Karl Mehta is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and engineer, with over 20 years of experience in founding, building, and funding technology companies in the U.S. and international markets. He is the CEO and founder of EdCast, a leading knowledge network, and Code for India, a non-profit organization that inspires global engineers from leading technology providers to donate their time to create solutions to real-world problems. Karl served as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, selected by the Obama Administration during the inaugural 2012-13 term. He was also appointed by Governor Brown to the Workforce Investment Board of the State of California. In 2010, Karl won the "Entrepreneur of the Year" award for Northern California from Ernst & Young. He is also on the boards of Simpa Networks Inc., and the Chapman University Center for Entrepreneurship and advisor board of Intel Capital. He is the co-author of the book 'Financial Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid".
EdCast is an AI-Powered knowledge Cloud for unified discovery, knowledge management, and personalized learning. EdCast uses Artificial Intelligence and it's curation engine to bring together organizations' internal learning content, expert insights along with millions of external resources into an easy-to-use, personalized learning experience, and knowledge platform.
Your experience in founding, funding and architecting technology businesses spans over 20 years. How did you get involved in the education and learning space?
The business world is transforming rapidly— everything that can be automated is getting automated. The dynamism and forces of AI, robotics, and 3D printing has disrupted the status quo, and pushed outdated processes into oblivion. But the workforce training process hasn’t kept up with the pace of change. We are entrenched in the knowledge economy where we are required to learn and apply new knowledge daily. However, this pace of change is surpassing enterprises’ ability to keep up and they are not adopting new technologies fast enough or investing in the resources that can enable them to grow. People in organizations lack expertise in the fields that will drive their businesses forward. Organizations are not investing in enterprise-wide knowledge, while many business leaders push against investing in L&D programs. The future of the corporate workforce lies in building a knowledge network, which also creates a culture of knowledge-sharing that develops tech-savvy learners to their full potential. Such changes require a platform for continuous learning at the individual, organization, national levels, and global scale to help achieve the full potential of every human being on our planet. That vision and mission excited me every day.
How did the idea of EdCast come about?
The estimates reveal that 2.5 billion content pieces get uploaded on the Internet daily. Essentially, this is an overwhelming amount of content that people find difficult to absorb. For a knowledge worker, there is not enough time or patience to sift through the content and use it; besides, you need to apply technology, AI, Machine Learning to make sense of it. I was looking at all this from a knowledge and learning perspective. Even if someone has the right intent and the motivation to learn, he needs the tools to curate content, to make sense of it, and then effectively use it at the right time. So that was the core idea. The problem statement was that in a knowledge economy, for a continuous lifelong learner, you need technology to make sense of the content, to curate and personalize it. And this knowledge or learning has to be peer-to-peer and bottoms-up, not just top-down.
We started EdCast at the Stanford University. Stanford validated the idea and invested in us so we had the access to their financial and intellectual capital. We were also extremely focused on AI from the very beginning, and we hired PhDs from Princeton and Stanford, and have also recently acquired an AI startup, Sociative. Although at the start, we built it for individuals learners, we have focused on the corporate market because that’s where the big challenge is currently at scale.
What were or are the trends that you feel supported this idea of venturing out into the learning space?
Given all the technology, demographic and economic shifts, the need for ‘Up-skilling’ has become the number 1 problem to solve for almost all organizations and governments worldwide. So the timing could not have been better. The millennials in the workforce are altering the demand and consumption of a more self-directed, peer-2-peer and personalized on-demand learning. That has been the big driver because technology and new ways of empowering peer-to-peer learning are gaining prominence. In addition, past 20 years before EdCast had seen a complete lack of innovation in the learning space along with outdated infrastructure which made this space ripe for disruption. L&D in organizations had and still has a credibility issue because there has been no real innovation in a vast majority of enterprises.
We are helping and supporting L&D departments of organizations with innovative technologies and helping them address threats of digital disruption, supporting their millennial workforce, and bringing innovation so they can have real-time performance support. We don’t offer learning for the sake of learning.
What makes your approach to learning different from others? What differentiates you?
We have adopted a different approach to providing learning — we offer both informal and formal learning. Informal learning is how humans have learned since time immemorial as we are all social animals, but now technology has made it possible with micro-learning, byte size learning, and subject matter expert-based learning. And because it gives the right content at the right time to solve what you are working on, it improves productivity. For example, if an appliance retailer has an employee who has figured out how to break apart a dishwasher completely and then put it back together better than any other employees; you need to capture that subject matter expertise. Now imagine if all other employees in other stores can learn from that one person. That person becomes a subject matter expert. We believe that that is the way people learn because we get motivated when we see our peers doing the same work, only better. That is the best form of motivation, unlike someone giving lectures.
How does that happen operationally?
We have invested heavily in the mobile-first app where you can identify subject matter experts. We set up channels like the television for every topic. So you can actually capture and show it. I think the learning industry has to understand that this is how people like to learn — on-the-go, just-in-time, right at the point of need, short videos — self-driven as opposed to somebody else telling them to do something (which may be necessary for some use-cases). But the most important part is when a learner sees other performers doing it. That is most motivating.
Organizational performance depends on individual and team performance and that is why organizations have to provide tools to their employees to help them drive performance. But when you talk about performance in any company, there is always a ratio of 80-20, which is 20 percent of employees are super-smart compared to the rest of the 80 percent. The way to drive performance is not through pushing people into courses after courses but making that 20 percent as coaches. If they become coaches, then the performance of the rest 80 percent lifts up. That is the secret. The best organizations have figured out how to do it and now we have a tool like EdCast. Our algorithms are tuned to prioritize internal knowledge over external as internal knowledge is the tacit knowledge, and that is valuable. The people who run your business, technology, and product, they are the people who know your business better than any outsider.
How do you enable these subject matter experts to actually contribute to productivity?
We believe in a culture of knowledge sharing. High performing organizations have 4 times more knowledge-sharing than low-performing organizations. That is why organizations have to create a culture of learning by incentivizing and enabling their top 20 percent performers. Real subject matter experts want to share their knowledge and have the desire, and that’s how they get their kick every day. But they don’t have the tools. When you don’t provide them the tools, they don’t share. Reality is that if you give people the tools, they will do it. If you try to hold knowledge or don’t empower people, they will leave. I think organizations need to bring innovative tools like EdCast and create an open culture of knowledge-sharing.
Tell us about the skilling initiatives that you are working on in India?
I founded a tech-driven non-profit, CodeforIndia.org and then as a part of this, we also started SkillUpIndia.org because I have been passionate about massively upskilling in India and worldwide. We have engaged with the governments worldwide in various capacities trying to help them. I had spent a year at the White House under President Obama as the Presidential Innovation Fellow working on various national and global technology projects and so I see the role of the governments in partnership with the private sector as pivotal in large-scale transformations.