Pinakulo aims to upskill the students of India with 21st century skills

Pinakulo is a one of it’s kind Ed-Tech organization working to help students learn the skills that really count. Pinakulo’s carefully planned mentoring and educational programs are a product of the team’s experience of working with thousands of students from across the country.

Pinakulo, provides every student the 21st century skills that will lead them from being a dreamer to being an achiever.

The Founding Team

A team of three came together to start up Pinakulo after having experienced that students everywhere lack the real world 21st century skills, which in turns ends up in students having compromised careers.

Arushi Kulshreshth( Founder & CEO)– She has been a Microsoft Student Partner, worked with Adobe, has been an acclaimed public speaker and worked in the field of education both in and outside India to ultimately realize that making a contribution in the field of education is her real calling.

Akshat Bahety(Co-founder & CTO)– He happens to be an exceptional coder and public speaker alike. He solely represented India at The Business Today International Conference at Grand Hyatt New York in 2018, and he cracked Google Summer of Code. He was invited to share a panel discussion alongside Mala Sharma, Vice President Adobe recently at a national symposium.

Abhishree Kulshreshth( Co-founder & COO) – A change-maker in her rightful capacity who has aggressively worked to eradicate poverty and hunger. She has distributed 75,000+ meals to the underprivileged. She has been actively involved in spreading education about sustainable development goals and was working this January with University of Patras, Greece to enable cross cultural understanding for Kindergarten students of the city.

What is the story behind starting Pinakulo?

We started Pinakulo with a vision in mind to help the students of India to upskill themselves.The current education system isn’t capable enough to build students for the 21st Century. Honestly we had no money to start, but the vision to make a real difference in the lives of the students in terms of their skill upliftment made us start and do whatever we could, from wherever possible. We started with taking seminars and classes to teach students what we felt was lacking for them. Eventually we were noticed and a school wanted to partner with us to teach their students all these skills. We started organizing different educational conferences, went on to collaborate with biggest companies to help the students understand what does the corporate exactly look for in students. On a massive demand by these students to get systematic knowledge on the 21st century real world skills, we launched our course “GenZ” with the goal to provide both hard and soft skills development in one single course of a duration of 3 months.

What do you think are your accomplishments so far?

– ​We were runners up at Global Student Entrepreneur Awards 2020 for our zone.
– We have been given incubation by the state government.
– We have collaborated with the biggest brands like Microsoft, LinkedIn and Adobe to provide the very best resources to students to help them build their dreams.

 What was the source of your initial funding for Pinakulo?

o We bootstrapped the startup, by using our educational conferences as a way to get some early profits to pool them in to start Pinakulo. Till date we have always had a positive bottom line , as we ensure to spend on the most essential stuff until you make profit from it.

What is your mission, and do you see yourself continuing with this effort even after graduating?

Pinakulo is a very close to our heart as we have been able to impact a lot of people and been able to generate a decent traction in a very less time, we want to expand it across the country in the coming years and are currently working on the same and are actively looking for the right Investors to help us to take it to the next level.

Who are your major customers?

o Our current focus is on helping students up-skill themselves right from School to Undergraduate, as our education system lacks majorly in building a skillset in the most important years of a student life and it’s highly important that these students get the right skillset building. We plan to extend our courses to middle school students also (6th – 8th Grade) in the next year.

Who all have been influential in this journey?

Our journey has been highly based on making an impact.As student leaders in our community, we always wanted to make a product that surely adds value to our customer. Students are often misled and asked to pay thousands of dollars over a normal learning experience. We tried to ensure that we always give the best education possible in the most affordable way possible and we largely give credit for this to Ritesh Agarwal,Founder of OYO. The way he revolutionized the hospitality industry by keeping customers first has always been a role model. And a book that we keep close to our heart is Zero to One by Peter Thiel. If anyone wants to build a startup they should read this before anything else.

What are some of the challenges you see in being a student entrepreneur?

The only challenge that you have is building a trust at the end when you are trying to run a business in a place where people are 10x times experienced than you, and are experts in their field. Trusting a college student is difficult but that’s just the start. It’s the same with investors and a lot of other people that we have come across who will say that you yourself are learning right now, how can you expect to teach others. Well, we believe that is our USP. Then there are obviously times when life brilliantly clashes exams and all the important work and we find ourselves crazily juggling between exams and our dreams(startup work)

Advantages?
o Well less of course , but things are changing. We have more mentors ready to assist us and put us in the right direction. And you learn a lot from these people making your experience as an Entrepreneur more fulfilling.

How much time do you and your team spend working on your company?

On a daily basis pre-covid we would work long nights 9 – 11 Hours every day given that we have to brainstorm a lot and it takes time we try to create new things on the fly and implement them in less than a weeks time and people always ask how did you come up with this and the answer is that it’s simply because we put in the time.

Do you see academics getting affected?

Some but not a lot, we have always been able to manage our academics with some support from our friends and teachers to help us out with notes and some extra office hours when needed.

What is the one thing that keeps you going?

The ability to build an impact and a legacy. We are passionately focused on being the largest EdTech firm in the country in the next 2 Years and the largest in World in the next 5 years. When you imagine an impact of the level of every kid being able to afford our courses and make better decisions, better life for them and their families, you get the driving force. Our courses are barely priced at $50-$60 right now and we are able to provide a personal mentor to each student right now and exclusive live classes to each and every student. Personal mentorship helps students jump 2 – 3 folds in the course and understand themselves better and we won’t stop until we do this for at least a 1 Billion Students.

What are some things you wish you knew a year (or two) ago?

o We have learnt the following things that we did not know previously:

• Entrepreneurship is not a day’s dream to achieve. Every time you start off thinking something would just fall in place for you, more often than not, it does not come through the way you thought and that way entrepreneurship is a roller coaster journey full of crazy experiences, which, to say the very least are all worth it. Every day of being an entrepreneur teaches you more than any textbook would have taught you.
• It is never easy initially to be taken seriously as a startup, and especially if you are a student. Many mediocre minds assume that if it’s a team of students that have come up with this, then maybe they are taking it as a hobby and are not really in it for the long haul. Obviously then it takes proof of concept and time for you to be taken seriously.

What are some of the tools or resources that have helped you? (Apps, websites, anything)

Some tools that should be part of every startup toolkit are Slack- We don’t use WhatsApp or anything else for work chat and this keeps things simple and quick , a mini cloud server that you can deploy applications easily on (AWS or Azure), Whimsical and Canva are somethings that we use for internal brainstorming.

How do you prioritize your activities in a day/ week?

We have a week-based project system, where we plan our calendars every week , we plan a project for a week and go forward with every day trying to get close to it. So for example, if it’s about getting a new course made on Monday we would brainstorm and chalk out all ideas, on Tuesday this is followed with huge research and finally we sit down again on Wednesday to plan a final structure, then on Thursday and Friday we’ll try to build a lesson plan as they need to be short and interesting if we are not able to explain a topic basics in 3 minutes we plan that lesson again and again after this by Saturday we send it down to our team for review and on Sunday the educators start with recording this and updating the lesson plans.

This helps keep things smooth and ensures that we work on one new thing every week. But this is just 20% of what we would do per day. There are still other operations that need to be done on a daily basis like meetings to be curated and a lot of other things from managing websites/sales/operations/meetings with principals. It is basically but we love each day of it because it is all a part of this beautiful journey we have embarked on.

Anything else you would like us to know about you or your organization?

Keep it fun and light as a student entrepreneur. You are working on college and your startup and probably you’ll face more rejections than others but believe in yourself more than anyone else will and in the end you’ll succeed. It may not work right away but hang in there and you’ll pull through.