Star one: Resolve. How Pragmatiq began

Two aims, one company Pragmatiq began in November 2019 with two aims. Both came from what our founder, Bharat Gujavarti, had seen first-hand.

The first aim: technology without the gamble. Bharat had watched companies struggle to build their product, or spend heavily on a full-time CTO before they had proved the product was worth building. Good ideas were failing not for lack of merit, but because building them cost too much, too soon. So we set out to offer technology consulting and CTO as a service, sized to where a company actually is.

A pharma services company was one of the first to take that route. Instead of hiring a full-time CTO, they partnered with Pragmatiq to build their products for them.

The second aim: closing the gap. As a senior vice president at a product company, Bharat had seen hundreds of new hires who needed training in things their professional degree should already have taught them. Companies paid for that training with their own time and money, a loss mid-sized companies feel most. Outside the office, he watched graduates head to finishing schools and to the training institutes of Ameerpet, Hyderabad's famous software-coaching district, to learn practical skills their internships and projects should have given them.

Medical education builds supervised practice into the degree, through clinical internships. Engineering too often leaves it to chance. That is why a doctor graduates ready to practise, while so many engineers graduate ready to be trained.

We gave the answer a name: EDIFY, for an Employable, Deployable, Independent, Flexible YOU. More on that in a later chapter.

Two aims, one rule underneath both: prove the product before you pay for the CTO, and prepare the graduate before the company has to.

Building the baseline Personalised learning has to start with knowing the learner. So before anything else, we built a way to understand each person.

Our methodology identifies a learner's strong and weak points using a 20-parameter model. It brings together a test on a few core subjects, a research-backed personality assessment, our assessment of their academic marks, their ability to read, write and present, and several other parameters, into one picture of the person.

Our first batch of 10 learners went through it in January and February 2020, in offline mode. The model confirmed each student's strengths and areas for improvement, and we tailored parts of the content to each of them.

Every learner then follows the same three-step model: Evaluate, Enhance, Excel. Evaluate where they stand. Enhance what needs work. Help them excel at what they do best.

Then we built the platform to deliver it: an online learning system that works offline, because in India a learner's connection is never guaranteed, and learning should not stop when the signal does. Live classes run inside it too, so teaching, materials and practice stay in one place.

Then the world moved online Four months after we started, COVID-19 closed classrooms around the world. For a four-month-old company with a learning platform, the question was no longer whether online learning would work, but whether ours would.

We found out through a trial with a non-profit organisation in the United States. Thirty students learned Python programming entirely online, taught by an educator on the West Coast while the students were on the East Coast. It was the first real test of our online learning platform.

Next, we ran our methodology fully online with a batch of six learners: three in the United States and three in India. It confirmed what the first batch had shown. When you start by understanding the learner, the learning follows.

One of those six learners, in the United States, came from outside computer science and had spent several years working in other fields. After the programme, she was able to build a new career.

That platform, built in a small team's first year, later grew into Connect, the learning platform our clients use today. But that's a story for a later chapter.

The Pragmatiq Way, principle 1: Evaluate before you build Each week of this series ends with one principle that the year taught us. The first is the one we set down before we wrote a line of code: evaluate before you build. We built a way to understand each learner, their strengths, their gaps and how they learn, before we built the platform to teach them. We do the same with every client: understand the person, the problem and the business before deciding what to build.

Seven years, seven stars In 46 days, Pragmatiq turns seven. Until then, each week one star of the Saptarishi lights up with one year of our story. This week's star is Kratu, Sanskrit for purposeful will: the resolve to begin something and see it through.

Next week: star two, Pulaha Pulaha is the second pointer star, the one that holds steady to north. Next Monday's chapter covers our second year, November 2020 to October 2021: how a young, bootstrapped company kept its direction through the uncertainty of COVID, and the partners who trusted us when trust was hard to give.

A question for hiring managers and engineering leaders: how many months does a fresh graduate in your team need before they're truly productive? Tell us in the comments.

46 days to seven. #Pragmatiq7