Catching up with Ankit Garg from InfoEdge Ventures today added a useful pause to the regular pace of work. He dropped by the office to understand how Edzy is shaping up, and the conversation stayed grounded in what is actually happening rather than what is projected. These check-ins are valuable because they force clarity. Explaining progress out loud reveals what is solid and what is still forming. From an SEO standpoint this fits into early stage startup conversations, AI in education, and venture capital discussions, but in the moment it was simply a practical exchange.
What stood out was how naturally the discussion moved between product reality and long-term direction. There was no pressure to oversell or compress complexity into neat narratives. The focus stayed on fundamentals. What is working, what is unclear, and what needs time. That tone matters, especially at an early stage. It makes it easier to be honest about constraints without framing them as failures. Progress in startups is rarely linear, and conversations that acknowledge that tend to be more useful than those chasing certainty.
The part on AI and education felt especially relevant. There is a lot of noise around AI right now, much of it detached from classroom or learner realities. The discussion stayed anchored in how AI can support learning without replacing the core human elements that make education effective. Tools, not shortcuts. Augmentation, not substitution. That distinction is easy to state and hard to execute, and it was useful to hear perspectives shaped by seeing multiple companies wrestle with the same problem. It reinforced the idea that restraint is often a competitive advantage in this space.
There was also value in the broader startup-building perspective that came through. Early stage work is about sequencing rather than scale. Knowing what not to do matters as much as knowing what to build next. The emphasis was on focus, iteration, and resisting the urge to chase every adjacent opportunity. That advice is familiar, but it lands differently when it is contextualized against current work rather than delivered as a principle. It made the path ahead feel more deliberate, not narrower, but clearer.
Writing this down is a way of marking the usefulness of the interaction without overstating it. These conversations do not provide answers so much as they sharpen questions. Having someone step into the workspace, see the product in motion, and respond thoughtfully creates a feedback loop that is hard to replicate over calls or decks. It was good to have that perspective today. It leaves the work feeling a bit more anchored, which is often enough.