There’s probably not a single person in Kathmandu interested in IT that doesn’t know CloudFactory. CloudFactory is one of the major international IT companies here in Kathmandu, and not only are they well known inside the country, but they are well recognized abroad too for their social mission. CloudFactory basically provides BPO (business process outsourcing) services through an API driven on-demand workforce. So what happens is, when foreign clients (businesses) hands them over their back end work, the parts that can be automated will be processed through tools that internal software developers developed, and the rest are divided into small micro tasks to be done manually. What’s cool about this is that these micro tasks like data entry are delegated to people all around Kathmandu - people who may not necessarily have high IT skills but are ready to work with their computers. CloudFactory has been able to provide employment to thousands of youth this way.

Our encounter with CloudFactory is kind of a funny story actually. Last year when we first came up with the concept of TECHRISE, we did a simple google search “Ruby on Rails Nepal”. It seemed like this CloudFactory was the dominant, if not only, company using Rails. And this mega company seemed to have evolved from the same idea that we had – teaching Ruby on Rails to local Nepalese. When we clicked around the homepage some more, we saw that the head office was located in Durham – which was ten minutes away from where Take was studying at in North Carolina (We were both studying abroad in the US at the time). It felt like fate. We knew we had to go talk to them. So a couple of weeks later, we had our meeting set up at their office in a super cool startup hub complete with a slide. They were really nice cool guys, introduced us to Karmath the alpha of the Nepal operations, and fast forward to today we were meeting up with him and the CloudFactory team at their office.

The main purpose of our visit to CloudFactory today was to talk about the possible collaboration that we could have between CloudFactory and TECHRISE. Our first visit to CloudFactory – we were absolutely blown away. From the outside you couldn’t tell but the inside, it was buzzing with energy. Rows of wooden desks, multiple desktops and macs lying around, loads of mug cups…it looked like a startup you would see in the US. I immediately envisioned TECHRISE becoming like this giant operation. The dream. We had a great meeting on the rooftop with the developers that Karmath brought together. They were super nice, and offered to help us in things like looking over our curriculum and providing mentorship for the more advanced student later on. It was super exciting to think about the prospects of collaborating with a company like CloudFactory. We left the office in awe, and hopes that one-day we could be as large and vibrant as they were.

After we returned we celebrated our team member Lakshman’s birthday! Lakshman has been amazing with all the marketing stuff - reaching out to local media outlets, organizing events, pumping out blog content. There’s little detail that he misses, and is always there to remind us that there are gaps in our marketing schemes. The major reason why we have been gaining so much attention from around Kathmandu is definitely because of he’s doing. Even though we spend time together everyday, this was the first time we had some personal down time over some drinks. It was a lot of fun on the rooftop, as we just ate, drank and talked about the future of TECHRISE. Happy Birthday Lakshman!