Millionaire uses tech to spark change in India

He founded PlaySpan, which sold to Visa for more than $200 million in 2011. He was a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow in the programme’s inaugural year. He joined Menlo Ventures in 2013 as a partner to focus on finding and funding interesting and world-changing companies.

Right now, he’s also working on Code for India, a programme he founded to inspire engineers in the US and abroad to use technology to help India’s poor. Code for India will be holding its second hack-a-thon -happening simultaneously in Mountain View and Bengaluru on May 9. This year’s event will revolve around the theme of using tech to make India more resilient to natural disasters. Mehta speaks about his plans for India:

Tell us more about Code for India

India already has a large number of tech developers and there’s also a large Indian developer community in the US. The country has massive challenges in the public service infrastructure and the government that need a lot of help. So there is an opportunity for tech developers to volunteer. We have a very diverse group pitching in and building software. And instead of starting another NGO to try to focus on various issues, Code for India cuts across horizontally and provides a technology backbone to existing non governmental organisations. It’s been a wonderful, open source movement, and we’ve created some great apps — over 20 of them so far.

Any app you want to highlight?

One of our apps that gets the most attention is the voting app, I Vote For A Better India. India is going through a massive election with 1.2 billion people going out to vote. Our community of developers and entrepreneurs have developed this app to increase voter registration. With the mobile devices, and the software we built, we cut down the hassle of registration. That made a big impact over the past few months. Our volunteers were able to convince even the election commissioner to use the app, which was a big achievement and it’s kind of super-charging all the other projects.

Do you think enough startups are focusing on social good?

Silicon Valley gets a fair share of blame for not doing much in the social impact space and I think that is quite legitimate. We have more companies getting funded that are just solving the first world problems than the second or third world problems. We’re still far from changing the mindset of people to build, take risks, and try to innovate in areas that will make an impact.

-Businessinsider.in