A conversation with Nikhil Sinha, CEO at GSVLabs and former Chief Content Officer at Coursera
I spoke with Nikhil Sinha, CEO at GSVlabs and partner at GSV.
Nikhil started his work in education at UT Austin, where he was a Professor and academic administrator for 8 years. He then spent time in startups, investing in and supporting fintech companies. Interested in institution building, he went to India to start a new university, which is now ranked as one of the best new universities in the country. Afterwards, he joined Coursera, where he built upon lessons he learned in traditional academic institution building to deliver content at scale globally.
Nikhil connected with the GSV team through his time at Coursera (GSV is one of the largest investors in Coursera). With Coursera, Nikhil helped democratize access to higher education, and similarly, with GSVlabs, Nikhil is excited about democratizing access to innovation and technology, particularly with their Passport platform that provides a virtual version of the GSVlabs experience for startups globally. Passport has now reached over 20K founders in 100 countries.
Nikhil shared his perspective on education investing, content creation in education, virtual community building, and what the US and India can learn from each other in higher education.
On education investing, Nikhil underscores the importance of having and leveraging sector specific expertise. Technology and service providers should grasp the many nuances of public versus private versus international education and K-12 versus higher education; the key stakeholders involved; and how different parties, such as school districts, governments, and teachers interact and work together.
On content creation in education, Nikhil notes the challenge of delivering education at scale. Education, by nature, is quite idiosyncratic. Standard academic institutions are able to craft specific curriculum for an individual or small group. Coursera, in contrast, needed to deliver content to a diverse global group at scale. To do so, they created structured modules and assessments to standardize content delivery, which reduced the flexibility of idiosyncratic curriculum creation but dramatically increased the global accessibility of higher education.
On what the US and India can learn from each other in higher education, Nikhil highlights the effective public funding of universities in India, which creates greater financial accessibility. In the US, tuition for higher education remains costly, so lessons from India’s public funding efforts could be taken to alleviate this financial burden for US students and families. Relative to India, however, the US has done well in integrating teaching and research. Phenomenal researchers are also professors in US universities. India can look to the US for best practices on elevating the collaboration of education and research in universities.
On virtual community building, Nikhil shares the importance of developing personas around the types of people engaged in the community and creating programming to address the needs of each of these personas. It is crucial to take an intentional, methodical, empathetic approach to recreating the magic of in-person communities online.
