Note to Directors | My focus areas in SusMafia

This is a mail I wrote to my co-directors of The Sustainability Mafia (Arjun, Anirudh and Priya) exactly one year ago (May 2023). I'm glad we have done so much more and are now looking for a leader to take it to the next level. Please go through and reach out if you are keen on leading the Climate Ninja! Through this, I would also like to thank Deva and Hari for their invaluable contribution during the very early stage.

Dear Arjun, Anirudh, Priya,

I'm writing this mail to communicate my focus areas in SusMafia and my motivation behind these focus areas. I request your patience in going through this pretty lengthy email. You can expect such a long email from me only once in ten years :)

I come from a family of teachers - my father, my sister, and my grandfather - all are or were teachers at some point. I have seen from close corners my father going beyond the call of duty to help his students succeed. A couple of years back, on Teachers' Day, my father's students from the 70s and 80s arranged a grand function to felicitate him for their (students') career success. I had even written a LinkedIn post on how I felt witnessing the satisfaction in my father's eyes that day.

As I look at my education, most of my education was heavily subsidised by taxpayers' money, and I went to government or government-aided schools and colleges. If I do math (without inflation correction), the total scholarship/ financial aid/prize money I have received is more than a couple of lakhs rupees, and the total tuition fees incurred in my education from KG to Master's must be less than a lakh rupees. And as luck would have it, even my recent 9-month-long executive education on entrepreneurship at Haas School of Business at Berkeley was funded by Cisco Smart Cities Group.

Considering my family background and the privilege of getting high-quality education from public funding, I always felt the urge to give back from my early days. When I was in high school, I ran painting classes for primary school kids (of course, from the money, I brought sports gear like cricket kit, skating etc, that my parents could not afford). In my college days, I ran electronics lab and communication lab tuitions to help students pass lab exams - I did that for two years before I got admitted to master's at IISc. I taught C programming and HTML to apprentice folks at BHEL during my master's. I taught digital design at engineering colleges just when I embarked on entrepreneurship in 2012 to make some money for my living. After getting exposure to teaching at the university level, I got the opportunity to teach at my alma mater IISc, courses on the Internet of Things and Data Science for working professionals. I taught there for nearly four years. After becoming a father (2019), I took a break from teaching to spend more time with my family. Many of my students became my colleagues in my startups FluxGen and Airprobe, and volunteers at SusMafia like Anusha, Shreyas, Manasa etc.

Taking a break from teaching did create an itch. I started feeling uncomfortable not being involved in something that was like a parallel career track. While technology and entrepreneurship has been my career focus, teaching kind of beautifully complemented it. During Covid, we at FluxGen started an online internship program. We had 20+ students working on Technical, Business, Sales and marketing activities. We ran three cohorts, one after the other. Since we were not paying these students anything to compensate for their efforts, we decided to do career development activities such as giving master classes by me and successful people in my network. I could pull in my friends from school, colleges and SusMafia to give master classes to these interns. In fact, Arjun also gave a fantastic master class. After Covid came down, we couldn't do the internship programs as we got busy with our financial targets, and the colleges also started operating offline.

During COVID, Deva was my mentor, and we used to catch up for our weekly calls. He suggested that I should try my luck with building a separate business line called the "Sustainability Warriors" program - developing an experiential learning platform similar to what we were running internship programs. I found it exciting and took Hari's assistance in building it up. Deva, Hari and I did a SusShot to get our Mafiosos' feedback on the model. While it was pretty appreciated and we were kicked, however, we couldn't take it forward as I got busy with FluxGen's water Intelligence business post-COVID. FluxGen hit reasonably good revenue numbers by March 2022, which meant I wouldn't have the bandwidth to do the Sustainability Warriors program.

I'm glad we at SusMafia got an enterprising Program Manager in Sharmila. When she heard of the Sustainability Warriors program, she was keen on building it as part of SusMafia's offering, not FluxGen's. We later renamed it Climate Ninja Program (thanks again to Deva for suggesting the name). The rest of the story, you all know. I'm delighted Saksham has taken Climate Ninja to a greater level of maturity, and it looks more promising - it can become an important offering of SusMafia to the climate community.

As I'm about to hit the 40 years mark, what impact can I create in the next ten years? While I have a set plan for FluxGen, I have been thinking about SusMafia. Considering my background and motivation, as mentioned in this note, and of course, the initial success of Climate Ninja, I have decided to focus my efforts primarily on the Climate Ninja Program and scale it in my capacity as a Director of SusMafia. I want to significantly reduce my active involvement in other functions of SusMafia.

As per Climate Ninja, I would like it to continue as a Practitioner driven, Solution focused, and Free Climate Education to College Students, eventually opening it to Primary School teachers and high school students too. We must build a financially viable franchise model to scale across educational institutions and local communities run by students and teachers. If we do it right, we should have 10 million Climate Ninjas globally on our platform in the next eight to ten years and impact a billion people. The platform developed by JPMC will be our minimum viable prototype. Later, we should hire partners/developers to make a robust SAAS platform to assist future Climate Ninja Managers to run Cohorts any time, anywhere, without affecting the quality of the outcome. To achieve the end game of Climate Ninja, I will work with Saksham on the three months, one-year and three years plans and present them to you all shortly.

To make this successful, the core of SusMafia - the Mafioso network should be strengthened and well-curated. The investor network in the form of Investados could also become educators to the Climate Ninja Program like our Mafiosos. The corporate leaders - Corporado, which doesn't exist today, also comes together then the possibility to scale the Climate Ninja program becomes much higher, as we will be creating climate talents not just for our Mafiosos and extended network, but also for the Corporate sustainability transition requirements too. In this process, we may build future climate entrepreneurs who feed into our Mafioso network. It goes without saying, we need to raise a lot more capital through donations to build multiple functions in SusMafia and grow each vertical. We need a robust compliance and accounting team to ensure the organisation is not at any legal risk and be managed like a well-oiled machine. Each of you can take up one focus area of SusMafia that you will be able to focus on and own, so that we can scale the impact of SusMafia in the coming years. I'm happy to own an additional role, such as HR/ recruitment, as it is also about dealing with talent. I enjoyed engaging with Sharmila and Saksham from the start to the end of the recruitment process.

I'm feeling the same level of enthusiasm towards Climate Ninja as when we were building the SusMafia community a few years back. The only difference is that I feel more confident of us achieving the vision and mission than ever, and that is because we are such a rockstar team!

Regards,

Ganesh?