The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.
At the beginning of this year, a statistic about the most searched jobs on Google went viral. The surprising part is that none of the top 20 is a job related to science. This is partly due to the low exposure children and teenagers have to these professions, especially in Latin America.
To talk about this topic, I invited Komal Dadlani, CEO and cofounder of Lab4U, a technology company that turns smartphones into science labs, using the phone’s sensors to run experiments and let students learn science in a practical and accessible way.
To date, Lab4U has been used by more than 100,000 students in countries such as Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and the United States.
We talked about the best way to teach science, the most common problems in doing so, and how well or poorly we teach science in Latin America.
If you are passionate about science and education, you will love this interview.
Youtube Timestamps*
[1:20] - Intro to Education and Science
- How did Komal get into the fascinating world of startups?
She has spent more than 10 years working at the intersection of science and education.
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What are the most striking problems she has found in science teaching in schools that keep her motivated to build a company in that sector?
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What is the best way to teach science? What does pedagogy say about this?
Few people study mathematics or science, and that affects the entrepreneurial or technical talent that eventually filters into the startup ecosystem. Many companies face this: they suffer acquisition costs because so few people are willing to go into a programming career.
- Komal told us the percentage of people who study these careers, and the market need.
The problems of science teaching are not particular to Latin America. They also happen in the US, India, and China. What does seem specific to Latin America is the very small number of people entering these STEM careers.
- Is this a problem particular to Latin America? How well or poorly are we doing compared with other countries?
[13:59] - Product Market Fit
- Komal told us about their first sales to schools and the objections they received. What did the first schools they approached tell them?
She mentioned the teachers from Enseña Chile as the innovators on the technology adoption curve.
- How did she identify them, and how do you decide when to listen to and focus on early adopter customers, versus potential customers who are not?
Eventually they moved away from their early adopters and started going to public schools.
- How has Lab4U’s product evolved from focusing on private schools to public schools?
Komal said earlier that, at the beginning, she started looking at the metrics and realized that students were not using the product, but the teachers gave her positive feedback.
Schools are a complicated customer because they have multiple “stakeholders”.
- How do you know whether your product is really moving toward Product Market Fit?
[30:32] - Go to Market
Sometimes founders in Edtech come in with a very “idealistic” view of how education should be. Even if that view is correct, it is very hard to understand the inner workings of the problems that teachers and administrators face in a school.
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What did Komal learn about navigating and empathizing with these multiple “stakeholders” when selling her product?
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What did Komal learn on the personal side, and about how to empathize with decision makers, beyond the methodological side of qualifying her leads and potential customers?
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Why did she decide not to quit?
[38:21] - Rapid-Fire Questions
- If she were to start a company again, what would be the main piece of advice she would give herself?
- How is artificial intelligence going to transform her business?
- How is her team preparing to adopt artificial intelligence?
- What would she like to change about the startup world in Latin America?
Episode Mentions
You can find Komal on LinkedIn
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Follow Enzo Cavalie on X: @enzocavalie.