EnlightenEd

N2N’s CEO Kiran Kodithala Speaks on the Company’s Past, Present, and Future

by | Feb 3, 2020

This past December, N2N celebrated its 9th birthday at its Annual Meeting at the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta, Georgia. 

 

N2N’s CEO and founder, Kiran Kodithala, gave the keynote, sharing and reflecting on N2N’s history and progress over the past nine years. 

 

After a thoughtful, personal, and humorous look at where N2N has been, Kodithala turned his attention to where N2N is going. The company’s goal is and always has been nothing less than to change the world—and Kodithala and his team are doing it through technology for higher education. 

 

“What we’re doing is illuminating students’ path to graduation,” he said. “We want to help them on their academic journey.” Through tools like a machine learning API that helps students identify courses that will help them graduate faster, as well as enrollment and registration tools, N2N is working hard to make navigating students’ higher education journeys easier and more accessible. 

 

After some discussion of present offerings, Kodithala laid out the three areas in which N2N is investing in the coming years. 

 

    1. Customer Success. N2N is dedicating new resources to supporting customer success, primarily through opening a new office in India to support the development operations team as well as customers. The aim is to support customers in a holistic manner, from technical support to relationship building. As Kodithala says, “The only way we can change the world is by continuing to provide better solutions to our customers.” 
    2. Investment in employees. Kodithala emphasized that N2N will be investing even more in their current employees by providing them with better benefits, more skills training, and better technology. As N2N has grown, so too has its workforce, and N2N is dedicated to supporting its people with the best possible training and technology available. Kodithala also said that N2N is changing its hiring process in order to attract the best possible employees and give them the right support from day.
    3. Double and triple down N2N’s focus on innovation. This last point is especially key to the way N2N will be moving forward over the next three to five years. Kodithala emphasized that innovation is a critical element of N2N’s future and their ability to support students moving through higher education. 

 

 

 

Finally, Kodithala made a surprise announcement: he is putting into place a transition plan that would see him transition out of his role as CEO and into a role as Chief Innovation Officer over the next three to five or six years. 

 

Referring to the way he opened his keynote, Kodithala said “The first question we talked about was what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wanted to be a scientist—and do I feel like a scientist? Some days. But there are some days when I feel like there’s too much operational stuff. There’s an operational struggle that prevents me from becoming the scientist and innovator that I truly want to be.” 

 

While Kodithala is not stepping away from N2N in any capacity, he will be stepping into a different role that allows him to fulfill those dreams that he had as a high school student, and still has today. 

 

Kodithala closed on an inspiring and ambitious note, saying, “We will figure out a way to learn from our experiences and build something better than what we already have. I am absolutely sure that all of this effort will allow us to illuminate the world itself. We want to truly change the world and support every single student on their academic journey.” 

 


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