Why I Left Tech to Fix Education

People ask me, often, why I left.

The honest answer is, I didn't, at first. I left in stages. The way most people leave anything that no longer fits.

In the mid-2000s, I was where most ambitious Indian engineers wanted to be. M.Tech from IIT Delhi. A research engineer role at Computer Associates. Then Cadence Design Systems, working on tools that helped global companies design the chips powering everything around us.

It was good work. I was good at it. My parents were proud of it. And I was, slowly, becoming someone I didn't recognize.

The thing about cracks is that once you see one, you start seeing them everywhere.

What I started to notice

I started noticing the children around me. The ones who could recite formulas but couldn't tell you what any of it meant. The ones who scored 95% and still froze when asked a question that wasn't in the syllabus. The cousins, the friends' kids, the neighborhood children, all caught inside a system that was producing high marks and quietly, expertly, stripping away the one thing that made them most human.

Curiosity.

Children, children, were learning to be afraid of getting things wrong. Children were learning to memorize before they understood. Children were learning, before they were ten years old, that math was something to survive, not something to love.

And the adults in their lives, wonderful, well-meaning adults, were so busy keeping the syllabus moving that no one had time to ask the more important question: Is any of this preparing them for the life they're actually going to live?

The answer, I started to realize, was no. Not because the teachers weren't trying. Not because the parents didn't care. But because the system, the structure inside which everyone was operating, had been designed for a world that no longer existed.

We were teaching twentieth-century children with nineteenth-century methods to prepare them for a twenty-first-century life. The math wasn't going to work out.

And every day I spent in tech, I felt the same thing more sharply: the most important problem in the country I lived in wasn't in the place I was working.

I held that feeling for a long time. Longer than I should have. The salary was good. The title was good. The trajectory was good. It is a hard thing to walk away from things that look like success from the outside, even when they feel hollow from the inside.

The leap

In 2014, I founded Ed3Dverse. I had no playbook. No investor deck. No guarantee that anyone would care about what I was building. What I had was a question I could no longer not work on: What would education look like if we built it for the world that's actually coming, not the one we wish we still lived in?

That question is still the question. Twelve years later, it has become MathX, TeenX, ParentX, EducatorX. It has become eight published textbooks across S. Chand and Arya Publications. It has become a TEDx stage, a global ambassadorship, and a methodology, the 6 Quotients, being adopted in classrooms across the country. But under all of it, the question hasn't changed.

Why I tell this

The reason I tell this story is not because my journey is unusual. It is because it isn't. There are thousands of people, teachers, parents, founders, engineers, who have felt the same crack. Who can no longer un-see what is happening in the rooms our children spend their days in. Who know, in a way they cannot fully articulate, that we are running out of time to fix this.

If you are one of those people, wherever you are in your version of the journey, I want you to know two things.

One. You are not imagining it. The crack is real. The system is failing in ways that the system itself is structurally incapable of acknowledging.

Two. You don't have to leave your job to do this work. I left mine, but that was my path. The work of rebuilding how we raise this generation can happen from inside a classroom, inside a home, inside a publisher, inside a school board, inside a company that funds education, inside a podcast, inside a parent-teacher meeting where you ask one harder question than usual. The work is everywhere. It needs everyone.

I didn't leave to fix education. I left because I couldn't keep pretending the most important problem in front of me wasn't the most important problem in front of me.

That's the only good reason I know to leave anything. If you're sitting with your own version of that feeling right now, about your work, your life, the way you're raising your children, the way you're teaching them, I hope you don't sit with it for as long as I did.