He was a civil servant, so he was very socially minded. He wanted me to grow up to do good, not just to do well, and was my first teacher. He grew up during the freedom movement in India. Being part of the process of nation building and reducing inequality was something very dear to his heart.

All the women I worked with agreed that it was vital to give their children good opportunities. But there were not a lot of scalable models that had been set up so far.

In India, more than half of children start first grade without knowing a single letter or number. 85% of brain development actually happens before the age of six. That’s why if you don't teach children by that age, it becomes harder to do so later in life. Our goal is to prepare 35 million children in India for school by the age of six.

In India, 70% of households, even low-income households, now have smartphones. And that number is growing. When we started Rocket, we asked parents and teachers, "What apps do you use regularly?" We found that there are three or four apps that are on every phone: YouTube, WhatsApp, Google, and sometimes Facebook. That's why we've come to WhatsApp and YouTube with our content.

Parents and teachers use WhatsApp groups to communicate, and all we need is our number to be added to those groups. We didn't want to force them to download something new. The memory on their devices is small and most of them are first-time digital users. For these reasons, it made sense not to make them download, learn and use a new application.

It was an interesting time when parents had to be the first teachers of their children. Schools and daycare centers were closed during the nationwide lockdown. So technology was the only way to reach parents. They really needed our product at that time because their kids were home and they weren't learning.

No nonprofit or for-profit organization can serve all of these children. There are also more than a million government-funded daycare centers across the country. That's why we wanted to work with our government to scale our program.

The amount of time an average woman has for productive work, rest or her own health is much less than that of an average man. Many Western countries seem to have closed this gap, but I don't see much difference in some of them. Despite the economic opportunities that exist, women are still the primary caregivers and there is still an imbalance in household work.

Throughout my childhood, I was expected to study, work and be equal to men in all aspects of life.

Recent studies confirm this idea: modern parents are beginning to take care of girls and boys equally. This is true for small children. But at the same time, we see specific signs of inequality between adolescent boys and girls. In India, boys are still more likely to be enrolled in private schools that require payment, while girls are more likely to be enrolled in free government-run schools. Girls are also more likely than boys to drop out of school to take care of their younger siblings.

We're also trying to make sure that our content is gender sensitive. We show mothers working outside the home and fathers doing household chores. We show boys and girls in the same light. While boys are learning about emotions, girls are doing math and science.

The thing is, we learn a lot by taking something that was imperfect and iterating on it. So instead of trying to come up with the perfect solution in your head, it's more efficient to just decide what needs to be implemented. That's pretty much being humble enough to say, ‘This is good. Let's try to work on it’

Compounding percent is a miracle. In the next three years, I want to impact 5 million children across the country.

Part of that is because women aren't visible enough. If a woman entrepreneur doesn't do well, the people around her often conclude that no woman entrepreneur will succeed. To all the women out there who are wondering if they can take the leap, I would just say, 'Of course you can, you're not alone’.

Half the world is still underrepresented right now. And hopefully we can change that.