Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, the products they build in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today Kavita Ghai, co-founder and CEO of Nectir AI. Kavita, welcome to the show.
Kavitta Ghai: Hey Jake, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here today.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, I'm excited to have you. Um, just a little bit more on Kavita. She launched Nectir at UCSB, securing $6 million in VC funding to build the classroom of the future. Featured in TechCrunch and Fast Company, Nectir is transforming education with AI, personalizing learning for 80,000 students worldwide and growing. Um, before we jump in here, Kavita, and talk a little bit about your company, where are you joining us from today?
Kavitta Ghai: I am joining from Los Angeles. We are fully remote, so our team is all over the world, but me and my co-founder are based right here in LA.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Hundreds of AI startups are launching every month, battling to build their founding teams. As a leader, your job is to get results. When it comes to hiring, that's where it gets tough. So, you go out and you try a recruitment firm, but they don't understand your story. They're off target, and when they send you candidates, it's a waste of time. We believe you should never have your time wasted. That's why we launched Match Relevant, because your story is more than just an open role. It's your founder's journey, the problem you're solving, the product you're building, and why it matters. When we work with companies, we make sure we understand your whole story. So, we go out and do a search, we're on target, it's worth their time, they're interested, and more importantly, it's worth yours. And when it comes to hiring engineers, we work to make sure we get it right by deploying a team of seasoned CTOs that have built some of Silicon Valley's best companies. They can collaborate with you in the technical interviewing process. They can be a sounding board, or they can run it for you. When it comes to building teams, there's no time to waste. Let's make it count. If you have a role that needs to be filled, book a time with a hiring guide at matchrelevant.com and learn how we do it.
Very cool. Well, hopefully you didn't get too impacted with the fires there. We're not too far from where you were at and I know it was uh kind of a crazy scene, you know, a little over a month ago.
Kavitta Ghai: It was. It has definitely been a month of rebuilding and just being there for our community. It was tough, but I am born and raised California, so been through quite a few of these fires in my life. So, you know, we bounce back. We keep going.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: There you go. I like it. Um, well, we're going to talk about you and your company, but you know, oftentimes, you know, the DNA of who a startup founder is is kind of embedded when you're young and kind of go through some things, experiences, you grow, and maybe you're just inspired to be a, a doer and a leader and a builder when you're a young age. Walk us through your background. How did you start getting into just business in general and you know, where are you from originally that started you down the path of getting into technology?
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah, so very akin to the name of the podcast, I am raised in the Silicon Valley in Fremont. So, you know, right at the heart of watching this technological revolution over the last 20 years. And my family immigrated to California from India in the '80s and '90s. And so my dad has, you know, always been a small business entrepreneur, been in the tech industry, and so I feel like I was born into this world. And my dad was never, you know, in a position to go raise VC funding or anything like that. So I had no idea that this was even a way that companies could be built. But I remember growing up, I would sit under his desk and just listen to all the calls that he would take all day long. And it was around four or five where I started to have my own opinions and I would crawl out from under the desk after a call and say, "I don't think you should have done it that way. I think you could have gotten the deal if you did this."
And you know, what was great was instead of being like, "Why is this four or five-year-old trying to tell me how to do my business?" he just let me talk to him like I was an adult and took my feedback, took my advice and taught me, "You know, this is why I said this thing and this is why I didn't do this deal." And so I think having basically 20 years of experience just learning firsthand from seeing an entrepreneur in front of me is really what has allowed me to build this business as quickly as I have. And I didn't go to a business school in college. I've never had any formal business training, but I really, I thank my dad for everything that I know today because I had no idea I was absorbing as much as I did until I started my own company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's amazing. You never know what you're going to learn from just listening and and seeing, but you can apply it hopefully in the right ways as you go, get older and grow.
Kavitta Ghai: Exactly.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Um, you know, you've got your company today and we're going to dive in on that. Oftentimes something inspires you to solve a problem or you've gone through something and you go, "God, I wish there was a better way to do that," and then you create a solution. Walk us through a little bit about the inspiration behind what gave you the idea to want to be in education, to want to build in education, and quite frankly just to bring a solution that's in AI to bear, which is really popping up everywhere these days in terms of technology that's impacting our industries.
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah, absolutely. So to kind of take it back to the beginning, uh my co-founder Jordan and I started Nectir when we were undergrad students at UC Santa Barbara about seven years ago. And so for us it was really born out of the frustrations that we had with the classroom. And it's funny because I never thought that I would dedicate my life to education. And my friends ask me, "You know, I had no idea that you were this interested in education. I didn't know that you loved it this much." And I tell them it's, I'm not doing this because I love it. I'm doing it because I hated it. I hated my experience in every classroom that I was in. And it just never felt like it was built for me or my brain to be comfortable in. And then I got to college and I started paying $40,000 to be really uncomfortable. And that's when it finally became enough of a pain point for me that I said, "Either I'm going to drop out or I'm going to do something about it."
And so Nectir was really born from the frustrations that my co-founder and I had with our student experience, and realizing that if me and 26,000 other people at UCSB are paying $40,000 a year, why is it that we're still using technology that feels like it was built by someone who hasn't seen a classroom for the last 10 years? I just could not understand. If there's all of this incredible technology in every other part of our lives, we can send tweets from the fridge. Why is it that the classroom is still this 400-year-old model that we've never thought to improve or iterate upon? It just never made sense to me until I finally got to a point where I said, "If no one else is going to fix this, and this seems like such a no-brainer to me, why don't I be the one who goes and fixes it?"
And so initially how this all started was we approached UCSB and never thought we were going to start a company, but just wanted to know, "Can you answer that question for us of if everyone's paying this much money, explain to me why the technology is not where it should be?" And they very kindly sat us down and walked us through the logistical hell of adopting edtech tools and scaling them campus-wide. You know, you have three different stakeholders. You've got the administrator who buys the product, the teacher who's the gatekeeper of it, and then the student that's the end user. It's a really difficult business model to understand and a very difficult market to integrate yourself in and build that trust with administrators who have been in these positions for 20, 30 years. So once I understood the industry, I realized this is why it is so tough to build and scale edtech tools. And I think we've gotten really lucky by authentically utilizing who we are, our story of students who are trying to solve this problem for ourselves. It's something that administrators can really get behind and they trust us. And I think that's exactly why they've essentially given us the road map of exactly what to build that they would actually buy.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. I want to go back to something you mentioned. You talked about your brain wasn't built for this. Talk about your experience around education. For some people it really is easy to look at something, read something, you get it, you take a test, you get an A, you move on to the next test, and you know, it's great. For others, it's just a different experience. Walk us through that.
Kavitta Ghai: Absolutely. So, for me personally, I have autism and ADHD, so no classroom has ever felt like it was built for me and my brain to thrive in. I am not the kind of student that can sit there and do rote memorization. It is just not how my brain works. And I spent the first 18 years of my life prior to college believing that I was dumb and that my GPA and the grades that I was getting and the fact that I wasn't able to adapt to these classrooms meant that something was wrong with me. Not that my education should be delivered to me in a way that my brain understands. That never crossed my mind. I simply accepted that this is one-size-fits-all except for me. And then got to college and realized that that was far from the truth. There are so many students out there who have stories similar to me, and even the students that are neurotypical. Everyone's brain absorbs information in a different way.
And that's exactly why we've turned to AI, because it is the very first time in history that we can actually deliver a personalized education to every student. AI is able to figure out exactly how your brain works best, even if you don't know it yourself, and then adapt the content that these teachers have been building for decades, to be applicable to every single student and their individual brain. And we could never before expect teachers to do that on an individual basis for every single student. Already today, we expect teachers to be not just the instructor, but also your academic adviser, your mental health support, your career support. They have so many different jobs that they're taking on in the classroom, not to mention the grading and all of the busy work that they have to do. And finally, with AI, we're able to give them some of that time back to really focus on being facilitators of curiosity and allow the students to work with AI to personalize every part of their education. And I'm very, very excited that AI has allowed us to do this in a way that we could have never dreamed before.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's amazing. So, if you're a student and you're hearing this and you're thinking, "God, I so many times want to go up and ask a question or I want to wait till the end of the class or walk up and, you know, ask what we're supposed to be doing again, or any questions, without having to, you know, set an appointment, go see your teacher, try and flag down the TA." Is this a solution that helps a student basically give them like a personalized tutor for their course that they're in or like...
Kavitta Ghai: Exactly. Yes, that is a perfect way to describe it. So essentially, Nectir you can think of as AI infrastructure for schools. So we knew that these LLMs that keep emerging on the market, they're just going to get better and better. And rather than having schools be beholden to using one LLM, what they really need is the ability to take any LLM and train it on their proprietary data for each class and then create these assistants that they can provision at the course, department, or campus-wide level. So basically at the course level, a teacher should be able to create, like you're saying, an AI teaching assistant that's trained on the syllabus, the textbook, all of the assignments so that they know students are getting accurate information and it's not random generic information that you would get on ChatGPT that may not be applicable to your specific class.
And then what should happen ideally is the school should be able to keep creating these AI assistants. Maybe you have one that's a FAFSA adviser and that's deployed campus-wide. So, every student has access 24/7 to a financial aid adviser that's trained on all the FAFSA documents for your specific campus. Maybe it's a career support that the career center actually builds based on all the material that they have. What's incredible is these institutions have existed for hundreds of years and they have so much knowledge that's sitting in PDFs and Word documents and just all of this data that either you're expecting students to go one by one and read through, which simply isn't happening, or that data is sitting there and no one's accessing it.
So what AI is allowing them to do, and especially with Nectir AI, is take that proprietary data and use it with these models without sharing that data back with the model. That's the key part here. For any tool that a school licenses, it must be FERPA compliant. And FERPA is to education what HIPAA is to medicine. And so that's really the key factor here is if we want schools to be able to utilize these LLMs, we have to deliver it to them in a way that is FERPA compliant that they're actually able to adopt and scale campus-wide. And that's exactly what Nectir AI does. So essentially custom ChatGPT for every single class that you're in and every problem that you might face on campus that you can now access 24/7, that learns who you are over time and then gets better and better each time it responds to you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's really cool. What schools heard about you and were inspired to give you a shot, maybe invest? I mean, what's the, what's a marquee school you can share with us that's really been championing your effort in trying to bring technology to market that's going to be solving um problems for students today?
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah, the most exciting deal that we're working on right now is with the largest school system in the world, which is the California Community College system. So this is the largest AI pilot that is happening right now worldwide. And the California Community College system consists of 116 community colleges across California. These are some of the best community colleges in the world. And growing up in the Bay Area, I started taking classes at these community colleges when I was in middle school and high school. And so this is very near and dear to my heart to be able to work with this system. And what I'm really impressed with is the ability for the Chancellor's office and the administrators to say, "You know what, California is going to be the first mover. We're going to set the tone for the rest of the nation."
And so to date, we're doing this statewide pilot that, coupled with a research study, to not only put Nectir AI in all 116 schools, but also measure the efficacy. Is this actually improving the student outcomes, specifically the GPA, in the way that we need it to? And I think that's what the key difference is here. It's not just building the technology and saying, "Well, I hope it works. Good luck." It's actually going in and measuring and seeing, compared to the last time this class was taught without AI versus now that you have it, was there a statistically significant difference in the student GPA? And if yes, that means that we're building in the right direction. So everything that we build with them is tested. We know that it's actually working the way that it's supposed to.
And what's awesome is now that this is deployed statewide, it sets the tone for the rest of the nation that this is exactly how your education should be. And I think one of the really key parts that the California community colleges recognized is we're going to have a huge problem if we run into the issue of certain schools having AI while others don't. And if we only allow AI to be deployed first at the campuses that have the money and the funding for it, that means that we're creating even a wider wealth disparity. The students that really need it most are going to be the last to get it. And it's crucial that every single student who leaves the higher education system is prepared, is AI literate. Because 75% of Fortune 500 companies are actively using AI in almost every part of their company today. The students have to leave the system ready to go, trained on how to use AI, and ready to enter what is frankly a completely revolutionized workforce over the last few years that we've seen. So, I think that the California system has done an incredible job at recognizing that in order to create true equity and accessibility across the state of California, we've got to deploy this to all of our students at once.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, you brought up a good point about like where the future is and what companies are thinking about. We were at a VC event a few months ago and you know, it was a fireside chat with lots of innovators there specifically talking about AI and the impact in different industries. And the Fortune 500 across the board, top of mind for every CEO is what is AI going to do for our company? How do we deploy it? How do we train it? How do we afford it? And does it generate a benefit for us? New revenue streams, improve our client relations, uh reduce our customer support. There's a lot of areas where AI is going to impact companies. Um and that's the future of our employees, too. So, absolutely, you got to be aware of what it is, how it works at every level. And if you're starting at the education level, I think that's the greatest place to start, especially if you're a young student or even in college. Um...
Kavitta Ghai: Exactly.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Now, we've seen in industry that there's been evolutions of how we operate. For example, Slack came out a while back and that now today is I would say 80% of our engagement with our customers isn't through email. It's through Slack, a platform that you can message and get real time information back quickly and it just optimizes how you operate, improves your communication. What's the experience like for people that use your platform? For students that are logging in and using it and for the educators, like what's that UI look and feel like?
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah, that's a great question. So, when we first started building this product, we spent about six months in private beta with Stanford GSB, Boston University Questrom School of Business, and Los Angeles Pacific University. So, we chose three very distinctly different types of higher education institutions to basically have them pressure test it and break it. We wanted to make sure that this technology was not just effective in delivering AI safely, but assuming that the majority of people have not actually dived as deeply as, you know, our technical team has into AI tools, we've got to build something that if a teacher or a student has never even heard of ChatGPT, they should still be able to get into Nectir and figure out how to use it within 5 minutes.
I think that is one of the most critical pieces of building AI technology right now is you could build the most incredible product that anyone's ever seen. But if it is too high level for people to grasp, they're not going to use it. It's not going to be effectively utilized, especially at a campus where students have a full-time, you know, schedule of classes, teachers have even more than a full-time schedule of classes and work to do. Anything that you deliver to them needs to have an immediate benefit within the first 5 minutes that they can see and feel that makes them want to come back to it day after day because they understand that it's providing value to them and it's saving time for them.
So, one of the most important factors of us deploying this tool was making sure that the UI was so simple for people to navigate that, like I said, even if you have never even seen ChatGPT, you can get into it and immediately go start creating an assistant, upload all of the material that you want to it. And then we even let you select how much access it has to the model that it's using. So if GPT-4o is the model that the school selects to use, then you can go in and say, "You know, I want this assistant to have full access to GPT-4o plus the documents that I've uploaded." And when some, with some teachers, they actually just want it to be trained on their documents only. They don't want it to have access to the LLM. So then you set it to "document only" and it's only the syllabus, the assignments, the lectures, the textbooks for your class.
So, it's really allowing that customizability that then they can scale over time. So, a teacher can go and say, "You know, I'm not comfortable with AI. I'm scared that ChatGPT or GPT-4o has information that is not relevant to my class or that I don't want my students to see. So, I'm going to start with document-only knowledge." And then over time, you get comfortable with it. You see the analytics come in and you're able to increase the depth of the knowledge base or switch it to topic or general knowledge so it does have access to the LLM. It's really giving them the ability to get comfortable with AI over time.
And then what I think is the most critical part of the product is the analytics. You can use AI all day long the way that we do, but what I think is the most exciting part is what the AI is able to discover about you based on the conversations that you're having with it. So now rather than showing teachers the conversations that students have, that we want to keep private so that students feel like they have this safe space to connect with their AI assistants. But what it is doing on the backend is collecting the sentiment analysis of those conversations and then showing the teacher at a high level, "These were the sticky points this week. These were the parts of the conversations your students had that either they had to dive really deep into and that indicates that maybe they didn't know as much about it. This is something you might want to revisit in the next lecture."
And for the student, that's the exciting part, is we're now going to show that data to the student themselves. So the AI assistants can parse out "here's your strengths, weaknesses, areas of opportunity," and that allows the student to learn something about themselves that they may have never known. So I think for me personally, that's my favorite part of using tools like ChatGPT is I'll go in and say, "Tell me what you think about me based on all the conversations that we've had. What is something that you think I could improve on that I may not even know about?" And that's I think where we get to a completely new level of value in the classroom, where the more the students interact with the AI, the better knowledge they have about their own strengths and weaknesses and where they might need to work on or what class they might want to take next, or ultimately what jobs might be best applicable to their skill set.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really amazing. I guess you help with the counseling side of uh your education, too, where you might be midway through your career and school and maybe you do a, a change in your major or whatnot. No one's really there to help you as you get into it. It's just you're kind of on your own. So, I like this. It's like an AI agent to personalize how you go about your studies and what direction you might want to go, which might be a good opportunity to get a job in the future.
Kavitta Ghai: Totally. Um, it's your personalized learning partner.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Really, really amazing. Um, you know, you didn't get into AI when the AI buzz hit a couple years ago. You started building this company six years ago.
Kavitta Ghai: Mhm.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: When you started back then, was the vision to utilize AI at the level that you can today, or was it part of the ChatGPT phenomenon where it came out and everyone realized, "Oh, we can actually make this a little bit more easy to use today and and not so complex um all the way around."
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah. So, when we started Nectir six, seven years ago, it was actually a completely different product. Same problem that we were trying to solve of how do we deliver 24/7 student support. But at the time there was no AI technology that we could use for that, and so I had actually used Slack in one of my classes and I found that it was incredible for solving that problem of getting help right away rather than waiting a day or two to get an email response from a TA or professor. Our instructor said, "I'm going to put all of you guys in a Slack channel and you're going to ask and answer each other's questions. And if you answer someone else's question really well, I'll give you extra credit for it because that lets me know that you understand the material deeply enough that you can turn around and teach it to the person next to you."
And so it created this ecosystem within the classroom where 24/7 there was a place where you could go and see other questions and answers, but also get the help that you need. And I walked away from that class with the highest grade that I got in college and more friends than I had ever made before. And I still have the network from that class today. And I was like a dog with a bone. I was like, "That was it. If you can give me Slack in all of my classes, this solves my problem." So that was actually where we had, you know, first approached UCSB and said, "Why can't you put Slack in all of our classes? Because that worked beautifully." And they explained how difficult it would be to put a separate Slack workspace in 1,500 classes every quarter, teach professors who are on average 55 how to use an enterprise-level tool that they likely haven't used before. And then on top of that, pay an enterprise-level cost for Slack for 26,000 students. It just wasn't feasible.
And we heard it. We totally got it. But then we said, "What if we could build Slack for schools? What if we could build the same type of infrastructure, but it actually integrates with the LMS, the technology that you're using today. It's scalable across an entire campus. It's affordable for you. It has the structure that's similar to how our classes are structured and our major is structured." And we spent two years with UCSB building that vision. And they became our very first customer. And it was actually a week before COVID remote instruction started. It was February of 2020. And they came to us and said, "We're about to take our entire campus online. And we'd like Nectir to be how we do that. We'd like it to be the main communication structure for the entire campus throughout remote instruction."
And when a customer comes knocking, you don't say no. And so we, it was just my co-founder and I at that point, and it was the most hectic week of our lives. But we got some DevOps engineers from Upwork. We made it sound enough that we could get 20,000 students onboarded basically overnight and we did it. And that sort of set us on this trajectory of being able to go and raise our pre-seed round and continue to grow out the company and keep selling this to other schools.
And around 2022, '23 we built in our first AI feature which was called Soma, and it was an AI teaching assistant. So we placed this AI teaching assistant inside every single one of these class channels and we told instructors you can go and upload your syllabus, your assignments, your textbook, and it's going to be this document-only basically like RAG, where students could go and ask a question to Soma 24/7 and it would answer based on that class documentation. And teachers and students loved this. It was exactly what Nectir AI is today, but at the smallest version.
And around that same time, Stanford GSB reached out and said, "We love this feature, but can you build us an entire platform that allows us to take any LLM, train it with our own data, and maybe it's not a teaching assistant, maybe it's a salary negotiation partner, maybe it's a roleplay partner, maybe it's a mental health advisor, but we need to be able to customize AI to our own data and place it exactly where we need to inside of our technology." And we said, "That sounds like a great idea. That is awesome." And that started this Nectir AI journey. And I think it's the most organic and the best way to have started it because it was the customer pulling the product out of our hands. You know, they came to us and said, "I love what you're building here. I want more of this." And I think that was the best indication of early product-market fit for this specific AI tool that we've built today. So, a little different than I think most pivots happen because it wasn't that we decided "this product isn't working, let's make a new one." But more so, our customers came to us and said, "This specific feature is exactly where the value is." And that allowed us to build an entire platform just off of that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's great when you don't have to build modules and features and hope that the market likes it, when the customer is really dictating what it is that you can help solve, and you're able to do it and hit the target out of the gate. Really, really cool. Um, you know, the company is uh uh distributed, right? You have people all over the world that are helping work for you and helping build this. Um what's the, what's the business model and um, walk us through that a little bit for all the other universities out there listening.
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah, absolutely. So, we love to go in and sell directly to the admin and the staff. Those are the folks that have the ability to disseminate a product across the entire campus. And like we said, we know that, you know, some edtech tools start in the classroom and they grow very organically across the campus. But I strongly believe that AI adds so much value to the classroom that you really should have it in every class upfront at once. Because if you have one student who's paying the exact same as a student next to them, but their friend has AI in all their classes and they don't, that's a completely different value that they're getting for that same price tag. And that just doesn't feel fair to me from a student perspective. I'd be really upset about that.
So that's why we like to go and sell directly right at the top and allow it to scale across the campus really quickly and easily. And we've built our team to be able to know how to do that really effectively for higher education. And so we go in at a price point per student, really flexible. We'll start at $10 per student per month when we're going into, you know, just a department. And then as the economies of scale kick in, that comes down quite a bit. And so we're going in and pricing it for the student. And you're only paying for those student seats. And all of your staff, faculty, and admin seats are completely free. So we have schools that have already started to create AI assistants that are for internal use. It's for onboarding their staff. It's for, you know, maybe the president himself wants his own personal assistant. Absolutely. You can build that. But you pay for the students and all of the rest of the seats on the campus are free.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. Um, you know, there's infrastructure costs to AI. We hear about it all the time. And you hear about companies like DeepSeek that's, you know, bringing down the cost with new algorithms and how they, you know, train the models and whatnot. As your company scales and grows, is, does the infrastructure cost scale and grow with that as well?
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah. You know, I think that's what I'm really excited about with seeing all the competition amongst the models is it's just going to continue to bring the cost lower and lower for companies like mine who are utilizing those models. And so we get to then pass on those cost savings to the school. So we've known from the start that this is probably the most expensive that Nectir AI is going to be and it's just going to continue to come down and down in price. And as we've deployed to, you know, entire systems like the CCC, we've been able to really significantly discount that initial price point and make AI truly accessible to higher education in a time where, you know, we don't know what's going to happen to the education system. We don't know where the budget cuts are going to come from.
And so I think that you have this double-sided issue of we don't know what the future of the education system in the US looks like. But at the same time, we know that AI is here to stay and that we need to get students AI literate right now. We don't have time to wait a year or two. We've got to keep one, the US ahead of the rest of the world, and two, we've got to make sure that everyone who's entering this now AI-driven workforce knows how to utilize it properly. So I think that's up to us, companies like us that are building AI edtech products, to figure out how do we deploy this in an affordable way while we're still hitting our margins that VCs love to see, but that schools can actually afford this even at the community college level.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. What's the biggest challenge as you're building your company today?
Kavitta Ghai: That's a good question. I think the biggest challenge is finding talent, honestly. And it's interesting because I had had so many other founders tell me that this was going to be the hardest part of the job. And you don't realize it until you're actually in it. But it's not that there is a lack of talent out there. I think it's that we just still haven't figured out the right way to bring talent to the right companies. I think there's a huge opportunity for someone to come in and figure out a better recruiting system, especially for early startups. I rely so heavily on warm intros from my VCs, from my other founder friends, and that's how we've hired some truly incredible people from across the globe. But I wish that there was a way for me to find more talented people out there who care as deeply as I do about fixing the education system and delivering the classroom of the future that teachers and students deserve. I know those folks are out there and that's exactly why I come on podcasts like this to hope that they hear me and reach out and find us. But that is definitely the most difficult part. You just, you need so much talent and specifically at this stage folks that are self-starters, people that could one day be founders themselves. I think with the first 10, 20 hires of a startup, those are the people that you're looking for.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a big challenge for, I mean we work with lots of AI companies. They're all battling to build their founding teams, all looking for similar talent levels. And yeah, I think a lot of it at, at some point comes down to the mission and vision of the company founders themselves too, you know, do people get excited? Can they get behind what you're building, you know, effectively will change the world, you know? So um I think the bigger the vision that's, that actually is helping goes a long way and if people have the skills they will find the company. We've, we've seen this happen a lot. So um there is, you know, the bigger companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and Google and all the big AI focused companies that are you know, hiring very fast and across all sectors and really even digging into like the startups that are recently funded to, to look for talent. So you have to I think keep the lines of communication open with your own staff so you keep them and make sure that they are treated well, at the same time be able to share your vision. And you know, we love helping companies like yourselves share your message on podcasts like this too where you know, you might not find them in in California, but you know, someone might reach out to you that's in Brazil or South America, different parts of Argentina, or could be here, you know, in California, too. All over the world.
Kavitta Ghai: Exactly. And I think that's the beauty of building a remote company is the ability to bring in that talent from around the world. I mean, half of our team is in Brazil today and it's incredible. I love that we can find people from around the world who deeply care about this because this is a problem that affects every single human.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, um in a world where AI companies are popping up every day like what we just talked about, how does Nectir not only differentiate itself but create a category defining impact in education?
Kavitta Ghai: That's a great question. I think that in a time where you don't even have to be a coder to be able to build your own app and technology is really been commoditized, companies have to find something other than their product that differentiates them and creates a moat. And for us, what we found to be the best way to do that is through building the brand and just being the best storytellers that we possibly can. We have spent the last 5 years working really hard to build a community, specifically on LinkedIn because we found that's where our target audience was. That's where our buyers and purchasing deciders were. And so figure out where your customers are and evangelize that community as fast as possible.
And I think it's really critical to have a CEO that can go do podcasts and panels and conferences and go and share the story, because when you go tell this story, and the better the story is and your ability to tell it is, that's what's going to authentically bring people to the table. And that's both customers and talent for your team. And so now that we've, you know, been building this community for years, anything that we build, we have administrators and staff and teachers from around the nation who will buy that because they are part of this community. They are loyal to us. They love the Nectir story. They believe that this is the team that is going to deliver the classroom of the future. So once you can really establish a very loyal customer base and community around your product, I truly believe that is the best moat that you can have because it doesn't matter what the technology is or if someone else develops the exact same thing that you do, your community is going to stand by you because they believe in what you're building and the team that's building it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, it's, it's great. You know, you, you started your company at uh, for a lot of people out there, at a young age, you know, at 21 at UCSB. You had this idea, you went out and you got funding and you know, you built this from the ground up. If you, if you were to go back and mentor yourself and say, you know, what are the three big lessons that you would drill into your head that you would now know in your next company to build or for people listening, what would those be?
Kavitta Ghai: I love that question. The first thing that comes to mind is "perfect is the enemy of done." Just ship it as quickly as you possibly can. If you have an idea, find some duct tape way of putting together something that could validate that idea and that market and go show it to people. I tell young founders all the time, everything that you want is on the other side of your fear of embarrassment. If you can get past the fear of "this is a shitty product, people are going to hate it. What are they going to think of me?" Everything that you want lies on the other side of that. I truly believe that the moment that I got over my fear of making mistakes and trying to ship something that was perfect was when movement really started to happen and you build that momentum because your customers will tell you exactly what they hate and love about the product. And you need them to do that and it's actually so helpful to have them tear it apart and tell you exactly what's wrong with it. You're not going to know that until you put it out there. And the sooner you do, the better it is. So, that's definitely the first thing is get out your product as quick as you can and go talk to as many people as you can about this idea and allow them to give you feedback on it.
The next thing would be start building your network as soon as you can because it is so true that your network is your net worth. The only way that I was able to break into the VC funding space was through building those connections very early on. I don't come from a wealthy family that was connected. I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I didn't, wasn't in a business school. There was no business school at UCSB. So, I had to go find VCs. And that takes a lot of effort and it takes time to build those relationships. We built a relationship with our first lead investor for two entire years before they put in their first check. And I think for young founders, that's the best way to do it because the VCs will tell you exactly what you need to do to put your company in a position to be VC fundable. They give you the exact milestones to hit: "Hey, if you reach, you know, get your first customer, get a five figure deal, we'll put the first check in." That's the metric that you need to know in order to be able to have that milestone to get to. So be okay with the fact that you might need to bootstrap for a little bit to be able to prove that idea. And that's exactly why, like I said in point one, get it out there as soon as possible because the faster you get it out there and validate it and get your first customer, the sooner you can go talk to VCs and have something to show them and figure out what is it going to take to get me to that milestone of my first funding.
Last but not least, my favorite piece of advice that my dad has ever given me is that luck is when opportunity meets preparation. I used to love when we first started this company, I would always listen to the How I Built This podcast and Guy Raz at the end, he asked all the founders how much of this was luck and how much of it was hard work. And I always asked myself that question throughout the years of, you know, one day if I'm on that podcast, what would my answer be? And I've realized that they're one and the same. The work that you put in, even if you don't see those opportunities coming, you have to believe that they will and stay true to what your vision is, no matter what the signals are. Because one day that preparation is going to coincide with that opportunity and it's going to feel like luck, but it's not. It's because you put yourself in a position to be able to harness that opportunity to the fullest. So, you got to be in a position to be ready to go at any given point. And every major opportunity that we've ever had in the last seven years has happened because I was prepared for it. I was expecting it. I knew maybe it takes a year or two, maybe it takes five, but we're going to win at some point and I'm going to be ready for that day when it comes.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. I love that. So much wisdom for a young entrepreneur. I love what you're, what you're saying and a lot of those things are actually stuff that we actually use ourselves and I, it does really make a lot of sense. You know, um, as your company has grown you've also grown. So you know, give us a little breakthrough of you as a leader that you have gone through over the last six years that you're a different leader today.
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah. You know, when people ask me about leadership and and how it's evolved for me over time, I think the most important factor is how I have evolved and treated myself over this time. Because I truly believe that your business is only as healthy as you are. And whether you realize it or not, the way that you treat yourself sets a precedent for everyone in your team and how they will show up to work each day, how they will treat themselves and see themselves as part of this company, and ultimately the leader that they will become for the team that they hire. And so it's tough because it puts a pretty big burden on whoever the leaders are to really take care of themselves and be as healthy as possible. If I think about it from the perspective of how I treat myself, both my mental and physical and emotional health is going to be exactly how my team treats themselves. That's a really big burden to carry, but at the same time, it actually makes it so much easier to take care of myself because it's not just for my own sake. It's for something much larger than me.
And so I think that the way that my leadership has evolved over the, the last few years and gotten to a point that I'm really proud of is because rather than trying to focus on how my team or the outside world perceives me, I've focused entirely on how I perceive myself. Am I emotionally and mentally stable and happy and in the right mindset to build a billion-dollar business and change the world? And if not, what do I need to do to get there? And also, while building a startup that is an incredibly taxing job, am I taking care of my physical body? Because if I'm not, my team is going to know, not notice that. And whether they realize it or not, they're going to start treating themselves and their body in that same way. And I never want anyone on my team to feel like what they're doing is more important than their physical health. It's not. Because maybe you can pull an all nighter a few days, but if you make these bad habits into your lifestyle, it will eventually affect the company in a really detrimental way. We need our entire team to be healthy and ready to go every day and in the best mindset possible if we're going to go change the world at scale. We are the role models for the world that we want to build. And so it starts with us. And I think that that's my biggest piece of advice to CEOs and founders out there. Take care of yourself to the fullest of your ability and invest a lot of time, energy, and money into your mental and physical health because it will reflect in your business.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. They say oftentimes the chokehold on a company is the leader themselves. You know, they aren't able to scale themselves, de- delegate at the level they need to manage, lead. Um, so you do have to look at yourself physically, mentally, emotionally. Um you know, we, we internally at our company talk a lot about, you know, what is the story we're telling ourselves every day individually? You know, is this something that I could do? Can I solve this problem? Am I the right person to engage with this customer? Uh whatever story you're telling yourself, whether, whether it's right or wrong, is true. So if you had, you know, issues in your past that keep coming back, you know, your state of mind is impacted. So we spend a lot of time on what are you telling yourself when you're looking at an opportunity that could be a success or a failure? And then what's your state of mind like? And that state of mind is something that you can actually change. You physically can change your state of mind through um you know, biochemistry and movement and you know, you hear a lot of times people go for a walk and these ideas come to them or they take a shower, you know, your state of mind's in a different space and all of a sudden you're open to ideas. And so we, we have a framework we use a lot which is, if you're going through a challenge, where's your state of mind at? What story are you telling yourself? Start thinking about that. Do a quick exercise to change your state of mind and then tell yourself the story that is, is, is real. And um I think it really helps as leaders to be able to have those tools absolutely that you can use, but also share with your team so they can also use. And yes, it's really made a big impact for us and for a lot of the clients we work with.
Um, in terms of your 2025, we're already two months into it. What are you excited about with the company, with the product?
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah, I am super excited to get this fully deployed across the state of California through the California Community College system because we're already starting to get traction from other state leaders who want to do the exact same thing for their systems. And to see how quickly the education system is willing to move for the first time is incredible. Anyone who's in edtech knows the sales cycles are long and tedious. These are 9 to 12 month sales cycles and you're going through so much work to convince these schools that these are tools that they need to adopt. But with AI, we've seen this shift across the entire education system where it's not just the faculty and students, it's the staff and the admin and the purchasing deciders specifically who are realizing AI is really here to stay and this is something that we need to integrate into our classrooms as soon as we can. And so I am thrilled because I believe that this change and this education revolution is coming much sooner than we would have expected.
And I think it truly does start with education. Every major innovation can be traced back to the classroom. That's where it starts. And if we can incentivize more Nectirs to be born out of more campuses, for students to have the support and the education they need to decide, "I'm going to pick a problem in the world and go solve it." That to me means that we have truly reached success. I believe that entrepreneurship is something that's going to be incredibly common and widespread and very, very soon. And I think that college is the best time to start a company. It's when you have the least to lose. You're already a broke college student, so it doesn't even feel that different to become a broke startup founder. And it's truly the time when you have the most energy to spend. And so I am very excited for this technology to give students the support and the freedom to be able to choose an entirely different future than what was afforded to us before.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well, I'm excited to see what the future holds for you and Nectir as well. If anyone wants to find you or find Nectir, where do they go?
Kavitta Ghai: Yeah, I would love for you to come find me on LinkedIn. You can come see our Nectir community there and everything that we post, podcasts, panels, webinars with other folks and other uh schools that we work with. It's really interesting to see how teachers are using Nectir AI today. LinkedIn is definitely the best place to find us, but please also come visit us at nectir.io. That's n-e-c-t-i-r.io and you can see everything that we're building.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. Well, Kavita, I want to thank you for coming in and sharing your story. Uh and for all our listeners for listening, it means a lot to me you spent your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, Kavita, the world, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.
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