Meet Ishan Pendyala

We were lucky to catch up with Ishan Pendyala recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ishan, thanks for sitting with us today to chat about topics that are relevant to so many. One of those topics is communication skills, because we live in an age where our ability to communicate effectively can be like a superpower. Can you share how you developed your ability to communicate well?

In my opinion, communication is predicated on two things: knowing the subject of discussion, and being able to clearly relay one’s thoughts on it. I spend a lot of my time reading through policy briefs, news articles, or whatever literature I get my hands on — reading how other people communicate through a variety of ways has been integral in building my topic knowledge, as well as my experience with how other people effectively communicate.

In this respect, competing in the high school debate circuit has been incredible in building my communication skills. Research of vague and obscure, yet societally important topics (like state hegemony and copyright law, just to name a few examples) builds this prerequisite topic knowledge for debaters through building their ability to investigate and interrogate research. To win debates, debaters are forced to build their communication and persuasion skills to sway the votes of judges — in my experience of 4 years of high school debate, effective communication is predicated on these two facets.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Of course, thank you for having me!

I want to first start by talking about my co-founder of NOVA Policy Network, Murari Ambati. He’s played the majority of the role in creating the Network, from setting up the organization, to getting our volunteer base, securing sponsorships from leading organizations (like Amazon, Novartis, and the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab, to name a few), to getting me on board on this project in its beginnings, allowing me to help build up this amazing group.

NOVA Policy Network is a policy writing group that addresses the global, unanswered issue of how we navigate governance of neurotechnologies. These technologies (NOVA focuses on addressing specifically cognitive enhancement technologies, neuropharmaceuticals, and mind-interface systems) have been widely undercovered by policy analysts and international organizations, which is why Murari and I felt it was necessary to create the Network.

Here, we’ve written and published a free, open curriculum that has taught over 20,000 students on neurotechnology policy. Through our work, we’ve created a network of 1,500 volunteers; gathered $80,000 in funding and sponsorships from companies, startup groups, and crowdfunding; and have written over 168 hours of open-access curriculum, which over 200 of our learners from all across the world have completed.

Our students have been able to publish over 70+ of their capstone projects, which are policy briefs on neurotechnology-relevant topics of their choice, to leading policy discussion groups and institutions, like the OECD and European Commission, reaching those who pass and legislate policy at the global scale.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Sure. First, the ability to not get discouraged when you don’t see progress in the early stages is incredibly important. When we first started pushing out our courses, we weren’t getting a lot of traction, and it took a while for us to reach students. After the first few months, though, by having our volunteer base reach out to groups that could host our materials and courses, we were able to expand our impact exponentially.

Second, knowing people who know people who know people (like our amazing volunteers!) expands your network extremely quickly. Connecting with people through social media groups or “start-up forums” connects you with like-minded innovators and change-makers who have their own group of connections.

Third, don’t get overwhelmed by scale. The numbers 20,000 impacted, 200 graduates, and 70+ publications feel like just numbers, even though each person is a real, actual person — that’s really hard to believe, and while we’ve affected so many people, we can impact so many more. Thinking that “this is good enough” would expel the motivation Murari and I had when initially creating the Network, preventing us from continuing our work.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

Being well-rounded is definitely important, and is arguably more important from our experience to scale up ventures like NOVA. I think we had a really solid network of volunteers and a crowd of people with whom we built our curriculum, so that wasn’t an issue for us. We also had a lot of experience with getting sponsorships, cold emailing companies, and organizations for sponsorships.

Our main area of struggle was definitely with contacting groups who could promote our curriculum and share it, and balancing creating curriculum with sharing it with our students was an experience that we had to be aware of. If you don’t have a solid ground in one area that’s necessary for your venture, then whenever all the other parts of your venture are maxed out, it’s much harder to back-track to fill in the gap of your weaker areas the second time around, than it is to get it right the first try.

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