live television, because schools didn't operate. So in all of your educators, maybe 50 or 100 educators to kind of take what you're saying to whoever they're teaching. I think there is a lot of method to that madness. I stopped teaching then, right? The moment I saw that scale is what I wanted to do, I told myself that I should stop teaching today. If I don't stop teaching today, then I'm gonna make this an institution.

[00:43:03] I'm gonna make this an academy, right?

[00:43:04] I mean, I would rather say,

[00:43:05] I'm not gonna make this an institution which is big. which you need to go through for you to scale that much bigger. And we realized that the best way to do it is to commercially scale up, build more voice, build more profound research. If one summer 30 variants of curriculum could give you that result, imagine doing that for five years, doing that across a million learners and having the right amount of tech to keep looking at what those inter-concept relationships are.

[00:44:26] You can build the best curriculum in the world there of time, but you always hit a, you know, Oh, how deep is this channel after a certain point of time? I think that's the natural scale trough of any business for that matter. But yeah, I mean, I mean, I think let me just qualify that right. I mean, if you look at typically how a tuition center grows, right, I have a branch in core

[00:45:43] Mangla.

[00:45:44] I'm doing fairly well. because I've spent the last three years before I started scaling doing hundreds of shows. I've done more than 500 stage shows in a period of three years. That's almost one show every two days. Crazy. Right? That's thousands and lakhs of people you've talked to. So you've built that amount of traction. You've built a certain amount of outcome.

[00:47:00] Right?

[00:47:01] And I won the Mind Sports Olympia 2020 in August,

[00:47:05] where I got, let's say,

[00:48:03] owned by anyone, but you have a fantastic product you'll scale. So again, I come back to that question

[00:48:05] of making a transition from an educator to an entrepreneur.

[00:48:10] And there are a bunch of things that you have to learn up.

[00:48:13] And typically, when we talk to product people

[00:48:15] on the podcast, this is something

[00:48:17] that they have to learn up.

[00:48:18] I mean, they have to learn up the business development

[00:48:21] side of things, the finance side of things.

[00:48:25] Heck, even just the HR and admin side of things. understanding businesses, understanding scale has been something which I've been exposed to, to some capacity or the other. So I think the acumen was there. I think you need to polish it a lot because as you scale, the problems of scale are drastically different than what you are as an individual unit. Three years ago, around two and a half years ago, we were a group of 10-15 people

[00:49:41] sitting in Hyderabad who were just trying to do what they were doing.

[00:49:44] And I think from then until now, there's a founder, you don't really have an option to not learn. So you're constantly learning, you're constantly challenged. And I think that's where a lot of my speed math regimen sort of comes to rescue, right? The first principle approach is what keeps you afloat.

[00:51:01] What are like two or three mistakes that you've made in this journey?

[00:51:05] And what have you learned from them?

[00:52:05] That instinct for a founder always exists because, hey, you are a maker. You are a maker.

[00:52:07] While that is a good thing initially, when that is given great benefits,

[00:52:11] I think I've understood that refraining from such instinct has longer benefits than what you think.

[00:52:17] I think number two would be just understanding the importance, you are good at what you do. So yeah, there's a few things. So EdTech has been such a roller coaster, right? Over the last three or four years, I should say, I think the last EdTech person that we had on the podcast, um, if I remember correctly was Arjun of great learning, and this was before the, by Jews acquisition that far back, right?

[00:53:40] I mean, uh, feels like a lifetime ago.

[00:53:42] Um, you know, you saw the boom in here to stay. If you're an aggregator, maybe not. If you're a marketplace, maybe not. If you teach the same school syllabi, I think it's gonna be out there for free. Yeah. So I think it's worth the value add, the proprietary stuff that you do, and if you really show outcomes, phenomenal outcomes,

[00:55:02] and have the ability to build a brand in the long run,

[00:55:06] those at-techs are here to stay. I mean just adding on to that, what's wrong with edX? I don't think a lot. I think it gets too much criticism than needed. Educational companies, educational institutions have existed for thousands of years, be it schools, colleges, institutions, and they will continue to for thousands of years.

[00:56:24] There might have been a couple of tools to the teachers. If you just look at these three and build over it

[00:57:41] over a course of time, then you've

[00:57:42] built something proprietary for yourself.

[00:57:44] And I think those are the three there are solutions. Banzu as a company is navigating through several of these and we've built several of these and we continue to do a lot of these. I think the last part of this, which is exclusive of the learner and the teacher is historically you peg a? Is the child more, is a learner wanting to come back to classes? Right? Is a learner being able to solve problems which they could never have before? Right? I think there are softer ways in which you measure these.

[01:00:20] It's not, you know, I give you 10 tests every day and try to measure it every single day.

[01:00:24] Right.

[01:00:25] It's as simple as saying, if you want to become fitter, you don't measure We are scaling, Banzu is present in India, we are in the Middle East, we are in Southeast Asia, we are in the US, we have just launched out of the US. I think we are good to do what we are doing and we continue to do it. I think collecting intelligence in terms of how students have to learn better, building a thesis around how do we displace and become the world's largest math education company.

[01:01:43] That's the vision, right?

[01:01:44] I think the vision is in five years, in ten years sure people have recommended everything here, but I really love The Art of Blitzkilling by Wright Hoffman. Yeah. Those are two books which I probably recommend. Flatland or Romance of Many Dimensions, if you're looking at a mathematics fiction book, which I find it very enticing. I think these are a few podcasts.

[01:03:02] I mean, I am not a consistent follower of podcasts, so wouldn't be the best person