Hello Naveen, you are the Chairman of ISF. Tell us about your background
I am currently the Founder & CEO of a mobile internet advertising company, InMobi. I founded this company in 2007 and have been working on growing it since then. The company now has 150 people spread across 6 countries. Prior to InMobi, I had received my MBA from Harvard Business School (HBS) and used to work for McKinsey & Company.
Why did you decide to found ISF? And what role did you play at the beginning?
The background to founding ISF was a trip that I organized for about 100 students from HBS in 2004. As part of that trip to India, we visited a village called Rajugela. The experience of interacting with people in that village moved everyone so much that we all decided to help in uplifting the village through education. Once the emotionally charged group decided to contribute in providing education to the villagers, I had to take the lead in making sure that it is done in a way that has an impact and is sustainable. Thus ISF was born along with few other folks from HBS.
After a couple of years of operation, where does ISF stand now?
Right now, we provide quality education to about 300 kids in two schools, our first main center is in Rajugela with its branch in the nearby village of Samarua. Since our model is scalable, we expect the unit cost to go down below $100 per year as soon as we are able to expand to other surrounding villages.
How do you see ISF growing in the coming years? Will you continue the model of building new schools and running them?
In the coming 2 to 3 years, we need to open 5 more schools so we have one hub & spoke system. This will allow us to reach economies of scale. During that time, we also want to lay down the basis for a new hub by centralizing resources between schools, and running more operations out of Delhi.
One of the questions that we always hear from the general public is “why doesn’t ISF work with the government instead of operating on its own?” What’s your take on this Naveen?
We don’t rule it out, but to work with the government requires scale! So maybe in a few years we will have reached a critical mass and we will know how to run large operations. We do have very good relations with government schools though.
What is the biggest challenge of ISF today, and what are we doing to address it? One of our main challenges is the recruitment of quality personnel for the school. The living conditions in this part of the word are hard so it’s difficult to recruit from outside. We also favor hiring locally to promote the local economy and build stronger relationships with the community. However as we move up to middle-school, we find that few people in the community understand intermediate academic concepts so we need to strengthen our training of teachers and provide extra ongoing support. This is our main focus at the moment.
