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Taking affordable edtech to the masses | Pallav Pandey @ Uolo
267 Plays1 year ago
Pallav Pandey has been a key player in India's startup scene for two decades. Now, with his fourth venture, Uolo, he aims to become the go-to platform for distributing edtech products across India. Uolo's core belief is that there's no one-size-fits-all solution in edtech; instead, India requires a multitude of affordable options. Pallav is actively constructing the channels through which these diverse edtech products will reach a wide audience.
For more such interesting founder journeys, subscribe to our newsletter www.founderthesis.com
Read more about Uolo:-
1.From 150 to 5,600 schools: how edtech startup uolo expanded across India
2.UOLO: Transforming B2B Edtech Industry One School at a time
3.New Breed Of Edtechs Will Emerge In Near Future: Co-founder, Uolo
4.You no longer live only once as UOLO bridges the gap between schools and teachers
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Transcript
Introduction to Pallav Pandey's Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I am Pallav Pandey. I am co-founder and CEO of EULO.
00:00:18
Speaker
The word serial sounder truly does not do justice to the guests of this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast. Pannav Pandey has been at the forefront of the startup revolution in India for two decades now. He is now on his fourth venture, and his past ventures include Knowlarity, which was India's first cloud telephony SaaS startup, and FastFox, which was a real estate tech startup that was acquired by India's largest real estate tech platform.
00:00:44
Speaker
Pallav is currently building Uolo, which has the ambitious plan of being the default platform distributing EdTech products in India. Uolo's thesis is that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all EdTech product and India needs thousands of affordable EdTech products. And at Uolo, he is building the pipes through which these products will reach the masses.
00:01:06
Speaker
Stay tuned for this insight filled conversation with a veteran founder and subscribe to the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app to learn from the best minds in the startup world.
Early Life and Meeting Co-founder Amrit
00:01:24
Speaker
Where did you grow up? And you know, were you in a business family? Were your parents doing jobs?
00:01:32
Speaker
So, I grew up in Delhi. We kind of grew up in a joint family, large family in Delhi. So, that's how it was. And I guess IIT Kanpur is where you met your first co-founder, right? Amrit. And that is right. That is right. Actually, this kind of tightly is a result that both IIT and Amrit were actually in the same badge in IIT Kanpur.
00:01:55
Speaker
But it so happened that for four years, being in the same college, same batch, we never met each other. So we actually met in Silicon Valley because both of us were working for different companies in Silicon
Career Beginnings and Political Consulting
00:02:11
Speaker
Valley. And then, you know, there's like from IIT, you got placed abroad. Like how did you? Went directly. Yeah. That's it. Where did you get placed after IIT?
00:02:21
Speaker
Basically, there was a company called NVIDIA. Now it is very big. About that time, it was very small, almost like a startup. It was like 2000.com bust was just about to happen. So in 1999, the company said, hey, there are no engineers left in Silicon Valley to hire.
00:02:44
Speaker
So, why don't we go outside, go find India's where we can get, right? So, somebody smart said, let's go get India's from IIT. So, they sent a recruiter to do that exercise and then the output of that was me with maybe six or seven other guys, all of us went and joined in the video.
00:03:06
Speaker
So this was in 2000 and then Abhish was working with another company called EFI and then we kind of happened to meet over there and then I came back in 2003 and he also kind of came back around the same time.
00:03:21
Speaker
We were doing different things, but then we kind of collaborated briefly, kind of became good friends. So why did you quit your Nvidia job earning big dollar salary, come back to India to do a startup?
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, the startup world is correct. So actually, if I were to describe that, rationally talk about that time now, I would say I just was very foolish. And that is what everybody told me, even at that point of time, I just felt that I want to do something more than just work for this corporation and contribute towards a chipset.
00:04:07
Speaker
So when I got India, I got India, but I thought that it was meaningful, which would kind of make a difference. So I came back and I started a political consulting company in India.
00:04:26
Speaker
Okay, which would be on lines of what that Kishore, I don't know. This is like, yeah, this is Kishore. No, Prashant Kishore, okay. Prashant Kishore, 10 years before Prashant Kishore. So, I was 24 years at that point of time. The thought process was,
00:04:46
Speaker
As I can say, all of this data that is now available on Indian elections, we can crunch that and do a lot of smart analysis and then guide these political leaders to be smarter in how they fight elections. Also in the process, once you make the, I think the big idea was that if you can make the Indian elections more predictable,
00:05:11
Speaker
You will have people who are less corrupt or less desperate. I was very naive, but the thought process was, the reason people are so corrupt is because the market is so unpredictable. Even if you do very good work, you are not sure if you are going to win next time. So the only way you can take care of yourself is to be corrupt for the five years that you are in power.
00:05:35
Speaker
But if there was a method to this madness, if you could actually know what voters wanted, how this whole, you know, next of people are going to vote beforehand, then you can do those things, right? And be systematic about it.
00:05:47
Speaker
So we started this concept of voter relationship management, worked with a lot of people, and did that for a lot of years, actually. I did that for almost five years. You built like a CRM product for the voter relationship management? What did you do? Was it a software business or was it services? Yes, a lot of things. It was, I thought it was software and my customers thought it was services.
00:06:12
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, so what so we and then eventually it kind of degenerated from a more socialist idealist thought process to being more of a election war horse kind of a thing where people started using whatever little I understood about elections and data to work as a to make me work as a syphologist.
00:06:41
Speaker
What is a syphologist? Syphologist is somebody who can do surveys and make sense of the election trends and predict what is going to happen. So that whole science of surveys is called syphology. So I ended up doing that. So a lot of interesting work, but it came to a point.
00:07:02
Speaker
So, you would give data on the basis of which the party would decide where to invest money, like what are the... Actually, that was the original thought. The thought was that you work with an MP and MLA, they've got
00:07:17
Speaker
their own funds and then they have got their own influence by which they can get stuff done. So you can kind of guide them that, you know, this is what bases some primary research and a little bit of data analysis from elections that, you know, this is your voter base. Then the primary research says that this is what they want. It could be a hand pump or a tube well or a school. So go this work, you'll get votes. These are your voters. So that was they were actually some good good MLAs who actually made their
00:07:47
Speaker
MLA fund deployed basis report that we had given. Eventually, it came to a point where we became an election mercenary, where we were used to, you know, do the legwork for political parties, they will pay us. And, you know, there's no, no sense of purpose left. So I felt that I'm actually worse off than what I was at Nvidia.
00:08:13
Speaker
Tell me something, would you get paid if your clients lost the election? Would they still pay you?
00:08:26
Speaker
Mostly, yes. So then we did that for a good four or five years. Then something interesting, then Amrit who kind of had met in 2002-03 and we were in touch all this while and then he finished his
00:08:42
Speaker
MBA, MacKenzie and all of that. He was also trying to find the opportunity and he said, hey, let's do something in India.
Founding Knowlarity and Transition to FastFox
00:08:52
Speaker
And I said, yeah, why not? Even because I also was at that point feeling that whatever I'm doing is not really as exciting as I thought it would be.
00:09:02
Speaker
So we came up with this idea for Nolarity and it so happened that what we built in Nolarity was a cloud telephony platform and it was basically new at that point of time so using
00:09:17
Speaker
being able to integrate with telephony at a cloud level, so without any hardware being able to do stuff with telephony. Which was revolutionary at that time, right? This is 2009, right? Nobody is doing that in India.
00:09:34
Speaker
Essentially, in India, the way people would do it is through those EPUBX physical hardware, like the EPUBX hardware. Yeah, yeah. So we basically replaced the physical EPUBX thing. Actually, a lot of things that we see now, they did not exist. So actually, we almost pioneered that. So for example, when you place an order on e-commerce website, and now you get a call, and you have to press 1 to confirm. So that kind of thing we invented. Now, there are a lot of places where there are virtual numbers.
00:10:03
Speaker
So you see a number on a classified, but that number will kind of patch you somewhere else. Or like when you call Zumato, and it will basically be some virtual number that you're calling and all of that, right? Or like with the taxi booking services. Oh, but all of that, right? So all of that, we ended up inventing a lot of that things.
00:10:27
Speaker
So that was kind of exciting. But the first project was very interesting, right? So first project, I was still consulting the then Chief Minister of Odisha, Naveen Bhatnayak. And we gave him a report which, so we were doing a survey. So we did a massive survey for
00:10:50
Speaker
the government and the idea was to figure out what is the strength of BJP versus BJD because they were always fought in alliance so people did not know what is the strength of one party versus another and basis our survey we kind of actually gave them a number saying hey if you were to split this is what you will get this is what BJP will get and and then the reaction was that hey then why the heck are we giving them so many seats
00:11:20
Speaker
So they actually broke, this is in 2009, they actually broke the alliance basis, the work that we had done. And when that happened, how did you do this? Like how did you run this campaign?
00:11:35
Speaker
like you got water for numbers and then you would do an outgoing call. No, no, this is pre-volarity. This is pre-volarity. So this was actually a lot of shitty legwork. But what we did was we had made some technology back then. Remember that torch, one Nokia phone that used to come. So we had a technology on that allowed us to run an app on that smartphone.
00:12:01
Speaker
So there was a Java application that you could do and that Java application what it did, it understood pre-smartphone world. So in that what we did was this Java application was running and then there was a standalone Bluetooth GPS that used to be there. So now what would happen is that our guys would go into this.
00:12:22
Speaker
deep interior of Orissa do a survey that used to open up on that mobile phone and the location of the surveyor used to get captured from the GPS and then the GPS over the Bluetooth that will get transferred to the application and then you know over the 2G connection that data will come to us in Delhi.
00:12:40
Speaker
So we kind of had made this technology. We showed it to, there used to be this guy called, he's no more now, Pyarimun Mahapatra. So he was the Amit Shah of Navit Fatnaik. So we showed it to him. He really liked it. He said, okay, fine, we'll do this. So we talked to about 17, 18,000 people in Orissa, made a report, and the alliance with BJP got broken up. And then,
00:13:10
Speaker
So that was like my career high in political consulting. And then we pitched him an idea that, hey, we are also doing this molarity thing. And what we can do is actually we can make a phone call to every single person in Odisha.
00:13:28
Speaker
And what you can do is we'll have a message from Naveen Patnaik, which is explaining the rationale of why he broke up with BJP. And we'll call up everybody. That is how Nolarity actually started, because the initial money that we got from that project became the seed capital for Nolarity. So till that time, it was just a prototype. Samreesh was still in the US at that point of time.
00:13:54
Speaker
And then after we got this project, we executed it. We were still working remotely on TeamViewer. This is pre-Zoom world, right? Phone calls and all of that. We coordinated this project, executed it. Then Amrit left his job at McKinsey, came to India. Then we started building on that more formally.
00:14:15
Speaker
And just for our listeners, we interviewed a reason that is episode 18 in the stream. So then what, like you, you left this political consulting thing used. Yeah. So I eased out of it. Yeah. So for me personally, it was all in, but when BJP lost, then BJP kind of roped us in and said, Hey, you know,
00:14:39
Speaker
kind of got screwed in Odisha, but you work with us now. And so then my company was working with BJP extensively. So we did multiple states for them. But I had kind of moved out, like I was already looking to move out maybe for, for about a year before that. And then I was 100% into nolarity, then I had a breach for building it. Then we raised money from Sequoia. And you know, the journey happened.
00:15:03
Speaker
You know, most people think of a founder like Sanjeev Vikchandadi who's been with Info Edge for two and a half decades or more now. Why did you and you were a co-founder at Nolarity, probably significant stake or I don't know in those days, maybe you're
00:15:20
Speaker
We are equal partners. So I and Abhish were equal partners. So we were building it together. So what happened was we built it together for almost five years, but came to a point where there was a lot of divergence of opinion about how to take the company forward. So we were not able to come at the same plane, so to say. Then we realized that what were the options in front of you that, I mean,
00:15:49
Speaker
What were those two different directions? So, I think two broad things were around, do we grow a polarity as an enterprise business or as an SMB business?
00:16:03
Speaker
So far, it had been what? Enterprise or SMB? We were doing both at that point of time. You were running two companies rolled into one. Strategically speaking, SMB was the right thing to do because as a company, you have a lot of power over the SMB customers.
00:16:22
Speaker
But all the writing on the wall was that SMB business was unsustainable. And the enterprise business is what will give you the money. So I was actually pushing for us to do the enterprise business properly. Abhish wanted to do the SMB business properly. So Abhish's point was that with enterprise, it will not happen. What problem is that? It was not happening with SMB either.
00:16:49
Speaker
A lot of dissonance and standard kiosk confusion to a point where we thought that we might be better letting one person run the show. So that is what happened. Some reach remained. I moved out. So that is where the journey for Nullarity ended for me. Eventually, it all went OK. The company ended up doing enterprise mode.
00:17:21
Speaker
that product consolidation phase, but it doesn't matter, right? I mean, I think the, together the outcome would have been much better. We yielded the space to other players. Eventually the outcome was not bad. We got sold for a hundred million dollars, but we could have done much bigger. So, but yeah, now that space that got created is done by our friend Shifu in Exotel. So he's doing well.
00:17:47
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Okay. Fascinating. So, then what? Like when you decided to move out, were you able to cash out your stake or you cashed out when the GAPSHAP acquired polarity? That's what you cashed out. So, in the next financing round that Mayfield came in, Mayfield led the rounds and Sequoia was there. It was the secondary that happened.
00:18:13
Speaker
So, I could sell part of the stake then, so that kind of at least financially took care of me and then I kind of went on, but I had already moved out. So, then till that time I was on the board and then when the eventual Gopshab deal happened, the balance was sold out.
00:18:34
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Okay. So what did you decide to do then? Like you are out of polarity, out of work, but you have money to experiment. So I zeroed in on two things, which I thought could be generally larger opportunities. So one was edtech and other was real estate. And as I talked to people on edtech, I realized that
00:19:04
Speaker
maybe the market is not ready, so I actually chickened out of doing a tech. I wanted to do a tech, but I chickened out and I did real estate instead, which in hindsight I think it was a bad call.
00:19:17
Speaker
was genuinely hard, very, very hard market. So we tried very hard. What part of the market? I mean, real estate is so broad. Yeah, it's an online angle to real estate. So what we thought when we got in, we said, hey, the problem is this whole information asymmetry, brokers have all the information. And then all the classifiers are shitty because everything is practically incorrect.
00:19:45
Speaker
So who has the right information? The brokers have the right information. And the brokers are talking to each other. Can we become a communication there between the brokers? And then the brokers can do. And then WhatsApp was kind of catching up at that point of times. This is 2014-15 time period. So brokers were forming a lot of WhatsApp groups and a lot of information was getting exchanged on that. And in contrast to the information
00:20:14
Speaker
like random information that was unclassified, everything on the broker groups was actually correct information. So we thought, hey, what if we have an app which is a broker's app? So it's like WhatsApp for brokers. And all the brokers can chat on that. So while they will not disclose the exact property details, but we'll get to know which broker is dealing in what and all of that. And the app
00:20:43
Speaker
went crazy viral in the broker community. So we had like a lack plus downloads of verified brokers. So we do a lot of, in like a span of like four or five months, it was crazy. Very heavy times, 2015. So light speed invested seed round. And then in 2015, of course, we did not have any revenue model.
00:21:12
Speaker
And we were still trying to figure out. While we were trying to figure out the revenue model, we said, OK, let's go raise the series A as well, because things are going good. And then the A. And that was the boom area for real estate, right? Housing, no brokers. Yeah, and so housing and all that was happened. So it was kind of real shit was still looking. It was a hot space at that time.
00:21:42
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I would say housing had raised $17 billion the year before, I think, 2014. And they'd already managed to blow up all the money in about a year. So it was crazy, crazy times, but generally, real estate was not as bad a world as it is now. And by the time 2015 ended,
00:22:06
Speaker
The whole world turned very, very cold and dark, like what it is now in the venture space, where people just did not want to make any new investments. People wanted to know very definitive revenue models. And we were like, oh my God, we just raised a million dollars and we do not even have a revenue model, we'll die. So we pivoted.
00:22:31
Speaker
from doing this thing to being a rental brokerage company and the idea was that will become a full stack like no broker basically like no broker but no broker was
00:22:47
Speaker
internet based play, we were we decided to be a full stack play. So, no broker was just discovery, you wanted to manage the transaction. Just discovery and to end fulfillment. Yeah, manage the transaction and in retrospect, I don't think that's a great idea.
00:23:04
Speaker
But that's what we did. We pivoted. We managed to scramble for some money. What does this mean, managing the transaction? Like you would take like 10 apartments from a builder.
00:23:18
Speaker
No, we were not taking the apartment really what the original idea was that we have because we have so much information flowing on our broker exchange on the supply side we will be able to contact those brokers and they will act as the supply side broker and we will act as the demand side broker and for demand there are any which ways lot of platforms out there we would plug into that get the demand
00:23:40
Speaker
and then our guys will work with the broker to close the deal. We will give a little bit of 10 servicing at our end.
00:23:51
Speaker
So instead of charging for a classified ad, you will take success fees, like that broker gets success fees commission of 15 days or one month. So some part of that will go to you. Success fees, yes. Same model, better service. And then whatever money gets made, we share it with the supply side broker. A lot of times supply side broker will also get paid from the supplier, which is Landlord. That was the model.
00:24:19
Speaker
which is kind of a mirror of how the world works in the offline space. When I think about it now objectively, I think there were structural issues in this market. What were the structural issues? Think of it like this, that for an internet player to win,
00:24:40
Speaker
It has to be better than the local guy that is out there. But the real estate as a business, think of a customer, he is looking to find a property in, let's say, pinnacle apartments. Now, the broker who is just having a small shop near pinnacle is equipped better to service that guy because he knows each and everything about pinnacle apartments, which a bigger company will never be able to do.
00:25:08
Speaker
So the question is that we are just fooling around. We do not have as much depth on the inventory side that is required. So while we might overall say that we have got like 5,000 properties in Burghao, that doesn't mean a shit because we do not have that four properties in pinnacle apartments. We only have like two.
00:25:30
Speaker
So we are worse off than the local brokers. Local broker will kick your ass every single time. And then brokers being brokers, so brokers are another very opportunistic kind of player. And they will always try to cut you out of the transaction. Cut you out of the deal, right? Cut you out of the deal every single time. And this is very different from other platforms where, let's say, there's a, so I mean, to be fair, even cab drivers want to cut out the Ola from the deal, right?
00:26:01
Speaker
So they do that, but still as a platform, there is a lot of dependency on Ola because for a daily bread, you have to go back to Ola. Problem is the... Yeah, it's high frequency. Like you get eight orders a day. Yes, it's high frequency. Real estate is a super low frequency business for the broker. So broker is fine cutting you out and say, okay, next one. That's a big deal.
00:26:26
Speaker
So that is what happened. That was a structural issue. And then it will manifest itself in different forms and shapes. But you cannot be a first act. You can do what to. No broker guys are my batch mate. And at that point of time, I think we had less appreciation of no broker at that point of time.
00:26:49
Speaker
In hindsight, I feel that the choices that they made were very correct because they said we will only do what we can realistically do.
00:27:01
Speaker
to command a very less fees for that much service of making the discovery and connection happen, and then you go figure it out yourself. And I think there's value to it. And then there's a very lot of pragmatism around how an internet business can possibly look like. So I think much smarter play. So I think Fastworks had a whole bunch of learnings.
00:27:25
Speaker
I think we were lucky that we got eventually bought out by Prop Tiger Housing Illara Group basically. So, Dhruv was the CEO. So, he had some plans around building a full stack business. So, in that plans, we fit in very well. And honestly, we were not doing very well.
00:27:47
Speaker
But we were lucky we got out. Full stack for rental, you're saying? Because PropTiger is already doing sale purchase transactions, right? Yes. So sale purchase they were doing, and they already had a demand engine at housing.com. So what they wanted to do was they said, hey, we have a demand engine, and we have a full stack. There are three, basically, markets in real estate. There's a primary transaction market, secondary transaction market, and then there's a rental market.
00:28:14
Speaker
So, and then what you need to power one of these three markets is a demand engine, which is housing.com. So, in his scheme of things, he said, hey, I've got the demand, I've got a full stack arm around primary, and with Fastbox acquisition, I can get a full stack arm around rental.
Joining Uolo and Strategic Pivot
00:28:33
Speaker
And you know, secondary, we'll maybe between PropTiger and Fastbox, we will figure something out.
00:28:38
Speaker
So that is how we got bought out. So yeah, so I kind of worked over there as the chief product officer for about a year. But yeah. Okay, just another note for listeners. Dhruv has also been featured on the show episode 109. So I worked there for about a year at
00:28:55
Speaker
housing as their chief product officer across the product. So we kind of had PropTiger, we had housing, we had Macar, and then we now had FastFox. So quite elaborate. Then they eventually got bought out by
00:29:11
Speaker
So, but I don't think they executed this plan, right, of full stack. Yeah, so they started with it. And they kind of started post acquisition, they tried for one year. But what happened is that one is, of course, I think there were structural issues that I described. Yeah, they discovered that also.
00:29:31
Speaker
They also realized that there are structural issues. So they closed that business. And also, fundamentally, there was a misalignment with the vision of the investors. So the investor, the real estate of Australia is basically a classified business in Australia. So they understand this market very well, which is the real estate media market.
00:29:54
Speaker
And they said, why don't we just sit down and focus on making housing.com the default destination for all the real estate traffic, which is what the company focused on. And it just made sense to cut down all the distractions. And fast was being one of them, so they eventually closed that business.
00:30:15
Speaker
And I think they've executed well. Last I spoke to Dhruv, he was saying housing is the market leader in terms of traffic. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think they've executed very, very well. And the journey has been long, right? So like Dhruv himself started from Prop Tiger and then
00:30:32
Speaker
managed to stay in the game long enough to acquire the right assets along the way and then keep executing. I think it's a very, very, like a lot of respect for the way Dhruv has gone about doing it. I guess at that level, it's more about people management than anything else.
00:30:51
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So then what next? You had some sort of lock in period there after they acquired you? Yes, there was a lock in. So I kind of let's cut my right hand to free the handcuff.
00:31:09
Speaker
Oh, I like that analogy. So when I came out, because I actually said I was in dilemma for some time, and then it became clear to me that I should go back to my original calling from five years back.
00:31:22
Speaker
which was edtech. And what had happened was just a little bit of flashback. So in 2015, when I was going through this real estate versus education kind of a dilemma, I ended up taking real estate, but I made an investment as an angel into YOLO as a company.
00:31:49
Speaker
Yula was then being run by my brother, Ankur, and one of his batch mates from ISP. So they were doing this cool company. And I was kind of, because I had kind of broken my head enough in startup. So I was kind of, of course, bouncing board around how to navigate this, that such to kind of work closely with them. So a lot of things were working okay. But as a business, it was not really taking off for them.
00:32:18
Speaker
So they spent while I was doing all of this Fast Fox thing, they were doing YOLO, they were going acquiring schools, they were effectively like an ERP player with a very thin communication kind of offering. So they had about 700 schools at that point of time, but the company was really not able to excite investors or kind of articulate
00:32:41
Speaker
what they want to become, right? This was a subscription business, like they were taking us subscription business. Yeah. Yeah. Subscription fees from schools for, uh, automating communication, like say buses late today or not, not automating. It was like manual. So think of WhatsApp for schools. So they were selling WhatsApp for schools, those schools, like the school could release their app on the play store through which it could send notifications to parents.
00:33:10
Speaker
It was actually not even white-labeled. It was their own YOLO app that the school can take and the children, parents will download and then the school administration, all the school teachers can send homework, school administrator could send this bus later and all of those kinds of messages. So that is how it was. Okay. And they would be the feature that teacher can send to all her students only so she can select her class and send homework only.
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, a little bit of nitty-gritty. Yes, all of this and a little bit of nitty-gritty around the fact that in WhatsApp group, all the numbers become exposed to all the group members. But in school set up, you don't want that. So on YULO, the same thing will happen, but you will not see other people's numbers. Schools love that.
00:34:03
Speaker
But this was one-to-one or it was like a group that got created. Parents would talk to each other or parents would get broadcast. A parent will get group messages, but the reverse flow was optional. A lot of schools did not want parents to reply.
00:34:22
Speaker
that you're just here from what I have to say, I don't want to hear what you have to say, like a typical school. Okay, so you could change setting to broadcast mode or group mode, okay. Yeah, so all of that. So that was there. So the company was not doing great. I mean, it was doing good at the fundamental level, but it was not doing great in the eyes of the investor world. How much was it making? Like what was the ARR?
00:34:46
Speaker
1.2 crores maybe. Okay. Which doesn't justify two ISB graduates doing it full-time. Absolutely not. Yeah, absolutely not. So, Batresh quit the company and
00:35:03
Speaker
Angkor continued to hang in there. And Baddish was a little unsettled for some time because his daughter was actually much older to Angkor. And she was coming in grade 10. And then he said, you know, this time, like, I need to seriously worry about the future and everything, right? And post school. So he said, you know, I am folding. So he folded. Angkor was also a wall at the back because no co-founder.
00:35:32
Speaker
are not able to raise money, business is barely profitable. So what we did was
00:35:43
Speaker
Besides moral support, I ended up leading a syndicate for him on Angel List and then on Let's Venture. So we raised two syndicates for him, raised some capital. And this was all through the time when I was in housing actually.
00:36:03
Speaker
So, but I slowly started getting more vested into the opportunity, like I used to start. Also, I kind of had my own mental cycles available. Before that, there's too much of my own shit that I was busy with, right? Yeah. Being a founder is a full-time job. Being a founder in first works and then, you know, my own company was not doing great. So then I felt that, you know, this business is definitely exciting, but maybe it needs to be done differently.
00:36:33
Speaker
So, then I kind of met Angkor and convinced him that, you know, let's just do the same business in a different way all over again, right? And the way to do that would be that we'll create a new company, buy you out, buy out this company and then raise money in that company and then start building forward from that point of view, the new strategy with no obligation to what we have done in the last 5-7 years.
00:37:00
Speaker
What is a syndicate? You said you raise the syndicate on angels. Let's venture an angel list has got a lot of angel investors who are willing to make investments. But the way these platforms work is that one guy has to raise his hand and say, hey, I think this company is good. And I am putting my money. And that person then convinces other angels that they should also put the money. So you kind of form a
00:37:29
Speaker
group of people and that is called a syndicate and then somebody needs to act as a syndicate lead. So I ended up being a syndicate lead who convinced other people that this YULO is a good opportunity, I am putting my own money, you also put money. So that is what I did on Angel List and Let's Venture and poured some capital for YULO.
00:37:50
Speaker
And this syndicate lead has to do a lot of calling and make the pitch himself? So what this syndicate lead has to do? These platforms take care of that heavy lifting. All the heavy lifting of finding angel investors are done by these angel list and let's venture. But when the presentation happens, the lead will have to share his thesis and the founder will come and talk about how the business is doing. So that is what my role was.
00:38:17
Speaker
No, other question, sorry. Why this complication of buying that company out with a new company and all of that? Was it the capital was messy? Lot of investors in that.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah, because I think what happens is that because companies are like five year old company, a lot of small, small investors, a lot of capital raised. So we had to clean it up because it was not investor friendly. And then also there was a room that was required to be created for me to come and operate.
00:38:48
Speaker
So, I said I'm going to put my next five years, ten years, whatever it takes to build this. And then there's a certain thought process around how we want to take it. So, what we did was we created a new company as a blank company. Then we acquired YULO's business on day one in our currency, our stock of the new company. And then we convinced Omidyar and Bloom to come and invest in this company on our
00:39:15
Speaker
a new management team and a new direction that we want to take this company. So they came in. Bloom was with me in my previous company. So it was a little bit of comfort there. And for Omidyar, they had a belief in this space. They believed that this is an interesting market. So both of them came together. They put in some money. And in 2020, we could execute this plan. And then that is how the journey of what we call as YOLO 2.0 started.
00:39:45
Speaker
So the current company is that I'm co-founder and CEO of is actually, we call it, we still call it YOLO, but in reality it is the YOLO 2.0. Okay. Okay. Fascinating. So what was your pitch to Blue when over the years?
00:40:01
Speaker
So the pitch was very simple. We said the future of schools is going to be different, where these schools will have a platform that will not only help them do stuff inside the school, but will also contribute towards a lot of learning products that will be there on that platform. And the reason that platform should exist is because there are now smartphones in the homes of people.
00:40:30
Speaker
and the learning can continue to happen in the homes. Let us say if you were taught about the solar system in a grade 5 in a school, then you can watch a small video on solar system at your home on your parent's smartphone.
00:40:49
Speaker
But you need a platform for that to happen, right? So a platform should be able to send that content, and then maybe that content itself was available on that platform, and the teacher just selected and sent it, and stuff like that. You could have people learning English, doing math practice, a whole bunch of stuff. So that is what we want to create. But we want to start with going to a lot of schools.
00:41:14
Speaker
and that platform should be there and maybe it will just start by looking like a plain simple ERP but that is the starting point it will go into the learning zone as well.
00:41:27
Speaker
So that was in which it was quite fuzzy, but they wanted to do this. So they were excited about what it could be. So that is how the journey started. Is there a global comparable company which does something like this? No, there is not. There is not. Because in US, there is a threat. Either companies are doing ERP or they are doing content. The combination of ERP plus content, I don't think there is any
00:41:57
Speaker
Yeah, so ERP plus content combination is not there. So in that sense, it's like the Narasimha avatar, right? So it's half man, half animal kind of a thing. But the hypothesis was, at least for us, that in India, this avatar is what is required. Because if you look at globally,
00:42:20
Speaker
The market in India is very different than the rest of the world where there is public schooling system in India, 40% of the kids go to a private school and this is the creamy layer of India or a layer that has got any cream is going to a private school actually in India.
00:42:38
Speaker
And they behave very differently than how the US market works. The decision making will happen at a school by school level. And once they sign on to a platform, they will want to do everything on that. So getting inside the school is going to be the single biggest bottle. That is why the market is different and then possibly the solution should also be different. That was our pitch at that point.
00:43:04
Speaker
Like, I guess in the US, they would be using tools like, say, I think Kahoot is one and there are others.
Uolo's Distinct Approach in EdTech
00:43:11
Speaker
Kahoot is there. There's a company called Power School, which is the biggest ERP player. So it's valued at about $6 billion listed company. But they only do ERP. They do not mess around with learning. And then you have learning companies. Kahoot is like a learning company, right? Like that's moron.
00:43:27
Speaker
Kahoot is a little bit of like learning company because they work with the teachers on the quizzes and then they have a lot of other learning programs like they have a math program now, they have an English program now. So it is not an ERP company. But interestingly, Kahoot has recently acquired a US company called Clever.
00:43:51
Speaker
Which is ERP. Which is a little different from ERP but it is more in the ERP realm. So, Clever is a school SSO company.
00:44:01
Speaker
What is SSO? Secure sign-on. Single sign-on, right? So what clever allows people to do is, let's say, if you think about a school, the school needs a whole bunch of other tech companies to come and plug into the school. But the problem is every single company has a problem that the child account should get created.
00:44:24
Speaker
But for that, you need to interface with the ERP and stuff like that. So Clever sits in between. And it allows the ERP login that would be there in PowerSchool to talk to a Dragon Math solution via Clever. And then Clever, I think, also has a little bit of their own login management. So if you do not have a ERP, I think even then it works. So Kahoot is becoming now
00:44:51
Speaker
similar to learning plus utility space, which is what we are building. And learning plus admin. Yeah, in India. But everybody started from a very different point. So there is, of course, Leeds School in India, which is working with schools, but more on content side, not on the admin and ERP. Like Leeds thesis is also a little bit like that I will give you everything that you need.
00:45:21
Speaker
So I will give you an academic ERP. So not necessarily the managing the school and the fees kind of an ERP, but I'll give you an academic ERP and I will give you every single thing. So they will manage the report cards and stuff like that. Attendance, I'll give you an app and all the content. So there will be daily content. And then of course, I'll give you my books.
00:45:45
Speaker
Plus, I'll give you a smart class, a physical team. And lesson plans and also that teachers can teach easily. So basically, a learning company with a little bit of ERP offerings. So I would say, Lead School is also trying to be that everything clear, but starting from an academic world.
00:46:06
Speaker
and we are trying to be the everything player but starting from a utility world or a ERP world. And so your thesis is that India is an everything player market. For schools yes but I think when you also try to be an everything player you have to figure out what is it that you will do and what is it that you will let other people do as in
00:46:29
Speaker
For example, lead will say that if the child has to learn maths, it has to be the maths that I am giving.
00:46:40
Speaker
But what our approach is that there are different people require different kinds of math programs and different schools will find some different math program relevant for them and that decision is best left to the school. So let them have whatever math program that they want, but a part of that math program should happen on our platform.
00:47:05
Speaker
So, we want to be a platform company in this market and that platform grows both ways. It grows inside the school utility space. So, it starts capturing the fees, attendance, report card, communication of the school. So, that creates a lock-in inside the school. The school is not dependent upon you.
00:47:28
Speaker
And then it also grows on top where, let us say, all these other learning programs that the school is having, it powers that to extend in the after-school space. These schools, as we know, are going to extend in the after-school hours. So the way to think about it is that school as a business
00:47:50
Speaker
was always in a box and that box was a space and time box. So, the school could only operate in the school premises during what we know as the school hours.
00:48:04
Speaker
But any local business wants to expand, wants to grow. So the way school will grow is when it goes outside of this box. And in COVID, these schools have realized that they can actually operate in the after-school hours. They can operate when the child is still at home.
00:48:23
Speaker
But what they need is a platform to be able to operate there. And that platform was Zoom at that point of time. But actually Zoom is not really designed for the school. So you need something else. So something that can help the school, let's say the school wants to do some extra classes, they should be able to do seamlessly. Because all the children are there, that app is with the children, the scheduling and everything happens seamlessly. If there's some digital content that these students need to consume in the after-school hours, that should happen seamlessly.
00:48:53
Speaker
If the children need to improve their maths, it should be simpler to prove that because the questions are available and then they can answer those multiple choice questions and all of that on the same app.
00:49:06
Speaker
So that digital infrastructure is what we think is required as the schools evolve to be the schools of the future. They need an infrastructure and that infrastructure comes from us. Okay, fascinating. So this needs a lot of investment in content or are you looking at aggregating content from multiple sources? Yeah, so people need content.
00:49:32
Speaker
But it is beyond the capacity of any one person to address the content need of the market. This market is going to be perpetually fragmented. And the reason for that is also that the fragmented content market is required for schools to be able to differentiate themselves with their neighboring school.
00:49:57
Speaker
So, if everybody is using the same content, then there is practically no differentiation left. So, it's an interest of the schools to pedal different variants of pedagogy, say, oh, we do Oxford maths, oh, we do this, that, right? So, schools will keep doing that. And that is how they... Plus teacher creativity, like teachers want to be creative.
00:50:20
Speaker
Teacher creativity, yes. So teachers will say, I will do, let's follow this, let's follow that. All of that chaos will always be there in the school market. So the content market will remain fragmented. So it is best left for existing content players or for that matter even new content players to come and create content.
00:50:45
Speaker
Because content will remain a niche play, there will be good profitable companies coming out, but it will not be a giant internet company coming out of that market. So we think that all of these content companies need to have digital extensions, digital exercises that run on a platform and not in some standalone app, as in
00:51:11
Speaker
How many apps can a parent have? It will not have a separate math app, an English app, and all of that. So you need one platform where a digital version of that content will also be there. And either these publishers will create it, or some other newer vendors will come. They will tie up with the publishers, or something new will get created. But this will run on a platform.
00:51:33
Speaker
And that platform is something that the teachers use, the school uses, and the platform that connects everybody. That platform is what you know what to be.
00:51:45
Speaker
So, who are these content creators that you're talking about? Are you talking about like Pearson, Eshan, these kind of publishers or like a QMAT like these startups which are in these? I think both will converge. I think both of these worlds will converge. Right now, we look at these two worlds as very different worlds. One operates in the school market and one operates in the after-school market.
00:52:12
Speaker
But we think that the school will extend itself beyond the school hours. So the school players will also want to flex themselves in the after-school market. And the good thing, the structural advantage of the school players is that they're aligned with the school. We have launched three programs of our own. Two are launched. One is in the works. So what we did is we launched an English speaking program.
00:52:40
Speaker
which fits into the school systems, there are two periods that the teacher will take in a month to teach students about how they can speak properly in English. But then in the after school hours, the child will practice English speaking on the YOLO app.
00:53:01
Speaker
So the structural problem in the market was that there was not enough time available during the school hours for every child to speak adequately. And because they were not speaking adequately, they were not increasing their English fluency. But this problem can be sorted by technology. And there's enough time available. There's hardware available at the school at home. Children can use that. But it has to fit into that. It should come out of the school. So we have lost this one program.
00:53:30
Speaker
Then there's another program that we have launched, which is a company that we acquired actually. It's called techie. That is a computer science curriculum. So that replaces the existing computer science curriculum in the school. And the children are able to go learn Python and block programming inside the school, right? And then they can go home and they continue to build on the project that they were doing inside the school.
00:53:57
Speaker
So, give you a contrast. So, on one end, you have companies like White Hat Junior, they will have 800 rupees per hour to teach the child block programming. We are able to deliver that, including the physical book, including the teacher training in 800 rupees per year,
00:54:25
Speaker
And you said three products, right? English, coding. And the third one we are still, it is in the works, we have not launched it, but that is around maths. So we are doing a maths program that is basically a book and a digital program.
00:54:44
Speaker
And the idea is that all of these three programs, we kind of sell it enough, show enough traction for all of our content creators to realize that this is how it needs to work right in this school and after the school. And then you let them do all of the other content development in the world that needs to be done in case by them and not by us. Amazing. OK. So this is essentially
00:55:11
Speaker
a way for the school to upsell more stuff. Like the English speaking course is not something which a school will give for free to students, but it will add something to the fees. So maybe you are charging 800 or something, whatever. So they will, school will add a little bit on top. Yeah, absolutely. That is how it works. Okay. Okay. Okay.
00:55:30
Speaker
So, therefore, it is not a cost center for a school anymore, which would be the problem with most edtechs are cost centers, like most edtechs who are selling to schools are essentially a cost center for a school where they have to pay a subscription. This becomes a... It's a profit center. It's a profit center. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Okay.
00:55:52
Speaker
You would do like both the teacher training, get the teachers equipped, provide them with the books if needed, and the LMS would be all loaded like the course curriculum. And this would be like a mix of during school, some work, some work on their own after school or after school also can be teacher guided.
00:56:13
Speaker
So, I think in the way we imagine the world after school could also be teacher related because we think that the school products and school services both will go outside of the box that the school is in right now.
00:56:28
Speaker
But so far we have not taken the teacher out of the box. We do that very rarely. Like sometimes that does not happen on our two products like the techie and speak products that we have. It does not happen there.
00:56:45
Speaker
Maybe we'll try it out. I think there's also a lot of change, right? So the teachers also are not willing to work beyond the school hours and all of that. It's a complex ecosystem. Yeah. So they also need to have some more incentive. Yeah. So now they have to have incentives so that the school should be willing to increase their salary a little bit. So I think some of these things will happen automatically as the market
00:57:13
Speaker
transforms into the new world. What we need to do is do the absolute minimum because if you try to do too much, you'll burn yourself out without making any change.
00:57:25
Speaker
So do the absolute minimum and make this change happen. So once enough schools are doing it, these models will naturally figure out. Think about it. If the school is going to make money in the after-school hours and if a teacher is playing a role on it, of course she'll get compensated. But if I were to go and preach it today,
00:57:46
Speaker
you know, the buyers might not be there. So I'm kind of only doing stuff which establishes the paradigm. And, you know, these things will automatically evolve. Okay, fascinating. So essentially, in the long term, the tuition market is something which the schools could take a pie out of that also, like parents anyway, send kids to tuition.
Adapting to COVID and Enhancing Offerings
00:58:08
Speaker
So instead of sending to tuition, somewhere else, the school is only upselling tuition to the captive audience which they have of parents and
00:58:16
Speaker
The trust is already there. Okay, amazing. Tell me the product journey. So you initially acquired the existing Hulu product, which was just like a more sophisticated version of WhatsApp. So from there, tell me the stages the product has gone through. Yeah, quite a lot of transformation. I think everything that was required to work was working, because there were about 700-100 schools using it.
00:58:45
Speaker
But it was very monolithic. So it was not thought of as a platform. It was a single use case product, basically. A single use case product, very monolithically designed. Then what we ended up doing was we started reimagining it. But we had to kind of continue giving support to the older
00:59:09
Speaker
a version of it. So all the new stuff that we kept building on. So we said, hey, let us see if we can get the mind share of the students in the after-school hours. So there is a property that we developed which allowed children to spend time, do a whole bunch of things, do hobby classes, this, that. This was not offered by the school, but it was happening in the app that the school was offering. So we created that. OK, like a marketplace for
00:59:37
Speaker
Marketplace kind of thing, but we said, keep it free. The idea was not to make money out of it. The idea was to establish a behavior where children spend time in the after-school hours on a digital platform. And for us, it was also good that COVID had happened. So people had the time to spend on our platform. So that we all built out.
01:00:00
Speaker
You raised your funding pre-COVID or during COVID? Pre-COVID. How much was that? $3 million. What happened was that we got a commitment pre-COVID, but then COVID happened. And then because of COVID, it got delayed by a few months. So we actually got the money in bank only in October 2020. So that is... But what were you doing in that period till October?
01:00:30
Speaker
you continue to build through your own funds, sir. So yeah, that is what happened. So what happened was that 1.0 was having this nice sweet prop, almost break-even kind of a journey. And then we basically put accelerator on that. So the burn increased. We started getting some high-quality people. And then COVID happened.
01:00:55
Speaker
But we were fortunate to kind of the things fell in place. So by the time
01:01:00
Speaker
We were completely out of money, and it came to a point where it also was hard for us to sustain in our individual capacity. We got around close. So that happened. Then in terms of product journey, because of COVID, there was a lot of nonsense stuff which was not required to be done. But we had to do it because schools started asking for it. Because schools had to operate in an online environment.
01:01:28
Speaker
And so they said, hey, do you have online classes on your platform? It was not planned to give you online classes, but we had to create that, we had to create flows for whole elements. Online classes means like a Zoom, like a video conferencing. Like a Zoom integrated on your platform. Actually, so problem in school is not the Zoom.
01:01:49
Speaker
The problem is that, how did you schedule it around Zoom? Access control it. Access control it and stuff like that. So then we had to kind of go solve that problem for school. Then there were a lot of schools that realized, especially the lower end of the spectrum, they realized that synchronous learning is something that we cannot achieve.
01:02:09
Speaker
because there is one device at home, and then two children who need to study. So the only way this can happen is in asynchronous fashion. So we will send videos, and the WhatsApp does not let you send large enough videos. So we'll send it on your platform, and then people will look at that. And then there'll be some homework workflow where children will do the homework with their notebook, take photographs, and submit that and all of that. So all of that stack we built in, then people said,
01:02:39
Speaker
We also need to have assessments, so we build assessments also. A lot of this became actually useless after COVID, by the way. But it still fits in our endgame kind of a situation. So what is it? Yeah, because for running the tuition classes, like all of this will be required. If a school was, yeah, absolutely. Right. So yeah, so that is what happened for good one year in the company.
01:03:08
Speaker
Also, I think what happened internally for us is that the market was so hot, the venture market, that just scrambling for engineers was very hard. And then everybody was working remote, it was a mayhem.
01:03:25
Speaker
So our market was moving very fast because of Covid, schools were all impacted and we had a hard time hiring people. There was an ad-tech hiring boom. Yeah, ad-tech hiring boom and we would somehow manage to stay afloat, honestly. And then post, as economy started to settle down, we could flesh out our own
01:03:51
Speaker
offering, so we could kind of migrate to a new platform, kind of clean up all the user flows so that it becomes very modular. Everything became microservice based, so we could actually flesh out things out of it. We built a quizzing platform where you can have, let's say tomorrow, publishers coming in and they have
01:04:16
Speaker
digital quizzes to have so they can kind of every single quiz like you know it's like typically people when they make quiz they will always have that corresponding to the style right multiple choice question problem is that it is boring right for a child you need to different stuff drag and drop sometimes fill in the blank sometimes not even for options because children are great at making random guesses
01:04:41
Speaker
And learning does not happen. They have to think harder and write something. So all of those formats we built out on the platform, we started deepening our own. These are like authoring tools, basically. These are authoring tools. So what is authoring? And then second is also authoring on the side of creation and also on the side of consumption, because the children will actually do this stuff.
01:05:09
Speaker
So both will happen on our platforms. Authoring will also happen, and then consumption will also happen. So we started from communication. The issue with communication is that it is quick to get in, but it is not sticky enough. So we said, OK, let's build fees. Let's build a report card. So some of these more commonly used modules we started building. So we consciously stayed outside of the ERP trap.
01:05:38
Speaker
And we said, you know, the one way to do that is because what happens is that customers are demanding. So they will ask for different things. And then you have to know when to say no to the customer.
01:05:52
Speaker
So what we did was we said let us burn this market, this profit pool that is there as an ERP company. We started taking zero money for the ERP solution. We said we will not touch this money because if we touch this money, you will hold us accountable to giving you some random feature and all our grand plans of evolving into a platform will get compromised.
01:06:18
Speaker
So, we burned that money as a profit pool and just focused on building good enough solutions that worked for 1995% of the schools and ignored the top 5-7% of the schools were very demanding.
01:06:36
Speaker
Okay. But what else is there? If you're doing academic performance, which is like report cards, and you're doing fee collection also, right? So what else is left? So I'll give you an example. So, and this is like the laundry list of ERP companies.
01:06:51
Speaker
So, teacher attendance, right, teacher payroll management, then you have things like library management, school physical stock management. We said all of that shit we are not going to do because that is not where we are really adding value.
01:07:18
Speaker
So, we stayed away from that. So, we have few modules very, very targetedly. We have fees, we have attendance, we have report card and we have got communication. It's four models. That's what we stick. Okay. And do you earn something from fees like a person, like a payment gateway charge or something or it's negligible?
01:07:39
Speaker
No, we don't make money from there. Actually, there's a little bit of opportunity people are pursuing around fee financing. So that opportunity is there, but we thought that if we succeed in what we are trying to do, then fee financing also we'll be able to do. So I'll tell you what is the fee financing opportunity and why it is a little bit complex in our market.
01:08:03
Speaker
So, free financing opportunity is that schools charge fees quarterly and the parents earn monthly. Right? So, if you can convert the quarterly fees into monthly fees, people are fine because it aligns with the salary cycles. And then therefore, there is a financing opportunity. But for that to work out, your parents should be credit worthy. Yeah, you need to do risk underwriting.
01:08:26
Speaker
So, now when you go to mass market of India and in the market that we operate, we get about 400-500 schools a month on the platform that we add. So, we are sitting at about 8500 schools right now.
01:08:42
Speaker
The way it works is these are mass market schools. The fees would be sometimes like a thousand rupees a month. The parents are not very great for these. So if you start offering things, a lot of times parents are like the civil school and all will not. So a lot of parents will get rejected by a global mayor.
01:09:07
Speaker
So, if you want to play this opportunity, you need to work with very local NBFCs, Work Comfortable Lending in Baliya.
01:09:16
Speaker
We've got schools in Baliya, but if you want a Bombay-based NBFC to do underwriting for these guys, they will not underwrite. So, how do you acquire schools? Like you said, 8500 schools you've acquired so far. What is the go-to market? This is all about Nullarity learnings coming back. So, back in Nullarity, we figured out that small businesses can be acquired over telephone.
01:09:42
Speaker
So you don't need to go physically to them because if your product is cheap or in our case free, then you can give a phone call, you can do some marketing on SMS, WhatsApp, get interest, get on a phone and explain the product, get on Zoom, give a demo.
01:10:00
Speaker
And if they like it, they'll take it. Why do you have to physically go? So when we started, actually, there was one venture capital fund that told me, Parla, whatever you're trying to do won't happen, because the tribal knowledge in the venture community is that schools have never been acquired at scale. It will not work out.
01:10:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. Most companies spend a lot on school acquisitions like Exe, Deetschool will have like feet on streets.
01:10:31
Speaker
Yeah. So, our philosophy is that they get this school in, create a lock-in, create a motor of these schools, because these schools are going to be very valuable in the future scheme of things.
Future Growth and Business Strategy
01:10:46
Speaker
And if these schools have a structural dependency on you, then you will make a little bit of fair money. If you try to make too much money, schools will kick you out.
01:10:54
Speaker
But if you make spare money, that relationship will last very, very long. And then as a platform, you make a lot of money because the money from a lot of schools adds up. So, 8500 schools have signed up. What is the ratio of these who are actually actively using it, like properly using the product?
01:11:12
Speaker
So there are different degrees of active. So we kind of get rid of schools that are so we use some schools were not active. But these 85 schools are broadly in different degrees of activity. So some people will use only communication and within that there are great some people will use us only for administrative communication that school is open school is closed because of whatever covid or flooding.
01:11:38
Speaker
Then there are use cases where teachers start using it, that is more active. Then there are schools that are also using fees, for example. So different degrees of activity, but all these 8500 schools are actually active schools that we have. Okay. So what is your plan to increase the engagement of schools on the platform? You know, like all these, it's essentially now
01:12:01
Speaker
You need to think like a Facebook, you know how Facebook Instagram are constantly tweaking algorithms to make users spend more time and minutes spent is the metric that they're constantly working to improve. Yeah. So basically you have to get more of the school on your platform. That is the plan in a nutshell. So first thing that we're doing is we are bringing, we have tied up with a company and we are bringing digital content on our platform.
01:12:31
Speaker
So this digital content is, think of it as a mini edu comp. So they give a solution for smart classes, but the same content that the teacher showed in the classroom can also be sent by the teacher on the Euro app.
01:12:50
Speaker
right because how you send it is basically the communication module but what goes is that same video that got played on the TV inside the classroom and then you know of course children start doing it they start spending more time and all of that so that is there our learning programs are paid programs but
01:13:07
Speaker
This content is accessible for free or is it for existing subscribers of this company? No, so we offer to our schools at a cost. So we say instead of buying smart class solution from adu.com for its extra marks,
01:13:25
Speaker
at one fraction of a cost, one third, one fourth of the cost from us. And by the way, it will also be shareable to the children. So that is the idea. We won't make too much money doing this either. But you're increasing the time spent. That metric is what you want to move right now.
01:13:45
Speaker
You know, smart classes used to be a thing 10 years back, but is it still a thing today? Are schools still buying a smart class product? It's basically keeping up with the Joannes kind of a thing, right? So because the other people are doing it, schools are doing it. So it's very interesting, actually. When I go and talk to some of the better schools,
01:14:11
Speaker
What they say is that we have stopped buying content from other players. We were doing it earlier, but we have stopped it. When I talk to the middle and the lower schools, they want to install a smart class and get some smart content. The reason is that
01:14:29
Speaker
The market is evolving, the people at the top, they are figuring out that actually this whole smart class, there is no engagement, nothing. It's something random that is there which gets played for some 5-7 minutes in the class. It does not integrate very seamlessly to the pedagogy, so we are checking out of it.
01:14:49
Speaker
Although they're still using the TV and all, but a lot of schools, what they started doing is they're letting their own teachers develop content which gets showed in the smart class. They're not buying content from outside. I guess YouTube has pretty much eaten away that smart class market for the more sophisticated schools.
01:15:09
Speaker
Absolutely. People are saying that, why should I pay you money for this packaged place? Think about Airbnb destroying the packaged hotels. They're saying that I've got so much variety to choose from on the internet. Why should I rely on one vendor for all the content? My teachers can scan YouTube, find out the best videos, and they will use that. But again,
01:15:39
Speaker
to be able to share that content with children. What you need is a platform.
01:15:46
Speaker
So that is what we provide. And teachers can create their own courses, like pick up a YouTube video, create their own quiz and send it to the class. So they can do that. But what is more common is teachers putting a pre-log or an epilogue kind of a thing. And the way that works is they will, let's say, download that video from YouTube.
01:16:10
Speaker
on solar system and then the teacher will put a small 20 second bite before that and she will say, hello children, we learnt about solar system today and watch this video, it will tell you about the Mars and the Venus and Venus is the hottest planet and all of that. She will give some photo, it then starts looking official and then that combination will be sent.
01:16:38
Speaker
And the teacher on this platform gets a report whether children actually watch that video or not. So watching that video becomes part of the school's pedagogy.
01:16:51
Speaker
That is how the school gets extended. Doesn't this cost you money? You are hosting videos now and you're not monetizing this. So this digital content piece, we are charging schools. So we charge 25,000 rupees per annum to the school for doing this piece.
01:17:09
Speaker
And that kind of more, this content you charge when you're providing access to that content or if school wants to start sending digital content, whether their own or whether through your library, irrespective of usage. So what we do is if they're using our own, our content piece, which you have kind of licensed from this third party, we charge money. But if this teacher wants to send a YouTube video, she can still send it. That is free of cost actually for this.
01:17:39
Speaker
And there's just a link. There's no server cost of that link. It's a link, yeah. So there's the server cost of running the platform, but that is very less compared to streaming it, because we still stream from YouTube. But if the teacher were to record a pre-log kind of a thing, and that will cost us money. So put that money in the bigger scheme of things. It's what per GB basis, the cost of streaming is about 65 paisa.
01:18:09
Speaker
So it's not all that expensive. But at some point of time, we should start worrying about it.
01:18:16
Speaker
If we're able to instill this behavior in children today, it's not a whole bunch of money. So talk to me about monetization. What are the different ways in which you will monetize? One is like you have an annual subscription now, 25,000 rupees for this license content, which I think that's not monetization for us. See, what will happen is that there are a lot of micro monetization that will happen on the platform.
01:18:45
Speaker
Honestly, if you ask me, I am not 100% clear exactly in what shape and form. Will it be successful? But I can talk to you about what are the possibilities that are there. So one clear possibility is that we are kind of helping schools become school plus. So there's a part of the school fees that comes to us.
01:19:09
Speaker
for being that platform that allows the school to be school plus. Then the publishers were on our platform and were selling books for 200 rupees. They increased the price of their book by 250 rupees. But the digital content which they already had, by the way, and nobody cared to see, becomes... Yeah, because it was in CDs, typically like... Some random CD. We do not even have CDs on the laptop these days, right?
01:19:39
Speaker
That is the world the publishers are living in. So now their content gets on our platform, nicely integrated. So we get a small toll out of every book that the school is buying. And that this 30, 40 rupees, 50 rupees per child starts adding up.
01:19:57
Speaker
And the book will have like a QR code or something through which the content can get unlocked for the child who buys the book or something like that. Absolutely. All of that can happen, right? So that QR code gets resolved by us, the content is with us. So all of those magic happens and then you can also at some point of time, if you're a publisher, something that you can't do today, you cannot
01:20:20
Speaker
You can only sell to the school. You do not have opportunity to sell to the child. But if the child starts using your book in the context of the school, there's a lot of data that is getting generated around what are the black holes for the child, what is the stuff that it does not know. And then there could be other programs that the publisher has, which could be sold on the platform. So you make money by doing that. You would rather be a scale player than be like a...
01:20:49
Speaker
That is the only truth of internet businesses. This is what...
01:20:53
Speaker
I think I learned from Nogbroker and FastFox. Do what internet players can do. Don't try to become an offline player with venture capital. That is not it. Okay, interesting. So, essentially then you are building a distribution channel for a tech for like education businesses. Let's just say that it could be a tech, it could be a traditional publisher. But for education businesses, it's a distribution channel, like say an Amazon.
01:21:21
Speaker
So, every D2C brand today needs to sell on Amazon, because Amazon has distribution, or say, Zepto, again, has distribution. So, every D2C brand will want to sell on Zepto. So, similarly, every education business will want to sell on Google to reach your customer base. That could be the approach.
01:21:41
Speaker
Yeah, so we like to think that you as a company takes EdTech to masses. That is what our philosophy, our vision is, take EdTech to masses. You know, right now EdTech really, you know, can make a difference in terms of new ways of doing things, learning things. It is restricted to the top of the pyramid.
01:22:03
Speaker
Just because the price points are insanely high, we talked about white hedge linear. If it becomes a mass market, if it becomes like a thousand bucks for learning something, it will become everybody will buy it. Everybody in India will buy a tech for their children.
01:22:22
Speaker
And the proof of that is that 40% of India has chosen not to use free education by the government, but take private education. Why will it not take? It has to be reasonably priced. It should work with the school. It should come seamlessly to them, and then it will happen. Sometimes the money will be collected by the school. Sometimes it will collect yourself.
01:22:45
Speaker
So as a platform, you make money by multiple places. So you make money from all the participants, sometimes by school, sometimes by publishers, sometimes by parents. But that is the ecosystem.
01:22:58
Speaker
that you're powering. You would probably also be able to do a physical store, like a store for buying physical products, like say books. So there are some things that we don't want to do. One of them is this. So the reason for this is we think that, see, we never ever, there's some things that are never ever for us, which is never ever step on the school's toes. So any business that the school can do better than you don't do.
01:23:28
Speaker
So the school can sell uniforms better than us, school can sell stationary better than us. So don't get into those business because then the school ceases to be a partner, it starts becoming a confrontational relationship. Yeah, so we don't want to do that. We want to help school make more money and be a platform to them. And if we are the platform, we'll make our money and we're happy with 3, 4, 5% coming from the school.
01:23:56
Speaker
What about selling PR at Tech? Like say you have all these test prep at academy or at 24-7, these are like pure online courses, test prep. That also is something you would like to do. I think it will naturally, these are niche opportunities if you ask me. If you look at
01:24:15
Speaker
what number of people will be taking these kind of things. These are niche markets, these are smaller opportunities and I think there will be a section of people who will want to buy something like a test prep solution and it is not unfathomable for us to also sell it.
01:24:35
Speaker
But this is not what we are about. If you had to get into test prep, your way of doing test prep would be to somehow allow the school also to earn from setting test prep. Like maybe the teachers of the school are involved in running that or something like that. If you ask me, test prep is not school's cup of tea because the school is a journalist player.
01:24:56
Speaker
So, think of it like that, like we have got the general physicians and then we have got the heart specialist, specialist doctors. So, test prep is a specialist doctor, place school is a general physician. So, that is how it will be. So, the general stuff would be like entry level, anything school can teach.
01:25:13
Speaker
So, entry level chess classes can happen in school. Coding, math, English. Everything. Yes, right. So, if you have to do Olympiad grade, international Olympiad grade, mathematics, this school is saying, boss, not make up of tea. IIT grade, test prep, not make up of tea. But you want to teach abacus to grade, to LKG students? Yeah, why not?
01:25:35
Speaker
But test prep could be a good source of revenue, right? Because I mean, it's a large market. Yeah. It is kind of chunkier. It is chunkier revenue. The ticket sizes are more. People are willing to spend more. But that is also a little bit of a curse for us because, you see, our value is to have the, if I can say,
01:26:03
Speaker
The most convenient place to buy things which are required, but they are not specialized. It's a very generic, general stuff. So it's like, I wanted some math solutions. We said, hey, we've got math solutions. They might not be the best in the world, but they're aligned with your school. We know what is happening in the school. And they said, good enough for your child.
01:26:34
Speaker
But if your child wants to become like a IIT champion by learning our maths, we're not the right people. We're general physicians. I'm just wondering if you have reach, why not use it fully? I mean, you could even, for example, run, maybe you don't sell test prep, but you could be a place where an academy can advertise.
01:27:04
Speaker
I mean at some point of time in future right where the all of this that we want to do has is looking like it is happening then having a business manager drive that I mean will happen right so like just like we have a portion to do fee financing we also have a portion to do some of this stuff but I think this is not the core to what you know is but if you know becomes right right right your core is to increase schools revenue like
Fundraising Philosophy and Advice for Founders
01:27:32
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to understand your approach on fundraise. What's your fundraise philosophy? I think you raised about $22.5 million very recently. So what's the plan here? So I think if you can raise because it
01:27:54
Speaker
Fourth, it allows you to not be very short term about things. One is that I think too many people worry too much about dilution. I think that is not the point from a founder's point of view. I keep telling it to a lot of people because eventually you will be left with a single digit in your company.
01:28:15
Speaker
It is the risk that you're signing up when you do a startup. People don't even understand how much risk it is. And it's good because that allows them to start up. But the reality is that the odds are supremely low. And every time you raise capital, you're able to get good people.
01:28:40
Speaker
build a healthy board, it reduces the risk. And therefore, it increases the probability of a success. And if a founder were to make at the end of the day $100 million versus $80 million because he diluted one more time, it doesn't matter. But the increasing the probability of that $70 million outcome by 5x.
01:29:05
Speaker
That can be a game changer. So I think that was one core advice that I would like to offer to people who are racing and that is my philosophy also, that if you are able to race, race. I think the other thing is that do things that you are passionate about.
01:29:24
Speaker
because it will allow you to, you know, outside of what is hot. Because what is hot may cease to be hot after some time. The investors can afford to be more fickle about their choices. But as founders, that luxury is not available. Once you get into a venture, you are there for the long haul. So get into things that you're excited about.
01:29:49
Speaker
work with people who you have a lot of respect for, because there are going to be fights, sometimes it might not work out, but having mutual respect, complementary skills will help you, you know, maybe manage those fights and hopefully not fall apart.
Conclusion and Call for Feedback
01:30:12
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at ad at the podium dot in. That's ad at T H E P O D I U M dot in.