The very impressive WhiteHat Jr program
I got the chance to listen to Karan Bajaj, twice in a span of a week in the month of September. First at the IIM Bangalore, Alumni event, "Anusmaran" where the moderator Rahul Singh, introduced Bajaj as "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" in reverse. Unlike the protagonist of the book, Bajaj started as Yogi in an ashram and had now managed to sell his startup to BYJU's for an eye-popping $300 million USD. An equally interesting discussion at an "IIMChat" event moderated by Rahul Phondke & Deepika Deshpande left me very impressed and I almost signed up for the program.
By the time I returned from India the WhiteHat Jr or SafedTopi had snowballed into a huge debate on the internet and I took some time to validate my very positive first impressions. I ended up talking to 7 parents, who had put their kids into the program. The feedback from the parents was overwhelmingly positive. However, given the very negative comments, I decided to do a trial class and was impressed. My 7-year-old has no coding background and in the first session, the teacher was able to keep her engaged for about half an hour. They used a gamified tool to explain simple loops and I was sold on the idea. My understanding of the WhiteHat Jr offering: In the 60s and the 70s spreadsheets were accessible only for the Geeks. Those fortunate few had a significant advantage over the lesser mortals who relied on the paper. Slowly with the evolution of the visual interfaces, these tools have become more common. We are on a similar journey wrt AI tools like ML etc. The biggies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM are working on tools that have the potential to democratize AI capabilities, and perhaps my daughter will be amongst the first generations who are AI natives. What WhiteHat Jr has done is to create a platform that curates publicly available tools like code.org and Jupyter notebooks to create a reasonably solid teaching environment (The founder acknowledges that some bugs persist). Theoretically, you can get access to all these tools for free, but any non-geek who has tried to set up the coding environments from youtube tutorials knows that that process can be quite challenging. The tools, a reasonable curriculum, and a set of dedicated teachers make the WhiteHat Jr program quite compelling. My daughter's teacher was a Cognizant developer for 4 years and after marriage is now based out of the Netherlands. Karan in the discussion mentioned above shared personal stories of how his mother, an intelligent LSR graduate sacrificed her career to support her husband's army career. He claimed that he has tried to create a sensitive organization that taps on this very capable talent pool of Engineer housewives. I found that very compelling and have validated the same with individuals who are teaching at WhiteHat Jr. Subsequent to this post, I will share two more posts covering: 1. Anecdotes from the life of Karan Bajaj. 2. The very special Startup story of WhiteHat Jr. Response to my Facebook Social Media post
My own experience with WhiteHat Jr Marketing WhiteHat Jr uses some good scheduling tools. But that is a bit restrictive and the short scheduling window creates some pressure on parents. I believe, whiteHat has now put in some policy that does away with outbound telecalls, but within minutes of my registering with their site for the first time, I got a few calls. It appears that the way, the customer lifecycle journeys have been set up can create some scope for annoyance. Then as I mentioned earlier, WhiteHat Jr uses some good frameworks and methodologies, some of which has its origin outside WhiteHat Jr. The Telesales guy sold this as an inhouse capability that had been in work for 5 years, and so when I pointed that the company had been in existence for less than 2 years, his response was rather defensive. If I had not done my homework, I would have taken that response as a sign of something fishy. The reports about the recent defamation lawsuit create some doubts and I would love to hear the organization's side to this story. I personally see value even in the list price of the program. However initial claims of how much of a genius your 7-year-old kid is (Who by the way has no coding experience) creates a trust deficit. The incredible discounts offered as scholarships and Apple laptops giveaways as referral bonus gives credence to the commercialization of education criticism against the company. Nevertheless, I am very impressed by Karan Bajaj, the individual, and his incredible WhiteHat Jr journey and I will share details of the same in my next two posts.
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