July 2014

The key to the future of learning may be having fun. At least that’s what keynote speaker, Krishna Depura has discovered.

In 2012, Krishna founded MindTickle with three other “tech geeks” who shared his vision to turn everyday employees into top performers by building a learning platform that leverages social competition and rewards to make learning more engaging, fun and memorable.

“We got the idea for MindTickle from seeing how these simple quizzes we’d put out on Facebook would just take off, with our friends competing against each other to see who knew more about a given topic,” Krishna says. “We looked at that and saw how the social engagement and fun competitive part of it actually made people excited to learn.”

After conducting extensive user studies and experiments, the “MindTicklers” discovered that just as exercise could be made fun by turning it into a sport, learning could be made more effective, engaging and almost addictive by turning it into a social, gamified experience.

Today, MindTickle has a global sales presence with headquarters in the United States and development/operations team in India and serves over 60,000 students distributed across a wide range of learning scenarios and companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 corporations. MindTickle empowers its customers to unlock and transform the knowledge of individual subject matter experts, documents, presentations, and videos into highly effective online learning programs.

As the first company to market a social and gamified learning platform, MindTickle was recognized in 2012 and 2013 with the Best Use of Engagement Techniques in Enterprise award at GSummit and the Cool Vendor award by Gartner in 2014.

“We follow the philosophy that people need three things to be happy: perceived control, perceived progress, and to connect with a higher purpose,” Krishna says. “MindTickle gives users control by allowing them to learn on their own schedule, work in the cloud from anywhere, and grow at their own pace. It provides instant feedback and metrics to measure progress. And, we make sure that the purpose of the course—how it will make the user better at what they do—is consistently brought to focus.”

Krishna is a graduate of IIT Roorkee and ISB Hyderabad, where he was awarded was given the "ISB Young Leader Award," the highest honor for his exceptional leadership and contribution. In the past decade, he’s worked passionately as a serial entrepreneur, having helped build three successful startups—Tejas Networks, Infinera and PubMatic.

“We are not learning experts. We are tech experts who are passionate about teaching done in a great way, with the end user in mind,” says Krishna. “I won’t be speaking at the Summit to sell MindTickle. I want learning providers to know these trends and how they can use them.”

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