She dropped out of law school and founded 3 startups. And she’s only 22.

According to a 2014 study, some 95 percent of students who enrolled in Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology failed to complete them.

Yale-NUS undergraduate Payal Lal is hoping to change this by allowing students to interact with each other while taking these courses. Lal and her team of three are now developing a plugin on MOOC websites for its learners to interact with each other.

At 22, Yale-NUS student Payal Lal has already founded three startups. Her latest venture is a web plugin that allows learners of online courses to connect with each other. Photo credit: Payal Lal

Lal said the inspiration for this was her own experience. “I hate going for classes, but I love the peer community in school. I realised that people taking online courses did not have this peer support,” she said.

The plugin first started as an app, which she provided to three small-scale MOOC websites. Response was good – as opposed to the 2 percent of e-learners who participate in discussion forums, 30 percent of those who knew about the app used it.

But MOOC providers wanted something that could be integrated within their websites, which prompted Lal and her team to start developing a plugin. They are looking to charge their clients at US$1 per learner per month.

Starting out as an entrepreneur

Lal, 22, is an Indian national and a serial entrepreneur who embarked on her first venture when she was just 18, almost immediately after dropping out of law school at National Law University, Delhi, where she had spent about a month.

 I wanted to do something huge and impactful.

“Within four days, I knew that law wasn’t for me,” said Lal, who is now studying psychology. “I enrolled in law school just because I managed to get into a prestigious course. But I didn’t see where it was going. I wanted to do something huge and impactful. I needed something more creative.”

The telephone service she set up, Tutor Connect, matched students to private tutors in New Delhi.

She developed this within a week of her leaving university. The service went on to have 400 tutors in its database, but ceased operations after a year, as it was not scalable and could not be easily monetised.

Her second venture

While operating Tutor Connect, she opened an online store selling sweatshirts with funny, sometimes offensive quotes printed on them. One of their more popular sweatshirts showed ‘They keep saying the right person will come along – I think mine got hit by a truck’.

Together with her best friend, Lal sold these sweatshirts through a Facebook page and hired people to wear and sell them in 20 colleges for a commission.

Starting with US$70 of their own savings, the girls earned US$1,500 within three months. But this money did not come easy.

Completing her education