Interviews

Technology’s power to educate

18 September 2024
Interview with Ozaal Zesha, Founder and CEO of ClassNotes, Inc.

Evelyn Seltier of Trade Forum talked with Ozaal Zesha, the young, passionate engineer and CEO of ClassNotes. With a major in robotics and engineering, the 30-year-old not only knows what you need but can also build it for you.  We talked about what it means to empower students to apply at quality universities, the change AI will bring to the education arena, and what community means for entrepreneurship.

 

This is an abridged, edited version of our interview.

I love to create things. Technology's power to disrupt and solve global challenges has enabled me to give 25 million young people access to online education.
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Ozaal Zesha, Founder of ClassNotes.
© Insiya Syed/ITC/Fairpicture

Q: You enjoyed a very good education growing up. What impact did this have on you?

I was lucky my parents moved from the Balochistan province of Pakistan where I was born, to Punjab, where I enjoyed a very good education in mechatronics engineering.

Engineering connected me to the world of business: I started my career with a hardware start-up for home automation solutions. Our innovations led me to travel to the United States in an entrepreneurship exchange programme, visit Silicon Valley, and get inspired for everything I do now.

Indeed, my education could not have had a greater impact on my life.

Unfortunately, Pakistan has only a dozen or so good universities for the 60% of its population which is below the age of 30; over half a million students are competing to get into these universities every single year. The decisive factor is their scores in standardized tests, normally taken during middle school, from 9th to 12th grade.

Consider this: A good university receives 250,000 applications a year – and they only select 2,000. This is harder than getting into Harvard – the same applies to India and other high-population countries.

Q: You now work in the education field, addressing this imbalance. Was this your goal all along?

No, it was a complete coincidence. I was lucky to become part of the entrepreneurship community. Starting in the hardware field taught me many valuable lessons as hardware is the most challenging route an entrepreneur can take. You need capital, a big team, software integration. The first half year was the toughest of my life. We failed, and we needed to.

How I got into developing an app called ClassNotes, was pure fate. Back in 2016, I went home one weekend and saw my younger brother, then in 9th grade, use a website to prepare him for his exams. Its learning content was of very poor quality, with an overload of distracting advertisement. To my surprise, my brother told me that this website was one of the most popular learning websites in Pakistan. I found that quite unacceptable.

Pakistan Interview with Ozaal Zesha
© Insiya Syed/ITC/Fairpicture
Pakistan Feature
Ozaal and his team behind ClassNotes
© Insiya Syed/ITC/Fairpicture

To help my brother and his classmates, I asked my excellent software team to take the weekend off so we could do something about it. We created a prototype that the kids tested. And without having planned any of this, in three months, we had 100,000 users. We were good and fast. But we didn’t earn any money with this, and to maintain the website with so many users a professor in the United States, who was acquainted with our work, donated $600 to keep the website up for another year.

And that’s when we reached 1 million users. Students demanded more, for more grades, for more subjects. It was crazy. In early 2018 we decided to move this “side-project” to an actual company.

The power team behind ClassNotes in Pakistan.
© Insiya Syed/ITC/Fairpicture

Q: What has happened since then?

In the last six years, we served around 30 million users worldwide, with 35,000 daily users. Our best time was during COVID-19 – as the whole education started moving online.

Even though there might be initial resistance, we must understand that the new generation is more comfortable with learning online. But websites can exploit students – we set out to change that. Plus, low-income students are at a great disadvantage; they don’t have the money for private tutors or other exam-prep academies.

The cycle of poverty continues. When we started rolling out our start-up, we wanted to create a high-quality platform that parents could trust.

We now have offices in Istanbul and the United States, with good content advisors guiding us, including from MIT and Harvard.

Q: What’s your plan right now?

With OpenAI’s update of ChatGPT in 2022, things have shifted. We started working on AI extensions for ClassNotes a few months ago.

We also learned that behind the success of each large-language model, there is an immense effort of data-labelling, and the quality of that training data ultimately determines how good the model would be. Every time there is a new ChatGPT version, it means billions of US dollars invested in data labelling on which not many companies are working.

To solve this, we have recently started a data-labelling company that contributes to developing AI in a good way, and which provides hundreds of jobs for educated people in developing countries who otherwise cannot find jobs. Working on this problem would also ultimately provide us with the skillset and human resources to create the next version of ClassNotes – offering the best versions of teachers you can imagine using AI.

Q: You are not only the founder of ClassNotes but also a Youth Entrepreneur Advisor for Pakistan. What does community mean for entrepreneurship?

When I visited Silicon Valley, I saw how important community is. In Pakistan, this was non-existent. I started the Youth Entrepreneur (Ye!) Community’s Pakistan Chapter seven years ago to change that.

We partnered with Plan9 Tech Incubator and started conducting workshops, networking and knowledge exchange events with expert speakers from Pakistan.

Being an entrepreneur in Pakistan is tough – there is no infrastructure or investment ecosystem. Pakistan needs even more communities working on entrepreneurship. But the Ye! Community has been instrumental in pioneering such a community in Pakistan.

Ozaal organizing a Ye! Community workshop in Pakistan.