A Slice on Naveen Bachkethi, Co-Founder of ConnectBud
Kids can learn to code at the young age of five, but most five-year-olds aren’t thinking about that. Naveen Bachkethi, himself got hooked on technology at a young age when he started coding when he was 11 and has since dedicated his career to his love for technology. Bachkethi is on a mission to get kids to start coding at a young age as Co-Founder of ConnectBud, an online coding tutoring platform for kids.
Bachkethi has previously worked at big tech companies like VMware, McAfee, and more, adding up to 16 years of experience. During COVID-19, when the world went online and everything turned to remote work, Bachkethi realized there would be a need for online tutors as well. Along with the rise in STEM and more students aspiring to be engineers, he thought, “Why can’t we have a platform where we can have remote coding tutoring?” Thus, ConnectBud was born.
ConnectBud was built with two missions: the purpose of being able to provide tutoring sessions only from those who are qualified to teach and affordability. Noticing that the platforms already out there were priced very high from $40-50/hour, Bachkethi wondered what he could do to lower that price point to make it cheaper, so they decided to use engineering students as tutors. With this approach, Bachkethi has been able to price ConnectBud’s tutoring sessions as low as $5 an hour per class.
When asked about why ConnectBud is targeted towards kids, Bachkethi emphasized the importance of teaching kids coding at a young age due to their brain development. “Coding is a language, and we want to teach them [kids] the basic fundamentals with each class we offer.” With a focus on tutors and kids, ConnectBud did not forget about making parents happy. The platform allows parents to choose which university their children can take classes from, and even offers a chat function to make sure the kids and tutor will be a great match.
Along with entrepreneurial experience, Bachkethi has a background in investing. He notes it’s helped him take a look at the numbers and see the business from another angle. “It’s about the numbers. You look at it and say, ‘This segment we’ll be doing X, Y, Z in the upcoming quarters, months, years, etc. It helps to get that all of that information and I was on the other side, so now I want to be on the giving side.” Bachkethi uses his experience as an entrepreneur to think about what questions he had while investing, and vise versa when he’s in his founder role.
Bachkethi’s advice to his younger self stems from the things he did wrong as a founder.
To measure success, Bachkethi creates small milestones for himself. “Success is achieving the goals you’ve created for yourself. Keep achieving them and you’ll reach your success.” Having these large and small milestones Bachkethi strives to meet keeps him motivated every day to continue doing more to keep him curious. For Bachkethi, success is a journey and even when you think you’ve reached the top, he strongly encourages you to keep going.
Founder Bio
Naveen Bachkethi has 16 years of experience in the technology industry. Bachkethi previously worked at Intel Security, VMware and Netscope. He is currently Co-Founder of ConnectBud, Co-Founder and CEO of CBNITS and an Official Member of Forbes Technology Council. Connect with Bachkethi on LinkedIn.
