Flow Empowering Students

Intrigued by the resistances and voids in the conventional system, Harshit has been investigating, ‘How can we design frameworks that better serve the purpose of education’. This motivation led to the founding of his startup Flow, with a vision to make education more inclusive and liberating.

In the pursuit of entrepreneurship over 5 years,

- Harshit explored diverse roles and responsibilities (Founder-CEO, Product Manager, HeadHunter, Editor, Community Manager, Design Researcher)

- Built a super-engaged community of 8,100 technologists from 100+ countries.

- Lived on an organic farm called Jaaga. Doing yoga, coding, cooking, and building tech together, while watching the country sunset.

- Built teams for High-Growth startups & hired for tech leadership roles.

- Invited as a speaker at the Daho.am developer conference, happening in Munich. 

- Invited to CCCamp 2019 by Chaos Computer Club, Berlin. 

- Invited as a mentor at Innoschool Austria, UnternehmerTUM Munich, Gifted Citizen, Mexico.

If you believe education is inclusive, you are confusing it with privilege!

It’s extremely difficult for students coming from tier 2/3 colleges and cities to access:
i) Curated resources for skill development
ii) Quality global career opportunities,
iii) A supportive peer group.

Flow is the 'Noticeboard' that every college needs. 

Flow delivers the leverages of a handful of premier universities to 99.99% students (3 million annually in India) who can't go there (can't afford, didn't qualify, or intentionally dropped-out).

Flow broadens the spectrum of opportunities leading to a fulfilling career. Flow helps students build unique credentials, expanding awareness and inspiring peers through our crowd-sourced curation engine. 

“Flow has been the missing news source. I believe that access to opportunities is the biggest service to people who are willing to put in the required work, but more often than not we seldom have the information or community to support. Flow bridges this gap.”

Every hour one student commits suicide in India, with about 28 such suicides reported every day.

India, with a population of 1.35+ Billion, nearly one-half of Indians are under 25 years. Suicide is the most common cause of death in the age group 15–29 years for India.

Academic pressure is the major reason for these suicides happening.

Due to limited awareness, students know few channels leading to a successful career. This leads to extreme competition, with certain few get success, and others remorse and pessimism.

3 million students compete for 30,000 seats every year, to secure admission in premier STEM colleges. With a 0.01% acceptance rate, 99.99% are bound to fail. 

During college, the academic schedules are so hectic that the student is left with no time to pursue one’s hobbies and interests. The competition for scoring a consistent CGPA of 10, a mandatory attendance, and bagging the highest package in the placement is so intensive that students can barely take the pressure. 

Parents end up spending from half to the whole of their entire life savings on their child's education. This is deemed as a necessary investment, and it leads to excessive pressure and impractical expectations from the family.

Flow promises for inclusive education by decentralising the leverages of a handful of world-class universities to 99.99% of students who cannot go there. 

Flow broadens the spectrum of opportunities leading to a fulfilling career.

Flow connects students daily with highly curated and interdisciplinary opportunities. Building unique credentials, emerging skills and expanding awareness through daily curated news and actions. Connect students to role models and inspiring peers for personalised recommendations.

Flow is a curated, crowd-sourced noticeboard with virtual hubs, connected across universities to empower 16-27 years old students with highly curated 'bulletins' for learning, opportunity and community.

By curated, we mean that every content or 'bulletin' is reviewed, filtered, categorised, and edited before publishing it on the noticeboard.

Through crowd-sourcing, we are ensuring scalability for the number of bulletins and dynamic diversification for their categories, together with maintaining high-quality and relevance through an open, and peer-reviewed mechanism.

By connected we mean, that all our distribution channels for the 'bulletins' are connected to the central noticeboard, ensuring a central point of publication of the bulletins and designating their flow to channels as per the categories.

Virtual hubs are immersive, and interactive virtual spaces for peer-to-peer interaction through live mentoring, workshops, streaming tutorials, discussion on a proposal.

• 16-27 years old (students, self-learners, drop-outs)
• STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math)
• Engineering colleges (undergrads, master's, postgrads) [Early Adopters]

Built the prototype as a Facebook Group (why: our users were on FB mostly, it was rapid and lean: no- code, no-cost).

- The Facebook group used as a central noticeboard for publishing daily 'bulletins', announcements, and peer-discussions.

As a result of publishing 3500 of these highly curated 'bulletins', we built a super-engaged community of 8050+ users with 500+ individual success stories, benefitting 75+ organizations get more inclusive by matching deserving yet inaccessible talents.

We witnessed students coming from non-premier (tier-2/3) colleges get into some of the world's most coveted opportunities including, NASA Frontier Development Labs, Google Summer of Code, Mozilla, RGSoC, MIT Media Lab Initiatives, Digital product School by UnternehmerTUM, Gifted Citizen, and many others. 

For virtual hubs, we use the open-source live streaming tool 'unhangout' for peer-led workshops & tutorials, and dialogue with role models. 

- 500+ students have had personalized mentorship through 30+ of the peer-led workshops, and dialogue with role models including 

- Alexis Hope(MIT Media Lab)

- Danielle Strachmann, (1517 Fund, Thiel Fellowship Former Director)
- Siddha Ganju (NASA FDL, NVIDIA) 

I attended the MIT Media Lab India Initiative in 2015, a 7 days design innovation workshopby MIT Media Lab.

It was through this workshop, I assimilated the values around openness, collaboration, team-building and documentation, and most importantly, building a product that solves a user's problem. Over here I learned, if you build a product that delivers enormous value to the end user's, you can build a business around it.

I met inspiring mentors like Srishti Sethi, from MIT Media Lab and peers like Ayush Sharma, who even though comes from a tier-3 college and, was one of the best frontend developers I met.

After few weeks, I saw a sad status from Ayush, that he had to loose his internship at TU Darmstadt, because his college didn't allow him to go for a compulsory workshop in campus.

This was very disheartening and frustrating scenario for Ayush, for me, for Srishti. Me and Srishti Sethi came upon a call to discuss, and Srishti, at the end said to me, "Harshit, let's do something for education." 

In Aug 2015, Flow started as a thought experiment to validate: 'If we expose students to highly curated opportunities, will we see a huge increase in their success?' 

Exactly a year back, I received a call from Carolina from Pereira, Colombia. She was so happy to share that she got into an internship at Mozilla through Outreachy. And she exclaimed, "It wouldn't have been possible without Flow!"

This really made my day, and similarly, a couple of weeks back, Somesh from India shared that he got into Digital Product School, Munich.

When one receives handwritten letters, emails, and Facebook messages, consistently from all over the world, that your initiative helped people to get them an internship at Harvard Medical school, a fellowship in MIT Media Lab, getting mentored from role models including MIT Media Lab researchers, mentors at KDE and Wikimedia, former Director at Thiel Fellowship, Self-Driving Architect at NVIDIA, Advisor at NASA.

Receiving a Google Summer of Code internship, a sponsored grant as a mentor at Code for Palestine, fellowship at TAVTech Israel, CERN OpenLab, Aalto University Science internship or selection in ACM ICPC Bootcamp being mentored by world's best coders and ICPC finalists, and getting full-time jobs in Germany, USA, at MNCs and at high growth venture-backed startups.

This gives a lot of confidence to the belief that what we are building is delivering enormous value to people lives. 

I consider myself fortunate to have inspiring people & mentors in my life, who can strongly vouch for me and the work that we execute at Flow. 

They include founders from Y Combinator, MIT Media Lab and Sloan alumni, Google and Wikimedia Developer Advocates, MIT D-Labs Investor-in-Residence, Co-Founder of Genius.com, VP of Kayak.com, leading CTOs, founders in Germany and India, Former Global Open-Source Strategy Lead at Mozilla, members of KDE, CCC.de and more.

In the pursuit of building Flow over 5 years,

Harshit explored diverse roles and responsibilities (Founder-CEO, Product Manager, HeadHunter, Editor, Community Manager, and Design Researcher)

Built a super-engaged community of 8,050 tech influencers & ambassadors from 100+ countries. Enabling extensive outreach in the developer ecosystem, university tech clubs, and youth conferences.  

Lived on an organic farm called Jaaga, a community residency bringing hackers from all over the world. Doing yoga in the morning, coding, cooking, and building tech together, while watching the country sunset. 

Built teams for High-Growth startups & hired for tech leadership roles.

Invited as a speaker at the Daho.am developer conference, happening in Munich, Germany. Daho.am is Europe's leading conference.

Invited to CCCamp 2019, organized by Chaos Computer Club, near Berlin. 5000 Hackers from all over the world participate in this camp. CCC is one of the oldest and most significant Hacker organizations of the world.

Harshit represented Flow in Y Combinator Startup School 2017.

Invited as a Mentor and partnered Flow with Innoschool Austria, DPS by UnternehmerTUM Munich, Gifted Citizen, Mexico.

Harshit, together with a co-founder, started Flow in Aug 2015 while still in college and a year left to graduate.

Harshit didn't sit for college placements, to pursue Flow full-time. Two months later, the co-founder left.

The huge impact of the solution from day one was motivating enough to continue building Flow, realising Flow growth itself will attract people who align with the mission.

I approached A++ people, good in values and function, though they didn't want to take the risk. I was approached by people who had great intentions but limited skills, and some who came for 'not-the right' reasons.

Finally after 4.5 years, Flow grew to 3 members, with Ikram and Saumya, both coming from Flow. 

Ikram joined Flow in 2016, 4 years back when there were 1500+ users. He reached out to Harshit to express his gratitude and sharing his selection in the MIT Workshop and later in Hack Zurich, Switzerland. 

In December 2019, Harshit asked Ikram if he could handle the tech at Flow. Ikram replied "Yes! of course. Flow has given me a lot, and I want to give back and scale its impact." 

Ikram has been working since Jan 2020, and leads the entire tech at Flow.

"You so willingly always share so many opportunities with thousands of people. How are you not afraid that they'll do better than you? How are you so secure as a person?"

This was the question that was posed from a user of Flow, and this has been posed a couple of times earlier. And the answer has always been the same.

I started Flow for a reason. Flow is based on the values of collaboration. I envision it as a tool to propagate the values of collaboration over the prevalent competitive mindset existing in Indian society, where it is deemed necessary to subdue others to be on the top.   

Flow stands for the values that the current scenario around education and knowledge sharing has failed to propagate:

- The values of openness and non-judgement for inclusion and equity.
- The values of collaboration over competition,
- Sharing and growing with others,
- Interdisciplinary exchange of thoughts, ideas, free-will, leading to the holistic development of perspectives of individuals, communities, and  a collective consciousness.