Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& An Interview with Pooja Nath CEO, Piazzza Date: May 17, 2010 [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi. This is Lucy Sanders, the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology or NCWIT. We've got another great interview today with women who have started IT companies, and this is a really interesting one. This is a woman who studied computer science, worked in tech companies, is getting her MBA in Stanford, and also by the way, on the side is starting a company. It's called Piazzza and her name is Pooja Nath. We're very excited to have her here. I should mention she's getting her MBA at Stanford, so not unlike other entrepreneurs who have come before, who we know about. Piazzza is all about group learning. It is really interesting to go look at the site. Having a college student myself, I know that often he is studying by himself or he doesn't have the answers to questions, and I must also say he also procrastinates and could really use something like Piazzza, which helps you get answers to questions from your fellow students and from your professor all through a form of social networking. So, welcome, Pooja. We're very glad that you're here. Pooja Nath: Thank you. I'm very excited to be here with you. That was a very kind introduction. It makes me really happy when I hear other people explain the problem I am trying to solve, because when I hear them explain it so well in their own terms, I know I am solving a simple problem that is very prevalent. I try and explain to people what I am doing. It's like, "Well, students have problems when they're studying for assignments or exams, and they have specific questions that have a lot of context." Search engines can't help much, because there is knowledge out there that is too general. Discussion forums usually can't help, because there is so much lost and so much back-and-forth in trying to explain the context. The way I see it is your classmates or your teachers are best bet to get fast and efficient help, and yet today, so many students when they're struggling are trying to call their few friends they know, or trying to email their few friends they know. There is nothing connecting them to try and get them help when they need it with the largest set of most relevant people, that's their entire class. Lucy: I think that is absolutely right. Larry Nelson: Yeah. Lucy: You have to go to YouTube listeners, and look at the YouTube video on Piazzza. It's very cute, because it calls many of these students, who just like my son, "elite procrastinators." [laughter] Lucy: I know. It was just absolutely perfect. Maybe just before we get into our set of questions around entrepreneurship, tell us a little bit about where Piazzza is these days, and how you came up with the name, and what's going on with the company. Pooja: Sure. I was sitting in a finance class at GSB when I was brainstorming on the names, and I asked a student next to me, "What's a term that explains this idea of bringing people together in a common place?" He said, "Piazza." Lucy: [laughs] Oh, that's very good. Pooja: Plural of piazza was a great idea, except I don't like the sound of piazze. [laughs] Lucy: Yeah. Exactly. Pooja: And since then, coming up with that name 'pizza' just really stuck with me. When I go back to my undergrad days when everybody would be sitting together in the same lab, mostly because they were not in a financial position to own their own laptops or computers, the amount of help people got in there, and the ways in which they learned off of each other was just so beautiful. That was my fruition was to come up with a term that had the same meaning in my mind, which is everyone is in the same spot physically, except I'm trying to now do that online. My inspiration was I was one of the very few female students in computer science in India, not only just co