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It’s a unicorn based out of Silicon Valley; it has got the founder of Google X behind it; it’s a company that not many in India might have even heard about; and it has got a chief marketing officer who is brutally honest in her assessment about the prospects of her brand in India.“Even in the US, we don’t have a brand that people automatically recognise,” grins Shernaz Daver , chief marketing officer of Udacity , when asked about the reason why a global tech unicorn is working under the radar and leading an obscure life in India. Daver, though, is quick to add a caveat: In the Ivory tower of Silicon Valley, the brand doesn’t need an introduction.Cofounded by Stanford professor and former Google vice-president Sebastian Thrun, Udacity offers free and paid online certification courses for students who earn nanodegrees and learn skills such as front-end web developing, iOS and Android programming, or machine learning.It recently rolled out ‘Introduction to Selfdriving Cars’ and ‘Flying Car’ nanodegree programmes to give students the skills to create autonomous flight vehicles. The idea is to do something unconventional: stitch a curriculum that finds takers among top tech companies across the world.Back in India, Daver too is trying to pull off an unconventional task: making Udacity popular. “In the self-driving nanodegree programme, India is the second-largest globally in terms of enrolment of students,” she claims, adding that overall, outside the US and Canada, India is the second largest country for Udacity.India, Daver knows, is not new to online courses. But most of them, if not all, have been under-graduate or post-graduate ones that don’t need learning technical skills. That’s what gives Udacity hope.What also boosts the prospects of the fledgling startup in India is the dismal state of higher technical education. Nearly 80% of engineering graduates in India are not employable, according to a report by a New Delhi-based employability assessment company last year. Based on a study of more than 1.5 lakh engineering students who graduated in 2015 from over 650 colleges, Aspiring Minds National Employability Report found roughly 1.2 lakh of them unemployable. Another survey by the same company found 95% engineers unfit to take up software development jobs. Shockingly, only 4.77% could write the correct logic for a programme.Two years in India, what would be the top learning for Daver? Nothing, but price. “The Indian market is pretty price sensitive,” she quips, adding that Indians have started realising the value of nanodegrees. Tie-ups with a bunch of tech companies such as Infosys, Wipro and Tech Mahindra help in conveying the message that there are takers for students.Daver is banking big on the keenness of Indians to reskill themselves. The toughest task for Daver though is to spread awareness about Udacity, and that too in an unconventional manner: targeting the parents.“We need to market the courses to the parents,” she says, highlighting the cultural differences that makes India different from other markets globally. While the millennial would get to know through word of mouth, it’s the parents who need to trust the course so that they can approve the students taking online technical education.“These are still early days in India but I am super optimistic,” signs off Daver as she gets down to take more nano steps towards making her little-known brand more popular in India.