School's in for Silicon retiree

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Alok Sharma's story starts out like a standard script for new Gulf Coast retirees who achieved top line business success somewhere else.

With a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Sharma started two high-tech companies in California that were ultimately acquired by Juniper Networks and Harris Corp. He moved to Siesta Key with his family on a part-time basis in 2003, and full time in 2010. “I was on the treadmill for 10-15 years building highly complex and complicated systems,” Sharma tells Coffee Talk. “I needed time off.”

But the script veered recently, after Sharma volunteered to teach some classes at the high school in Sarasota one his daughters attends. The school is nationally ranked for gifted students, but Sharma looked at the education process like someone who has spent two decades in Silicon Valley. To Sharma, a native of India, there was a lot of inefficiency in education. “My first reaction was nothing had changed in 35 years,” Sharma says. “It was shocking the technology had not caught up.”