The Piazza Story!
The skewed sex ratio at IIT-Kanpur finally lead to something good and paved the path for a very innovative product, Piazza!
Piazza is an online question and answer platform founded by an IITK alumnus, Pooja Sankar that facilitates interactions between students, TAs (teaching assistants) and instructors in an efficient and intuitive manner. It’s a website where a professor creates an online classroom where the TAs and students join in. The students can discuss with the whole classroom when they are stuck on their homework, take help from the instructors and TAs at any point of time. The instructors can make course announcements and can judge where the students are facing difficulties in the course. Piazza is now a multi-million dollar company, recognized worldwide for its services and is used by majority of the students of Stanford Universities, UC Berkeley, MIT, Cornell, UIUC, GaTech and many more top universities. Even the professors of IIT-Kanpur use it for online discussions!
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‘Founder/CEO/Den Mother’, Pooja Sankar[/caption]
As interesting the concept is, more amusing is its origin! Pooja Sankar was a computer science undergrad at IIT-Kanpur and one of the 3 girls among a class of 50. As in every other course, professor would give them programming assignments, intending for them to learn programming basics. Night-outs to complete assignments were common in her time too… But this was the least of her problems. As she describes herself, “I’d sit in a corner of the computer lab, too shy to ask the guys in my class. They’d all talk to one another, ask each other questions, and learn a lot by working together. I missed out on this learning. What was worse was I wouldn’t even get to the core of the learning that the professors intended for us since I was stuck on a nuance and couldn’t complete the assignment.”
She later went on to do Masters in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, worked in big-shot firms like Oracle, Facebook as a software developer and later joined a master’s course in Business in Stanford University.
But what inspired her was the entrepreneurship class at Stanford which illuminated her about the entrepreneurs that World has seen and learnt that if you look at a problem you are really passionate about; it’s very possible to go and try to solve it.
The problems she faced as an undergraduate at IIT came afresh, but now the way out was clear. That’s how emerged the idea of ‘Piazza’, a powerful platform that would enable student to feel free and provide the instructor with tools to encourage learning.
The journey wasn’t an easy one for the founder too. She had to be cautious in choosing her team. She designed the prototype herself and pitched it to a professor in Stanford who was impressed by the idea and decided to use it for his course. This was the birth of Piazza. She hired a designer and worked together to improve Piazza. They travelled to more universities, went door to door at Professors offices, gave them demos and it was very well appreciated.
Founded in 2009, Piazza expanded rapidly with backing from the likes of VCs like Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners to name a few.
Piazza now has a team of about 13 engineers and designers, working meticulously to improve this new form of education and with the success it has received so far, this is the future of classrooms!
Written By: Bhuvesh Kumar
Edited By: Gaurav Doshi
