For starters
Documentary CTRL+ALT+Compete (2011), directed by Brian Giberson and produced by Microsoft, follows five tech start-up founders as they try to make successes of their companies, focusing on the high-stakes business of pitching to potential investors. Nickey Khemchandani, co-founder and chief technology officer of BSD Education, a Hong Kong-based edtech company that partners with schools to teach children coding skills, explains how it changed his life.
This movie really stopped me from chasing the money, which is what
I kind of grew up believing was the
only way to succeed. Growing up in
“GROWING UP IN HONG KONG,
IT’S DRILLED INTO YOUR HEAD
THAT TO BE SUCCESSFUL, YOU’VE GOT TO
MAKE MONEY.”
Hong Kong, it’s drilled into your head
that to be successful you’ve got to
make money. It was getting depressing,
thinking that you’ve just got to grind it
out for the rest of your life.
I didn’t go overseas to university.
I got a job at an agency a week after
graduating from high school. I got into
the London School of Economics and a
couple of Canadian universities, but they
were pretty expensive. I went to university
a year later, taking evening classes,
but after two years I dropped out. I was
learning computer science, and everything they were
teaching was out of date by at least 10 years.
I saw the film about a year after it came out, in
2012. I’d heard about it from a couple of friends. I
was working full time at a creative agency as head of
digital. I saw a trailer and thought, “I really want to
watch this.”
There’s a moment in the film when someone says,
“To succeed in this world of entrepreneurship, you
need to focus on solving a problem, and then the
money will come to you.” At an agency, the only way
to become more senior is to make the company more
money. This was one of the few movies that showed
you the entire journey, not just: you have a great idea,
and then people give you millions. The pitching, the
begging – this is what really got me going.
Seeing the entrepreneurs in that movie, I realised
that your 20s is a time when you can take risks. So
I did. I remember distinctly – it was six or seven
months after I’d watched it that I jumped, two feet in,
took a pay cut and chased this crazy dream to change
education. I was making HK$10,000 to HK$20,000
a month more before BSD. But I had asked myself,
“What am I doing with the money?” I was blowing it
on going out. And I had been building other people’s
dreams. I thought, “If I don’t do this now, I won’t want
to do it later.”
I was lucky: I met my partner, Chris (Geary, BSD
Education co-founder and CEO), and found someone
who’s as passionate as me about education. We
started off serving adults, then about four or five
years ago we pivoted to schools. You don’t get this
kind of education there, which before had been the
one problem we couldn’t solve.