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Elephant Learning Founder Dr Aditya Nagrath Joins Us On The Steve Jobs Inspired Join Up Dots Podcast
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Introducing Elephant Learning & Dr Nagrath
Elephant Learning founder Dr Aditya Nagrath is our guest today joining us on the Steve Jobs inspired Join Up Dots podcast.
Dr. Aditya Nagrath is a visionary leader on a mission to change the way that the world teaches mathematics.
Dr. Nagrath is the co-founder of Elephant Learning Math Academy which is a gamification of a proven curriculum.
On average, children in Elephant Learning, learn 1.5 years of mathematics in 10 weeks using the system just 30 minutes per week.
Dr. Nagrath, at age 14, taught himself C++ and continued on to read books on game development and neural networks which are the basis for modern day artificial intelligence.
He graduated from the University of Denver with a dual major of Mathematics and Computer Science, continuing on to graduate school while working full time as a software developer to graduate with a PhD in Mathematics & Computer Science 7 years later.
How The Dots Joined Up For Elephant Learning
After at decade in University, Dr. Nagrath graduated to found Elephant Head Software where he lead a team of no more than 10 engineers to bring over 35 different product lines with over 50 different applications to market between 2009 and 2016.
In 2016, Dr. Nagrath co-founded Elephant Learning with Professor Alvaro Arias from the University of Denver in order to bring transformational change to America’s education system.
As he says “3 out of 4 students are not proficient at High School Mathematics, leading to 69% of STEM majors switching majors to a major with less mathematics.
Math deficiencies happen completely amongst income lines leading to a preservation of the cycle of poverty as mathematic scores often predict high school drop out and over all scores.”
So how do you get a business like this up and running to such great success?
And where do people go wrong when tackling an issue like this? Focusing in on the kids, more than the pain of the parents?
Well let’s find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Dr. Aditya Nagrath
Show Highlights
During the show we discussed such deep subjects with Elephant learning founder Aditya Nagrath such as:
Dr Aditya shares the reasons why the first thing you must do is to simplify the product to take away any of the confusion that could keep it from succeeding.
Why its so important to get your branding right at the very beginning…you have to get one word in the customers mind.
We discuss the personal loan that he made to the business, proving that he truly believed in his vision.
And lastly………..
Why he has built a product that appeals to the global market, instead of going tight and niche like most common advice would have encouraged.
Connect With Aditya Nagrath From Elephant Learning
Return To The Top Of Elephant Learning
If you enjoyed this episode of Aditya Nagrath why not listen to some of our favourite podcast episodes such as Jack Canfield, Nick Ruiz, Layne Booth or the amazing Spencer Sheinin
Or if you prefer just pop over to our podcast archive for thousands of amazing episodes to choose from.
Full Transcription Of Aditya Nagrath Interview
Intro [0:00]
When we’re young, we have an amazing positive outlook about how great life is going to be. But somewhere along the line we forget to dream and end up settling. Join Up Dots features amazing people who refuse to give up and chose to go after their dreams. This is your blueprint for greatness. So here’s your host live from the back of his garden in the UK. David Ralph.
David Ralph [0:25]
Yes, hello there. Good morning, everybody. Good morning and welcome to another episode of Join Up Dots motivational conversational, and I like to think inspirational show, but shows you that it’s there waiting for you. You just have to go and get it. Well, today’s guest on the show is a visionary leader on a mission to change the way that the world teaches mathematics. He’s the co founder of elephant learning math Academy, which is a gamification of a proven curriculum. Now he says on average children in his system learn one, two Half one and a half years of mathematics in just 10 weeks using the system, which takes just 30 minutes per week. Now at age 14, he taught himself c++ and continued on to read books on game development and neural networks, which are the basis for modern day artificial intelligence. And he graduated from the University of Denver with a jewel major of Mathematics and Computer Science, continuing on to graduate school while working full time as a software developer, now after a decade in university then graduated to found elephant head software where he led a team of no more than 10 engineers to bring over 35 different product lines. We have over 50 different applications to market between 2009 and 2016. And then, in 2016, he co founded elephant learning with Professor Alvarado areas from the University of Denver in order to bring transformational change to America’s education. system. So how do you get a business like this up and running to such great success? And where do people go wrong when tackling an issue like this focusing in on the kids more than the pain of the parents? Well, let’s find out as we bring them to the show, to start Join Up Dots with the one and only Dr. Aditya Nigrath. Morning, dr.
Elephant Learning [2:23]
Doing good. Thank you for having me.
David Ralph [2:25]
It’s lovely to have you here. So right, cut straight to the chase. I recently went through a nightmare scenario when I had to get my son to pass his exams in maths. And even though they were only maths at an 18 year old level, it was a nightmare. And we sat there night after night, there was so much and in my head I was thinking, you don’t need to learn this in the real world. You don’t you’re never gonna use this.Was I thinking about it in the wrong way?
Elephant Learning [2:57]
Well, I guess it depends on what he was working on. And what He goes on to do it through calculus, there’s there’s a lot of applications in the real world. I mean, for example, the stock market uses derivatives every day. That’s what an option is.
David Ralph [3:13]
So I was looking at it the wrong way, I was just looking at what I use in my own life. And I should have been looking at where he was potentially going.
Elephant Learning [3:22]
What I found is that when I look in my own life, and I try to find where I’m using math kind of on the spot, it’s really, really challenging to do. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to get it over to children. Because children learn language through inference, meaning that they hear you using the words in context, and then they attempt to use those words in context. And it’s just one of the things that if, if we, as humans did a better job of of being able to identify like, Oh, I’m multiplying here, or I’m using algebra here. We could be saying that aloud and pointing it out, but it’s really challenging.
David Ralph [4:00]
Now, when you are creating a system like you, you’ve done, obviously, like it goes into so many different variations. Where did you start? How did you know that you weren’t going to end up in a mess yourself? We have so many kind of dead ends and pivots. How did you focus on it?
Elephant Learning [4:20]
Well, so I had the experience of putting together software products for so many different companies prior to starting this one, that I kind of knew exactly where the pitfalls would be. And so like the decision of how do we build it, how do we put it out? How do we market it kind of all? all aligned at the start of the of the programme?
David Ralph [4:47]
How do you do that? But for somebody out there that’s thinking of doing something similar? How can we tap into your expertise to to make the right decisions?
Elephant Learning [4:58]
Will I mean God Every situation is different. But when when you’re approaching developing software, the first thing is you want to simplify it. So the thing is, is that when you’re looking at that minimal viable product, you want to make sure that you’re solving the problem that you’re going after. And you’re doing it in a way that is simple for both the software developer and the customer, right. And if you can, if you can manage to put that together, then you have a foundation from where if you pivot, it doesn’t matter how where power where you pivot to, you’ll probably end up on goal and simplification
David Ralph [5:39]
as in the process or the journey that the user goes on.
Elephant Learning [5:46]
The process and journey that the user goes on and at the same time the I’d say the processing journey that the developer goes On what we find a lot of times, we inherited a lot of projects where it maybe came in from another contractor, typically in India, typically overseas somewhere. And the code was so complicated that when you look at it, it was it was extremely challenging to fiddle with it to make just the bug fixes that they were coming in work. But to add anything on would be nearly impossible. It’s not a strong foundation. It’s almost as if sometimes they didn’t understand the problem that they were trying to solve. And, and so they solve for a whole bunch of problems that are already out there. The problem is, is that if you got that kind of a mess in your code base, and you can’t bring anyone else into build on top of it, then you’re kind of at rewrite, which is unfortunately kind of the most common recommendation once you switch contracting firms regardless of regardless of the quality of the Software regardless of whether it’s understandable or not, because typically when you get to another human being and they read the code that the previous firm wrote, they’re not really incentivized to understand it. Yeah, though, that in most cases. I mean, really, depending on who wrote it, you, you could be looking at a big mess. So I think it’s just really important to kind of have your eye on both the user experience and what’s happening from a code perspective. There are a lot of decisions we made in our platform that if we would have gone the other way, we probably would not have survived. Now,
David Ralph [7:39]
what interests me with you and you’re obviously a clever guy is a lot of cleverness doesn’t translate well into the real world as into marketing and sales. You understand it but getting out there, you obviously have. So what’s that part of your sort of remit as well? Did you understand How to traffic generate online and get your product to market.
Elephant Learning [8:06]
So that piece I had to learn, I think the piece that was kind of innate that I was able to kind of identify ahead of time was maybe how it relates to brand. So like we had a brand that we were able to then kind of start marketing online. And just by having the brand be correct. We were able to get some traction, but it was the brand just jumping
David Ralph [8:29]
in there. How would you describe the brand?
Elephant Learning [8:33]
Well, I would describe the brand as effective. We had a gentleman come in his name is Jerry O’Brien. And he had done stuff for all sorts of different companies like cores, etc. And what he had said and this was kind of after we had already started with the idea, but what he had said is you want to own one word in the customers mind. And for us that word is effective. And the reason why I chose that word was because what I realised was There’s so many products out there on the market that are out there trying to be fun. They’re trying to be engaging. They’re trying to be entertaining. Yeah, there’s nothing out there that is actually effective. Because if there was, we wouldn’t be seeing the statistics that we were seeing.
David Ralph [9:17]
So people really were looking for something that wasn’t just an enjoyable journey to go through, but actually did it exactly what it says.
Elephant Learning [9:28]
Well, yeah, so like, so the stat I was looking at was that 75% of high school students are not proficient at high school mathematics at that time of the 2007 stat, just turns out that the 2019 stat looks exactly the same. So from 2007 to 2019. We’re still looking at 75% of high school students not being proficient in high school mathematics. Now, if there was something out there that was effective, the schools would already be using it, people would already be using it. And that was the gap that I saw.
David Ralph [9:58]
Now when you find the gap, If you then have to translate that idea, that vision to somebody else, did you go straight over to your co founder? Did he buy into it straight away? Or was it a case of many nights in pubs trying to buy pints for people to get them to believe in it that you did?
Elephant Learning [10:17]
So what what it actually was was the other way around. So he approached us. And at first I wasn’t convinced, and he had to convince me, and, and he was pretty successful at that.
David Ralph [10:30]
And why why wasn’t you convinced? Well, I couldn’t use CBT because of the stats you told me just a moment ago. Seems like it’s a no brainer.
Elephant Learning [10:39]
Well, it will, he gave me that stat. Oh, okay. So yeah, so I mean, that that was the thing was when I when I walked up to him, and he wanted to start a business, kind of for the purpose of a grant. And I started to look at it and I started to understand what was going on and what the motivations are, and who are the players. I started to realise that these national science foundation grants, they tend to be a way for professors to get money in and run projects on the side, maybe make a little extra money themselves, but really kind of distributed out to potentially students or, you know, some particular vendors, but they don’t have a real interest in actually, maybe, I mean, they have an interest in solving the problem, but they don’t have motivation. Let’s put it that way.
David Ralph [11:30]
You want to go clean it you want to go big and World Domination? Yeah.
Elephant Learning [11:36]
Well, at the time, I was kind of done with contract software engineering. Maybe I hadn’t even fully realised it myself. I was still kind of on the fence of well, do I want to try to go and build something over here with the contract software engineering firm or do I want to try to do something else in and that’s when what he told me he convinced me that this is what I want to do. Because what he had told me was that four out of five students start kindergarten unprepared for the kindergarten curriculum. And that was a hard thing for me to swallow even then. But it turns out that what parents think counting to 10, and what kindergarten prescribes counting 10 to be is slightly different. So if the child says the numbers one through 10, a parent will typically give it a thumbs up at the time, I would have given it a thumbs up, but kindergarten means Can you slide 10 things over and stop on 10 without continuing and that’s a completely different skill for four or five year olds. So I started to realise that there is this gap and that that gap continues all the way through elementary school. It doesn’t even really show up on standardised tests until algebra and the reason why is because you can memorise addition and subtraction you can memorise multiplication division, you can memorise the procedures to get through fractions. But when you get to algebra If you didn’t understand those ideas that came before, it’s sort of game over because now you’re using it in the abstract. And algebra is also where mathematics turns into more of a language so that we actually start to have discussions about it. Like suppose y equals two x plus five, for example, right? If that statement y equals two x plus five is not true, right? It’s a hypothetical things, just in this case, this is what we want to suppose for the purposes of this problem. And the thing is, is that in the classroom, none of this is discussed out loud. So I remember going through it myself. And, you know, no one told me that Okay, we’re going to have a discussion about this. And let’s suppose that and it’s right, you just put the problem on the piece of paper and and solve for x. That’s what it is. And it might be and it probably is the case that many students don’t even know why they’re doing it.
David Ralph [13:55]
Well, let’s say some words now and then we’re gonna be back with Dr. A teacher.
Unknown Speaker [13:59]
My father couldn’t In a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that that was possible for him. And so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant. And when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job. And our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.
David Ralph [14:25]
Now, you’ve obviously come from Asian descent, and certainly with my experience, a lot of doctors and medical and lawyers, there’s a big push from the family to sort of get you into these establishments. You’re now entrepreneurial. How does your family feel about by ease? Are they happy for you? Am I proud for you and I sort of disappointed
Elephant Learning [14:52]
Well, I guess they’re proud. My father actually built motels back in the 80s
David Ralph [15:00]
Somebody was quite new as well then.
Elephant Learning [15:03]
Yeah, basically and, and to some degree, they just don’t even understand what I’m doing. They can maybe see the output and understand the output. But they don’t. I don’t get the feeling that they got a strong grasp on what it takes or what I’ve put into this or what it even means.
David Ralph [15:22]
And then does it mean something to you? I’m I’m always interested on this kind of personal because I think there is we all like our parents to be proud of us. And we would all like them to pass on the back and say you’ve done really well. There’s that sort of Langkawi view slight eg would you like them to ask more questions? Are you quite happy for them to just sort of them? let you get on with it?
Elephant Learning [15:47]
Well, I I mean, I just get on with it. I mean, there’s
when you’re talking with someone, or at least when I’m talking with someone, and they don’t seem to be getting it, and I can’t seem to really conveyed over, I sort of just move on. Right? But I mean, the impact is pretty huge. Because what we found what the research that Elvis showed me that day to kind of continue that story was that if a student entered the education system in the United States prepared for kindergarten, it tends to be that they actually understood the teacher all the way through it and our system is effective. It’s just that it’s not effective for 80% of the students. And our software just happens to be helping children get to that level where statistically speaking, if you looked at the graphs, we were looking at it, it was nearly impossible. Like some children did it but it was extremely rare.
David Ralph [16:44]
Okay, so stepping away from the sort of results based of your products. Obviously, I’m interested in how you got it going. So did you then go out and get sort of external funding? Did you do a start up? How did you actually increase it because it was quite rapid, rapid, and I’ve gone over and I’ve seen the amount of traffic that you’re getting. So you’ve done webinars, how did you actually do it?
Elephant Learning [17:09]
Well, so we stopped taking on new clients over elephant head software. We had some clients that were still on board and the revenue kind of stipend the outflow into developing the product, but for the most part, just came out of my savings account. And we counted it as a loan, a personal loan for me to the business to make this work so that as Alvarado came in and out of the business, at least the money I was putting in was somehow protected.
David Ralph [17:43]
So you must have really believed in this, but I imagine that was still scary time to actually take your own money was it?
Elephant Learning [17:52]
Well, so what I believed in was that if we made something that was effective, that there would be a market that would purchase it. We would figure out how to make it profitable afterwards.
David Ralph [18:04]
So you knew the problem was out there, you knew that you could provide the solution. You just had to build the thing. And then, as I say, build it, and they will come.
Elephant Learning [18:14]
We’ll select even as Albert was talking to me that day. And you got to remember, he approached me with just preschool and kindergarten games, and we had to build the rest from there. I was thinking, well, there’s this baby genius stuff that’s out there. And I mean, people buy that. So if I could just tap into at least that market, I should be able to have enough to to have a business that’s operating. And I will have effectively transitioned from a business where I’m basically selling human time to a business where I’m selling software, which in my mind at that time was the goal.
David Ralph [18:54]
Now on a monthly basis, about 9000 people are typing in the word elephant learning, which which surprised me when I did my research on you today? Because I thought, you know, they’re they’re not two words, but naturally you would expect to get traffic. So what was the first starting point to convert organic traffic towards your business?
Elephant Learning [19:14]
I we’ve spent zero time trying to convert organic traffic
in the last three years, to be honest with you.
David Ralph [19:25]
So how have you managed to get 9000 people a month searching for you?
Elephant Learning [19:29]
Well, to be honest with you, now that you’re telling me that I’m actually surprised I never went and saw how many people are searching elephant learning. SEO for me, has always been like, it never made any sense. And even as we were starting this business, and people were like, Oh, you got to be working on your SEO. I was like, you know, what if you could just get Google paid ads to work or if you could just get Facebook paid ads to work then we can Worry about the SEO later. What the way I think about Google, and what SEO is, is that SEO is trying to hack the Google algorithm to try to move your website higher into the search result. And the reality is, is that Google’s algorithms and the way Google is changing the algorithms and what Google’s trying to do is intended to make it so that when someone types in the search, type something into the search bar, and and and pops up, it’s actually relevant to what they were searching for. Yeah. So for me, it was always why don’t I just try to be relevant?
David Ralph [20:38]
And so what did you do blog posts, or did you just do sort of videos, you know, you must have done some kind of content delivery.
Elephant Learning [20:49]
Well, so we did at some point turn on blogs. What I found blogs were very useful for was actually leadership, meaning that we We’re able to get blog writers to either interview me or interview someone else and create a post out of it. Yeah. The post itself didn’t generate any money. It’s not like if we threw that out on our Facebook channel, that all of a sudden people would start clicking it and reading it. And it wasn’t that like, for example, that like, oh, all of a sudden, we’re ranking for math, or any of the other keywords out there. So when you’re seeing people search elephant learning, it literally means that they’ve heard of us or maybe someone’s talking about us, or it’s the branding that’s working, right. Because for someone to type the words elephant learning into the search bar, I mean, what could they be looking for?
David Ralph [21:42]
No, it is Yeah, well, exactly. That’s what surprised me because when I looked at it, I thought, Wow, I’ve done well on here. Now it’s it’s remarkably cheap bow elephant learning $35 a month, which is well about 23 pounds over here. And that membership includes up to three students as well. So we’re literally saying that families can go through on this.
Elephant Learning [22:05]
Yeah, yeah. And actually, we will increase the student limit. If you have more children. What we found was that parents would come in, they would put their older children into the system. And it makes sense, right? Because the oldest child, the parent knows might be behind. Yeah. But But if they had more than three children, they tended to leave out the younger children. And honestly, they’re the ones that see the most gains from the system. It’s not uncommon for us to see four and five year olds get as far as multiplication, division fractions and decimals, mainly because there’s no anxiety they’re already meaning that they haven’t yet incurred the not understanding. They haven’t developed any fear or anxiety towards mathematics. They don’t even really know that this is beyond their level. They are just playing the games and they’re just getting that far and so we do have testimonials where the parents writing, we’re watching Watching with jaws dropped as our four year old figure out where a fourth was on a line. And so what we said was let’s just let them have all their students in because if we can do that to a four year old Gosh, I mean, isn’t that isn’t that great a for that family but be
if we could get more reviews like that, that would be awesome too.
David Ralph [23:20]
Yeah, absolutely. So on a family playing, reading it all your children up to seven. So we’re looking at real fertile parents here that can bang out that many kids and still have the energy to sit there and do math with them.
Unknown Speaker [23:34]
I’ll tell you what, my attorneys got 11 children.
David Ralph [23:37]
I’ll tell you what, he he’s got time on this and I’d suck him and get another one. Love the 11 children. I used to my kids are grown up and I kind of don’t need this now. I used to dread this coming home from work and being told our best maps. So is it fun for the parent as well explain how the system actually works.
Elephant Learning [23:59]
Sure. Okay, so I think for the parent, the way I built the system was, you know, as Oliver was telling me the statistics, I started to imagine a tool that I personally would use to be able to teach my child who was on the way at the time. So now I got a three and a half year old. And I was just imagining like, well, if I wanted to make 100% sure that my student understood math to the level that I could put them in school, and he just be fine, but maybe better than fine, right? I mean, you got a little bit of a competitive spirit in me, if I could do that, and I could just make 100% sure that that’s what could happen. This is the system I would build. So the way it works is the student comes in, we’re able to evaluate them through a placement exam on what their starting level should be. And this is a very serious exam. But at the same time, we had to balance the idea that the student might feel like they’re being tested and we wanted to be able to avoid that. So within our systems, we can Call it the training game. So the child feels like they’re going through a training game. And the only thing that they need to know is that the skip button in our system means it’s too hard. So if you hit skip, our system will treat it the same as answering incorrectly. But then this way, there’s no frustration or stress around, Oh, I got to get this right. On the other side of the of that equation, so like as the student exits the placement exam, it’s seamless to the student, they go directly into learning. And the learning happens in the same way as the exam happens is we keep feeding puzzles that are exactly at the students level just based on how they came out of the placement exam. And what our systems continuously detecting, meaning that we will continue to adapt with them both up and down. So if they forget, we will go back. On the other side of that equation is the parent side and we tell the parent exactly what how we intend to teach it any particular subject, how the students doing in that subject, we even Give them the history so that for example, if you had a very young child, learning the numbers and you go into the history screen and you see that they’re struggling with the number five, for whatever reason, you could then just work with them that day on the number five. And beyond that, we actually give the parent advice on how they can work with their student outside of the system. So for example, if the students learning to count, we might say play board games, or if they’re learning to skip count, we might say play basketball and make each each basket worth two points, right? So they’re counting by twos and threes. And so we start to elicit the map that is out there in the world and get them to apply it with their children. So that so that you can make sure even outside of the system, the student is getting it and is able to use the language.
David Ralph [26:47]
So it sounds reasonably fun for the parents. So it’s something but they’re part of but they’re not sitting there like really going through it trying to get the kid to understand
Elephant Learning [27:00]
It’s mostly hands off. It’s mostly parenting by exception. And it’s taking away a lot of the stressful factors that would be involved like mainly the the application of patience, right? So like, when you’re working like my students now working on how many select, you have to hold up How many fingers and they have to count on you to get them to the next step. If I put them in the software, it’ll just keep doing that until he gets it and then I’ll move him on to the next step. And so you know, those, those that time that I would spend with him where maybe if they if he continued to get the wrong answer, I might start to get frustrated. The computer never gets frustrated, the computer will just keep doing this until he gets it.
David Ralph [27:43]
Let’s listen to the words from from Steve Jobs and we’ll be back with Dr. DJ. Of course,
Unknown Speaker [27:48]
it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards. 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path. And that will make all the difference.
David Ralph [28:22]
So when you look back and you connect your dots back to the early days, what could you have done differently or have the dots joined up perfectly for you?
Elephant Learning [28:34]
Well, I mean, I think the dots joined up the only way they could have and I mean, to be honest with you, when when I look at this project, and I look back at my life, it was almost as if everything was leading up to this. I mean when I was young, my mother used to get the math books and the reading books for the following year. And she would make me and my sister sit down and she would make us during the summer work on these things for the following year. And to some degree, I learned how to learn on my own. Meaning that like, I remember one year, I didn’t get into the Advanced Math course. And it would meet at the back of the room. This was like fourth grade. And I saw, what I did was I said, I’m going to be like, I missed it by a point, I’m going to sit in the back of the room. And I’m, I’m going to try to take that advanced course, which I found out just moved a lot faster and did more problems. So like, I just did that by reading the book by listening to what was happening in the back of the room. I mean, it’s just all of the experiences I’ve had I use at some point in this project to try to get that extra edge to be successful.
David Ralph [29:47]
Do you think that this is where you’re going to end up? Or is this just going to be the first step of other platforms tackling say physics and biology and all the kinds of things that people have to do
Elephant Learning [29:59]
so We did build the platform so that we can tackle more than just mathematics. Our plan is to cover through math through calculus. To do that, we would likely have to start to do a treatment of coding. So we also want to teach children how to code. We believe, as soon as we can get them enough algebra that they can understand that language, that it’s the exact same language that you use for coding. So we’ll be able to give that to them. Assuming that their understanding and right now they’re showing us that they understand. And beyond that, we might have to go back and do reading. At the same time. Our company is developing software internally. So the goal for this company wasn’t just can we build this product that is able to accomplish these amazing things with mathematics, but also can we only do that with 20 people and so we’re building software internally to augment people so that their jobs are easy. They’re more comfortable and, and the information they need is right at their fingertips. So that internal software at the same time, if we get it working properly could become a new product in the future.
David Ralph [31:14]
Well, good luck on that. And I’m sure you’ve got a passion, you’ve got the brains wide. Why not? It’s gonna come true for you, don’t you think?
Elephant Learning [31:23]
I’ve shown I’ve shown what we’re doing to numerous business people. And they’ve already said like, if you could put this in our company tomorrow, we’d want it. It’s not quite done yet. If I could just make it work for us and see my team working in it. And I already see them working better. Like if I could just see that then I mean, a I’d be happy but then be we would start paying to to really make it workable for other companies.
David Ralph [31:49]
Oh, great stuff. Great stuff. Really, really pleased for you? Well, this is the bit of the show that we’ve been leading up to what we called a sermon on the mic when we’re going to send you back in time to have a one on one with your youngest self. And if you could go back in time and speak to the young doctor, what kind of advice would you like to give him when I’m going to play the music? And when it fades out? Is your time to talk to him? This is the Sermon on the mic. With the
Unknown Speaker [32:21]
best bit of the show.
Elephant Learning [32:40]
Okay, well, if I were to go back and talk to my younger self, what I would tell him is that when I was younger, I really didn’t believe that you had much control over your future. And I would tell I would tell them that actually you can create your reality to be Anything that you want it to be? And, and I would kind of lay that out for him so that he could understand it. Because it took a long journey to try to get to the other side of that and be able to see that. Yeah, I mean, if you if you if you want to be a business owner, you can be a business owner, if you want to be a scientist, you can be a scientist, it’s just a matter of being able to sit down and apply and work towards that. And that it the the things that look like chance are actually less random than than they then they appear.
David Ralph [33:40]
Right advice. So Dr. Aditya, what’s the number one best way that our audience can connect with you and elephant learning?
Elephant Learning [33:49]
Sure, well, the best way to connect with elephant learning is to go to elephant learning calm, and then I am pretty active on LinkedIn. So if you want to connect with me, go ahead and Find me on LinkedIn. It’s just under a ditch in a graph, and I think it might even say, Doctor, I did Tina graph, and if you find me on there and connect will likely be connected.
David Ralph [34:11]
And one last question, obviously, this is a global show if there’s somebody in Australia, I know Max is kind of maps, but does it still apply to? does it all work for them? Or do they have to be like American based?
Elephant Learning [34:24]
Well, so everything we do is very general, very abstract. We didn’t try to go down into measurements, we didn’t try to go into currencies, we figured if we can get the student to be able to add or be able to work on the line, that you know, moving it to a concrete example is easy. And so we have parents in Australia, we have parents in UK, we have parents in Canada, India, anywhere where you’re speaking English or your students are learning in English. During this COVID thing, we opened up all of Europe, because we found out that actually kumaon teaches out there In English, so anyone that can’t get into the kumaon could use our software. And we’re seeing success all the way across, we get very few complaints where someone comes back and says that my student didn’t understand it. And typically when we get that for some reasons in the United States, so. So this works basically everywhere where English is spoken, and we’re working on internationalisation. So one day, we’ll be doing it in your native language, right stuff. Great stuff.
David Ralph [35:28]
Well, deep chat. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. joining up those dots. Please come back again when you’ve got more dots to join up. Because I do believe that by joining up the dots and connecting our past is always the best way to build our futures. Doctor, thank you so much.
Unknown Speaker [35:44]
Thank you, thank you for having me.
David Ralph [35:47]
So elephant learning that teaches maps if you’re interested in that, or any of these sort of other subjects like table fables, which is an amazing maps programme, that we had the The owner of the programme Rebecca, she was on the show back in the day just google tables tables, just come over to Join Up Dots but elephant learning, you can just go over there and take away the pain of teaching your kids max. It went on every single night for weeks. It felt like a lifetime. But he did pass and then we never have to look at it again. Until next time, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. We’ll see you again. Bye.
Unknown Speaker [36:31]
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Unknown Speaker [36:33]
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Unknown Speaker [36:36]
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Unknown Speaker [36:40]
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Unknown Speaker [36:46]
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Unknown Speaker [37:06]
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Unknown Speaker [37:21]
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Unknown Speaker [37:49]
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Marni Spicer [37:51]
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David Ralph [38:01]
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Outro [38:27]
That’s the end of Join Up Dots. You’ve heard the conversation. Now it’s time for you to start taking massive action. Create your life busy only life we’ll be back again real soon. Join Up Dots Join Up Dots Join Up Dots john the gods. john john joy