It’s been many years since my last blog post and I was
fondly reading some of my old posts and reflecting on the journey.
The one thing that I am really glad I did is start a
company when I was in my 20s, I believe that’s when risk taking ability and
passion is at its highest. I am so proud of all that we achieved at Kern - from
starting a company passionate about Instructional Design and learner-centric to
evolving into an eLearning company, to being the first company in India to win
a Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Award in the Blended Learning category,
to a transition to a Learning Solutions Consulting firm. The launch of our
product – Lionsher, a SaaS-based assessment platform was a crazy roller coaster
ride. In a sense, it feels like we did it all. I also cherish our experiments
on Second Life, Web 2.0 and Mobile learning. Thank you Geeta, Ripul, Archie, Yatin,
Nishana, Sampada, Rahul and the countless others who have been part of this
Kern journey.
Unfortunately all of it did not translate into commercial
success and a heart-breaking decision was made to shut down the company in 2013.
It’s been over three years and in that time; I’ve moved to a new country and rejoined
the corporate world.
As a start, it’s only apt that I change the title of
this blog from Stratosphere (Strategic not Static – startups and more) to reflect
this next phase where I am back in the corporate world – building on my
experiences as an entrepreneur and growing and learning each day.
The journey back into the corporate world has been interesting
– I’ve been lucky to work on projects close to my heart such as on-the-job learning, social
learning and innovating to move learning beyond formal /structured learning (still
an important piece). And recently, I’ve moved into the space
of employee engagement which is evolving very fast – exploring real-time,
cutting edge listening and analytics strategies to measure and enhance the
employee experience.
I plan to be more regular with blogging from here on,
so watch this space.
