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Fixing the employability gap | Santanu Paul @ TalentSprint
335 Plays2 years ago
TalentSprint is the market leader in high-end deeptech boot camps for young working professionals, helping them acquire new-age tech skills. Santanu talks about the journey of building up TalentSprint with very little external capital, pivoting from an offline business to an online business, being acquired by NSE, and the road ahead.
Know about:-
- “We collect before we deliver”- building a capital-efficient business
- The phase of shutting down the business
- Fate-turning moment- launching the first AI machinery program
- Fintech for Edtech
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Transcript
Introduction to Shantanu Paul and TalentSprint
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Shantanu Paul and I'm the CUN founder of Talentsprint.
00:00:16
Speaker
the word boot camp has a fascinating history. In early 19th century, the US military recruits used to wear boots and hence the training camp for new recruits was called boot camp. Over time, this work started to mean an intense training program for a newbie to any field. In the US, software boot camps took off about two decades ago in which students would immerse themselves in learning to code
00:00:39
Speaker
with the expectation of building a career in tech.
What is the Founder Thesis Podcast about?
00:00:42
Speaker
In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, your host Akshay Dutt is talking with Dr. Shantanu Paul, the founder of the edtech startup Talent Sprint. Talent Sprint is the market leader in high-end deep-tech bootcamps for young working professionals, helping them to acquire new-age tech skills which open up lucrative career opportunities for them.
00:01:03
Speaker
In this conversation, Shantanu talks about the journey of building up talent sprint with very little external capital, pivoting from an offline business to an online business, getting acquired by NSC and the road ahead for Shantanu. Listen on and if you like such insightful conversations with disruptive startup founders, then do subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast on any audio streaming app.
Challenges in Indian Education and the Skill Gap
00:01:35
Speaker
I led some of my career is that I was heading into India for five years and we went public at NASDAQ and all of that good stuff. But that about the real interesting journey here was that I realized that how shallow the Indian talent story is and was even at that time, maybe 5% of Indian college students have the great good fortune of
00:01:53
Speaker
going to world-class institutions, I was one of them. Then, 95% of the colleges were offering pretty shoddy education, giving out degrees. And when we went to interview with the market, we realized that to hire new engineers, we would interview 100 people. So our strike rate was 1%. And I thought something was very seriously wrong with this picture. So a lot of my friends at that time in industry, we used to keep talking about the so-called scale gap, right?
00:02:17
Speaker
I was also active with NASCOM and other industry forties. And the favorite armchair topic of discussion was how do we solve the skill gap? Somebody should solve it. Academia is doing this wrong. Colleges need to do a better job. And after a few years of that, once I was done with Virtusa and Virtusa was already on its way to become a big company. And I thought I should go and do something new. And this time I should do something India facing and not US facing.
TalentSprint's Bridge Between Education and Industry
00:02:40
Speaker
How many people did you hire those five years? Like how many were you hiring every year?
00:02:45
Speaker
So you want to guess the total number in five years? 10,000. I don't know. It was 6,000. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So it was a very large hiring operation and nonstop hiring operation.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I think we all had almost, I would say, a decorative stress injury aside from that experience. And we realized that this is not the way to look at talent. We figured that we did a new solution in place where we realized that we can't just lecture the colleges and tell them to do a better job. They just don't have the system for it. The college's job is not to produce. And I have a strong view, which many people in industry disagree with. My view is that a college education is not supposed to make you learn the skills of a job in a particular company.
00:03:30
Speaker
College education should prepare you for problem solving. You should be able to solve good problems in a good way, and you should develop the skill of problem solving in college. That, unfortunately, colleges in India don't teach. I think American colleges teach problem solving. Indian colleges don't. So I forget that it was not the curriculum in the college that was the problem. It was how it was being taught that was the problem. So I always say that
00:03:50
Speaker
India's problem is not what is being taught. India's problem is how it is being taught. And, and therefore we felt that we should win the new company, but that was the Talenspin story. And that we can sit as a very sort of nice clearinghouse between the college in one side and companies on the other and to use talent through a B2C model where the student would pay for their learning and not the company and creating this.
00:04:14
Speaker
high-end programming and coding boot cap. A lot of people used to call it finishing school, but I used to joke and say, finishing school gives the impression that there's a cake and you're putting icing, but there's no cake, but there's no cake, there's nothing, no icing to put. So I figured that we call it a software coding boot caps. And that's how science would happen.
00:04:31
Speaker
Had bootcamp as a terminology taken off back then? Today, the word bootcamp is used a lot by a lot of ethnic companies, but was it? Yeah. It was, it was definitely taking off at that time. I think by 2010, the word bootcamp had started. US also, if you look at the US market, the coding bootcamp started to appear in 2012, some of the only ones like General Assembly, Flatiron, they're all 2012 vintage companies.
00:04:56
Speaker
So yeah, I think it was just about the time the word bootcamp was coming up because the reason for that is what we ran inside the companies in IT. For example, if you look at ECS and Post-its on even virtual server, when we hire students, we bring them into our companies and put them in the so-called bootcamp. So the word bootcamp was already in use inside the company. So we just made it a public bootcamp. That's all for it outside the company.
The Essence of Education: Beyond Content Delivery
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah. And you were really like the perfect founder to start this, spent close to a decade in colleges in the US. So you saw how US education, you saw a best in class education system and how it works very intimately, which gave you a certain thesis on what needs to be done. And then you spent time with tech companies and then you spent time hiring 6,000 people in over a five year period. So it's like that connecting the dots like that really happened pretty well here.
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah, no nice of you to say that I took that. Think there is some truth to that, but I also say that sometimes I say that my problem is that I look at the supplies out of any situation that I'm in.
00:05:55
Speaker
And I find the inefficiencies and then try to form the company on those next supply side. So I tell people that if I do it long enough, I'll end up building a primary school. Okay. That's interesting. This is like a very philosophical question. There are two ways to look at building a business. One is that you focus on building demand and if there is demand, then you will figure out supply. Or the second is you focus on creating supply. If you create good quality supply, the demand will come. What is your purpose?
00:06:22
Speaker
No, I think it's not really either or I don't think demand implies that supply will happen. No supply implies the demand will appear. I think one has to match it. That's the whole idea of a platform company, right? Any company that serves as a platform has to bring two sets of stakeholders to the platform.
00:06:37
Speaker
On one side are people who have a need, and other side are people who have another set of needs, and the platform connects the needs. In our case, we had a B2B side, which is the conference, which needs talent, which is ready to deploy. They don't want to spend money and time training people. And then on the other side, there are people who need jobs, who can't get those jobs because they don't have the skills. So on one side, we have learners, and on the other side, we have recruiters. And in a good platform business, you realize that you have to subsidize one side to make the other pay for it.
00:07:05
Speaker
So typically in this case, so if you look at Google as a business, it basically subsidizes all of us through our search and through our maps and through our YouTube participation. It keeps us engaged long enough so that it can sell advertising to humans. So you always have to make one side come in for free, so the other side will pay for that access. So in our case, after a lot of debate, make a curated talent sprint that we have to make the jobs free. So the company should come in, they're equal to higher.
00:07:35
Speaker
with no friction, so that just like they go to a campus and hire in a college, we have to make talents to be a new kind of virtual campus and make that free. But then when the jobs start to appear, the students will come and pay you money to be in that system. Which also correlates with the existing consumer behavior, because existing behavior is the same. You pay for a college education. You're not paying for the degree, but you're paying for a job that you get as a result. So you had this idea that you were to
00:08:01
Speaker
build an upskilling company focused on employability. So from that idea to actually launching it, tell me about that journey. Yes. So essentially, as I mentioned last time, I was working at Virtus at that time, leading a large organization of a few thousand people. And this was again a plunge into the unknown because first time I was changing multiple axes. And let me spend a minute on this because this is useful information for entrepreneurs.
00:08:27
Speaker
When I moved from my comfort zone of IT services company for a global market, I moved multiple acts in one ship. For example, I went from a technology business to an education business. I went from a P2P customer base to a P2C customer base.
00:08:44
Speaker
And I went from an international customer clientele to a domestic Indian clientele. All three were pretty radical shifts. And I think if I'd thought about it deliberately at that point in time, I might have scared myself. But in hindsight, I realized that one of the struggles of why it took us so long to get talent spread going the early days, one of the struggles that I'd like to talk about is because I think as entrepreneurs, as a leading team, we were essentially moving into a, going away from a comfort zone to a completely new way of doing the expected market.
00:09:14
Speaker
I think that was certainly an interesting experience. So anyway, long story short, I quit my job at Virtuosa, gave them like some five months notice saying that I'm happy to transition and I'll be leaving. And that was a good move because it also led to some of my former colleagues who I had worked with before.
00:09:31
Speaker
We're also at that time working in large multinational companies. There was a common view among many of us that we should do something at this pace and some of us came together at that time. And I'm happy to report that of that maybe 10 member team that got together in those days 12 years ago. I think happy to report that five of us are still in the same place. So that's not a bad accomplishment as a core team.
00:09:53
Speaker
Yeah. And that has been the heart of it. You came together as co-founders or like some were co-founders, some were early employees. Yeah. So, yeah. So we had co-founders and founding team members. So we were about 10 of us. And then three of us were, I think, more along the lines of the senior team. So me and my former co-founder Madhu Mothri and Jay Jotri, all of us were running multinational companies at that time.
00:10:17
Speaker
And we've all had this great inspiration that we should go do something more meaningful. I think the purpose, I think a purpose-driven company, the idea of an impact thesis, all of that excited us. And if you remember the time 2008 was also a time before the global crisis, of course, but 2007, 2008, India was going at 8, 9%. The economy was booming. The IT sector just before the global crisis was doing really well. And there was a lot of bullishness that we all had saying that good time to do this.
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was a leap of faith. I think a lot of people ask me subsequently that what's wrong with you guys, even comfortable job, large multinational companies and going out and roughing it in the education space. I always said that I make fun of it by saying that I tried to play golf for everyone, never really forward. So I had to do a startup.
00:11:04
Speaker
They said the best-made plans was to meet reality. They rarely survived that. What were some of those early struggles? You had a plan in mind, but I'm sure there must have been a lot of struggles until you finally found
Economic Challenges and Business Strategy Pivots
00:11:16
Speaker
your footing. Tell me about that. I think the biggest struggle was external. Just as we were starting the company, the global crisis happened. And with that, a lot of the enthusiasm that was there in general in the market, the euphoria was evaporating. I remember we had said that we should raise capital quickly.
00:11:32
Speaker
And then capital raise become a real difficulty within six months or nine months of starting realize that we would have to really post up for a while before we could raise money. The other thing that was very interesting again is that I remember when I was heading what you saw and when he had gone public and I asked a lot of my friends told me well now from this point on whenever you start a company raising money will be like a breeze.
00:11:52
Speaker
And sure enough, all of us have to believe all this stuff about ourselves. And then when we started and we realized that man, the markets are really in terrible shape and the raising money became a real struggle. So we decided that we could pull strap for a while. And then that was a good idea. In fact, it focused us on creating the first set of coding bootcamps.
00:12:10
Speaker
We were creating software testing engineers because we had a friendly company called AppLabs and AppLabs was growing and they were a software testing company and they gave us this big mandate to say that whoever you get produced through your code and software testing bootcamps will hire them all. And that gave us a lot of momentum.
00:12:25
Speaker
So it took us a year to recalibrate and say that money is not going to come easy in terms of investment, but that actually forced us to behave better. I think I must say that it's a behavioral change that happened early, which is very fortunate because we started focusing on not losing money. And what did you price these bootcamps at? How did you do the go-to market? How did you acquire customers? What was the first cohort size?
00:12:48
Speaker
do it through tech from devan or was it that through classroom traditional delivery and that gradually evolved like tell you about that sure the price points were about 40 000 rupees which was in those days and not a small sum of money for young college graduate looking for a job so we decided
00:13:03
Speaker
to be seen as a premium player and not a vanilla, low cost player. And then we decided to do it physically for the first few cohorts, because that's how you build that high Dutch and feel. And also, I think a big part of, in my view, this kind of education, and I think all education is inspiration. Students don't learn because they're uninspired, right? It is a myth that all that happens in a classroom is just content. I don't think that's true. I think what happens in a classroom is content, peer learning, peer pressure.
00:13:30
Speaker
Inspiration motivation all of that comes together in a physical setting. So the first you got supposed to hear the fact we're all physical classroom driven and price was a 40,000 rupees luckily for us like i said very quickly one after another first app left and polaris. Quite a few companies started giving a large band is and that would that be true i think we know it's been a year's time after that so suddenly i was getting inbound calls from investors.
00:13:55
Speaker
These mandates were essentially like a soft commitment that folks at your training, we will take that through our interview process and hire them. That's correct. And exactly that. And the soft commitment turned out to be really good because we realized that the quality of our training was sufficiently high that 80-90% of people being interviewed were picked up immediately. So we had an 80-90% placement rate out of the deals.
00:14:19
Speaker
But for the first cohort, how do you acquire students? Like getting students to pay 40K is not an easy thing. I think it was credibility. See, the good thing is that by the time we had come out of previous companies, we already had as co-founders, myself, Madhu Jay, we all had sufficient industry credibility. And people somehow believed that if we were training young, somehow they would find jobs. There was a leap of faith as well. I don't want to deny, the first cohort was probably 50 students.
00:14:46
Speaker
But then once those 50 students cracked it within three months from starting and they were all in these companies, then it became a very easy blowout to that. Then the word about spread and then, this is a very hurt mentality. The students are a very tight peer group. And so that, I think we got first our problem of talent acquisitions through fair commission very fast after we got started. I think in some sense, one of the things that entrepreneurs have to watch out for is their own psychology, right? I think we were.
00:15:12
Speaker
wasting time thinking about how to raise money, but in fact, moment we started focusing on how to run product and bid customers and then deliver, I think we're on our way. Amazing. Okay. This obviously is like after they went to therefore it funds your expenses because students pay up for the entire amount.
00:15:28
Speaker
That's a beauty of our business model. It's a negative working capital, which means that we collect before we deliver. And I must say that has been one of the mainstays of how you can build a company of this type without raising too much capital. In fact, we're a very capital efficient company for that reason, that very often what happens is you're able to get working capital from the market as from customers. Amazing. Amazing. Okay. And so did you hire trainers? Were you training yourself? How did it co-product of education? How did that evolve?
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, there were two geniuses in my team. One was of course Madhu Mutti, my co-founder, who was a software testing expert with a great reputation. He had, previous to that, he was heading the testing practice for Accenture. So he came and the first few cohorts he taught himself on the software testing side. And once the testing side started doing really well and I started getting calls from companies saying that, can we do developers, software developers?
00:16:21
Speaker
which is a higher bar, actually. And then I made a sort of another interesting move. I called this guy called Ashokan Pichai, who was still our chief learning officer. And Ashokan had been our head of training at Gochusar and had built this amazing reputation for
00:16:37
Speaker
Super programming skills development in the answer. So I can't help you. Wasn't, I think he wasn't my boy at that time. He was the CTO of my phone. He was in Chennai and I called him and I said, come for lunch. So he flew in for one day. We went to lunch together in our favorite pub and downing street in Hyderabad. And then I told him this whole story. It's like that. Hey.
00:16:56
Speaker
Can we do this? And his response was like, he asked me like, are you sure you want to do this? Because education is such a messy business. I said, yeah, I'm sure. Then he said, where do I sign? And then he left post-lunch, having agreed to move baggage back to Hyderabad. And then a couple of months later, he showed up, and then he became the head of the academy.
00:17:14
Speaker
And I think that was the big turning point. Yeah, to answer your question, the core expertise came originally from the founding team members like Madhu and Ashokan. And these cohorts, like the testing cohort was how long? Like the duration. And was it like full day or was it like a part time?
Rigorous Bootcamp Structure and Effectiveness
00:17:31
Speaker
Oh, no part-time. Dallas Print has a reputation in the coding bootcamp of being fairly brutal. We were technically eight hours a day, but students were here since, you know, the day for three months. And, and I, one of the common things we always say is that, and you learn more in four months in Dallas Print the careers of college.
00:17:46
Speaker
Right. And that was the mission that we had and we kept our word. I think students would look back and say that this is amazing. In fact, today also, I would say that whenever I land in Delhi, Bombay, or some unknown place that I've traveling to, somebody in the airport would approach me and say, you know what, I'm like third batch talent spirit from 2010, or 14 batch from 2014. And then I'd say, what are you doing now? I'm a project manager at Accenture, or I'm an architect at TCS. It's such a common thing to see.
00:18:13
Speaker
Amazing. Okay. You must have had to spend on physical pizza, right? Because you would need like a computer lab and a classroom and all of that to get started, which would have been from your own savings, I guess. The answer is yes and no. We needed all that, but we didn't spend much money. Let me tell you how. One of the biggest institutions in Hyderabad, where we are located, is Triple-I. The Triple IT Hyderabad is a top computer science school. Triple IT Hyderabad at that time was in its earlier days and they had a bunch of
00:18:43
Speaker
buildings like unfinished buildings and they had at that point in time running short on funds to finish those buildings and they were like sitting there in the campus as unfinished buildings. So I remember walking in one day with my co-founder Jay and talking to the director Rajiv Sangal and I said, so why don't you rent us this unfinished building and we will convert this into classrooms.
00:19:03
Speaker
And they said, that's interesting. And they said, after five years of using it, we'll leave the building for you to use in a Spanish deal. We'll just walk away. So give us this building at a low rate, and give us five years of rental at a low rate. And that's it. And I must tell you, that was the best thing we ever did. Because very so students are coming saying that, oh, yeah, I'll spend inside triple ID. Yeah, triple ID is such a great institution. So we are going to triple ID campus to get trained. And that going to triple ID campus to get trained gave us enormous aura.
00:19:31
Speaker
So what turned out to be like a very good solution also became an asset as we went along. Amazing. By when did you set up the IIIT campus? I think within the 2010 summer we had moved in. So a year after we really got going. Yes.
00:19:46
Speaker
And then we did five years there and I think our reputation as a high-end institution began because IIIT's aura was always rubbing open on us. Okay. Amazing. Like year one, what did you close at? Like how many students or what top line or whatever, how did that go all over the subsequent years?
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's been, it's been a long journey, but I would say that the first year, I think we did about four or five crores and it is pretty phenomenal for a bootstrapped startup. Yeah, correct. And then of course we started getting more and more focused in terms of building out our teams and so forth. So I would say first year we did probably about four cohorts or five or six cohorts. I would say five or six cohorts we did. And things started to happen pretty fast after that.
00:20:28
Speaker
Yeah, so I would say that the lesson we learned and in a way the solution we found which is physical bootcamp was very comforting for the students, comforting for us, comforting for the recruiters.
00:20:39
Speaker
But very soon it became by itself a challenge because you realize that you can't really scale too much by going physical all the time. And then at some point in a few years, we started thinking about how to scale. So because you hit peak capacity, like your devices could not accommodate more cohorts and you wanted to continue to scale faster. What does it trigger to decide to hang beyond physical?
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah, so digital came a little later, but what happens is, so by the time 2011 comes along, there is this new institution that's been set up in Delhi called the National Skill Development Corporation, or NSDC, which was set up by the UPA2 government. And at that time, SDC was itself starting up, and they were going around trying to spot interesting entrepreneurs and companies that they could invest in. And one day the then CEO, the founding CEO of the Deep Chennai, who's a very well known person,
00:21:26
Speaker
So they re-boxed it through the door and talent sprint and the trip party campus. And it says, you know what, I've been hearing about you guys. I want to put some money here. And it was a venture day. And then, so we got some money from them. And then we decided to, and then I think economic times wrote an article about us. And then the next thing that happened was Nexus, who's our investor, venture capital from Nexus. I know Gupta, when they called me and said, I want to come and visit.
00:21:50
Speaker
So funny, if you spend like the first one year trying to raise money out successfully, then went to bootstrap and then that's 30 and we were getting inbound interest from investors. Quite an interesting, I would say experience. Just when you stop trying, it started. Amazing. How was it you raised it in the third year? Like from both of these? Yeah. So I think, so Nexus gave us about 20 crores of equity. And then of course we caught about 10 crores commitment, not money in the bank, but commitment from NSTC.
00:22:16
Speaker
in trunches, Nexus was of course very clear, no trunches, just take the check and get to start running. So yeah, we suddenly we had money. And, but by then all the bad habits were also forming. You were starting to hire ahead of time and you're trying to do all kinds of experiments and you know, won't move into Gretchen Buddy, they get, you get a lot of pressure to scale up. And then I think we realized that scaling up is going to be a challenge in this business because much of what we're doing was very high touch.
00:22:43
Speaker
And then came the next phase, there was a lot of discussion on how to scale and so forth. Yeah, but the short answer is that when investors were involved, professional investors, there's no choice in slowing down. You don't have the luxury of saying I do it slowly. What was the peak revenue for the physical only portal? I think the peak revenue of physical for the fooding boot camps probably hit about 25 crores at the peak. Amazing. Like what location 25 crores, that's amazing.
00:23:08
Speaker
One location, we are also experimenting with Bangalore, with Chennai, we were transitioning from small sectors, they were going up, they were going down and the markets also had a lot of churn. And I think last but not the least, I would argue that by the time we were talking about 2011-12, industry was changing. Industry was no longer looking for people who knew the
00:23:27
Speaker
basic theory. The whole shift moved towards experiential learning. I always say now, today, if you say that, what do you know versus what can you do? That the real employable person is somebody who can do something, not who knows something. I always say that if you say that, what have you studied? And the guy says, I've studied computer science. And I said, okay, so what can you do? And I have this habit of telling people that skill is a verb and not a noun. If you say that I know physics, well, that's really noun, but if you say I can write a program, then it's a skill. It's a verb.
00:23:57
Speaker
So I always say that Indian education system prioritizes nouns over words. So we end up saying Java, C plus operating systems. But if you talk to a student in America, they will say, I know how to code, analyze, write, present, document, and synthesize. It all works, right? So I think real skills are words. And somehow our education system, including what we saw at the first regression of these skilling companies, people are focusing on teaching people, syntax, theory, concepts.
00:24:27
Speaker
But if you ask me what to come on and say, what can you build, their equivalent transfer concept to practice will always speak. So therefore, one of the philosophies that we adopted, and this is our belief system is that if a professor is talking too much, then the student is not going to learn too much. So we always say that the more you speak, the less they learn.
00:24:46
Speaker
Best way of teaching is to not say too much. In other words, give them problems to solve and be there to help them solve it. Don't try to tell them how to solve it. Don't try to give them lectures. So we have a very anti-lecture pedagogical approach that the more a teacher talks, the less they will learn.
00:25:02
Speaker
Okay. Amazing. I think I'll give you an example of that. So for example, we would have a system where the instructor would come into a classroom, 50 students, all of them with computers in front of them. Each of them have the personal computers to work on. And then the instructor would say, here's a new language called Haskell with them speaking one, right? Those of you who know Java, go read up the syntax of Haskell and the documentation is online. You can go search for it in Google. You can find the documentation or you can go to a portal and get the documentation.
00:25:31
Speaker
and solve the, let's say the bubble sort problem using Haskell and walk out. And then someone would say, I don't know how to do this. And the instructor won't say, well, neither do I, why don't you figure it out? Because the whole idea was to simulate the workplace, right? The idea was to simulate the workplace after four years of college, if you give them four more, four more months of more college, nothing will change. But if you give them four months of the workplace,
00:25:57
Speaker
day that you have to change something because in the workplace no one's going to give you instruction on how to solve something they will say here's a document here's the problem here's a person figure out what to do and that we always said that you give them a taste of what their life will be and don't give them the extension of their college experience they the physical product sounds pretty amazing how did you manage to
00:26:17
Speaker
Take it digital. A lot of these things are this kind of interaction. You said students were on campus for 16 hours a day, that kind of immersion, the peer learning, the inspiration. How did you convert these things into digital? Tell me about that journey. Once you realize that you need to go digital to scale.
00:26:35
Speaker
Yeah. Let me tell you what actually happened right along the way. There's a bit of a, we have at least two or three pivots along the way of this
Digital Transition and AI Program Launch
00:26:41
Speaker
company, right? This is what today is not what was happening then. We have multiple steps in between. So I'd rather fill in at a high level. So what happened was we came to a point after four, five years of doing this, saying that this was really not for global by any means or national by any means at this rate. And we said, no, what can you personally face steps, right? Like you were saying, you tried bad guys.
00:27:02
Speaker
which had many things and the results were always very, very unsatisfactory. And so there came a time when we said, how could we make software coding bootcamps digital?
00:27:12
Speaker
And globally at that time, by 2012, 13, 14, by 14, there was a universal acceptance that we were trying coding bootcamps anywhere in the world. And there were quite a few very highly funded companies in the US that were trying it like Flat Island, General Assembly. They were all concluding that it's almost impossible to teach coding online in the way it was described. So there was a consensus that it's not working.
00:27:37
Speaker
So then we said, this is not a good idea to keep doing this. So what we said was, can we fight an alternative employability program, which does not involve programming, that we can use where digital will work? And in those days, 2015 was a very interesting year in India because there was a lot of talk about how banks and government needs a lot of employees.
00:27:59
Speaker
Suddenly these common back exams and government exams, probation officer exams, special officer exams, all of these were like just catching on. And we said, you know what, this is test prep. Those exams are test prep. So can we do test prep online for job, not for GE or anything like that, just for jobs that people aspire for. And those exams were like 10, 20, 30 lakh people writing the exams.
00:28:21
Speaker
So we said, okay, let's try something here. And in a way that second part, which we added as our second stream, the coding bootcamp is continuing physical world. We are a digital world where we said no classrooms at all, only digital test prep for jobs and banking and the government sector.
00:28:38
Speaker
And the start was very promising. We got this fantastic team of people that gave in book with us that time. And then our CTO, Jikandar Singh, who was an IIT Kanpur grad, built this phenomenal online platform that even today has been one of our strengths. And that platform allowed us to reach students across the country. So all of a sudden, we were having students from Manipur to Kashmir to Tingon learning on our platform.
00:29:01
Speaker
So that was one or two quick questions here. This was cohort-based or this was like self-paced? Cohort-based. Please record it. Okay, cohort-based. What will be like live classes? Yes, cohort-based originally and then we started doing async and hybrid and all of that and I can talk about that if you wish. But we spent about two, three years in that time trying to perfect this model.
00:29:23
Speaker
And we realized that finally, it was interesting. It's a perfect answer. But the model itself was a problem because the price points of these courses never exceeded 10,000 rupees.
00:29:33
Speaker
No matter what you did, you could never charge women 10,000 because somebody else was doing this at much cheaper. And this was the beginning of the tech funding thing. So there were your online companies coming and saying, we'll give you something for free or all of that. So we started running into this problem of comparison, saying that, okay, we have quality products, they have great outcomes. But the kind of students who write these exams where budgets were capping at 2000 to 5,000 movies.
00:29:59
Speaker
And then we realized that this is another problem, that we had problems in our first model that we tried to solve through second model. And second model has new problems to solve, which is, how do you charge 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 for this model?
00:30:11
Speaker
And finally, again, after trying for some time, we concluded that this is not going to be the way we want to build a company because we are just spending too much time trying to create a low price product. Even though everything we had in the system was high touch and high technology, great customer service, all of that. So great reviews. And I think that business about four or five crores, and that we lost interest because we said we cannot make this a big business.
00:30:36
Speaker
And what was really the real benefit of that phase two was it built a great digital platform. Right. So now be ready for phase three phase three was when the finally it all came together.
00:30:46
Speaker
Okay. Before we start phase three, I want to ask some questions about phase two. 10,000 average course price was not enough. Was it because of high customer acquisition costs where you had to spend a lot to acquire? And 10,000 wasn't sticking either. 10,000 would be the MRP and you'd end up selling in six. So you are constantly fighting this. Somebody else is opening at a lower price gain. I mean, which has become the nature of the internet today, right? I mean, the YouTube had free content. There was somebody doing, who's a YouTuber doing this alone.
00:31:14
Speaker
So there was all kinds of stuff and I think in some sense it seems obvious now in hindsight that very hard to write these things that are premium but because there's always a very rapid commodity thinking that comes around it and people start opting at us solo, right? And it becomes like a tuition business online. So yeah, so short answer is that it didn't really fly for us and we decided that we have better things to do in our life. And also a crowded space, breadware, all these others.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yes. And there was also a question that, OK, technology platform part, how do we differentiate ourselves? Because we are ultimately tech guys coming from the tech industry. And if you can't really scale up our own technology training, then why are we doing the sideshow? There was an internal debate saying that what special value do we bring to this? Is there a better way to teach that we are bringing?
00:32:01
Speaker
Anyway, so what happened then was a decision. And I must say one of the more interesting decisions where I one day just told that we are shutting this business. Right. And there was a human cry from one set of people in the company. And now a set of people said, I think finally, common sense has prevailed. So that was an interesting case. But I would say that everybody agreed that we need to go back to our base.
00:32:24
Speaker
hmm and then came the third I think I would say the most important piece that fell in place when and this is about 2015-17 I think we yeah late 16 early 17 we shut down this yeah
00:32:42
Speaker
So then at that time, something very interesting happened. Triple IT had to go with itself, which historically has been a very, I would say academically pure organization and they have their bachelor's, master's and PhD programs, et cetera. Certainly one day, one of the deans is in my office and he's a friend for many years.
00:33:03
Speaker
And he says that, are we not reading these newspapers? At 2017, remember, it was the first time the Indian media went crazy about AI, right? There was this study right about AI and how AI even changed everything while the jobs of animation, IT will disappear and so forth. And I also started noticing something very peculiar in those days. When I was 17, it was the first time in my life I remember getting on a plane in India.
00:33:24
Speaker
in an indigo flight and realizing that until then, I was always watching IT professionals who were working at the IT sector. And doctors were now working professionals, not freshers, but people in the industry. They would all love to carry, until 2017, this fat book called Program Manager, Project Manager, Certification, BMP. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:33:46
Speaker
PMP books were very popular in those days that every techie was trying to become a project manager because that's how we got a career growth re-announcement. So if you became a manager, you would then get to manage people. If you manage people, then you had more esteem and prestige, and then you'd get more money. And your marriage market would be much better. And God knows what I'm saying. This whole idea that you want to be a good IT professional, you start becoming a manager. And you escape technology, right? So then in the 1970s, that started changing. All of a sudden, the PMP books disappeared.
00:34:16
Speaker
People are carrying data science books, they're trying to carry AI in machine learning books. And I said, this is interesting. And I had, yeah, exactly. And I had this theory that maybe the wheels are turning. Maybe people see a rush from management to technology again, in terms of skill sets. And the media did a really good job of scaring people saying that if you're in the IT sector and you don't know AI and all of that, your days are numbered.
00:34:40
Speaker
So I'm sitting in my office talking to Ramesh, who was from Triple IT, and Ramesh Logan at the time. We are sitting and having this conversation. We said, you know what? Triple IT is one of the best AI faculty in the world. Why don't we start a program?
00:34:53
Speaker
for working professionals in AI, right? Upscaling IT professionals in AI. And that really was the big turning point because everybody loved the idea. And we said business schools are really famous for starting running executive education in leadership, in strategic finance, and all of that good stuff. Why don't tech schools, the best ones, run executive education? Because the future of executive education might be technology and not management.
00:35:18
Speaker
And that insight, I think, was powerful. And we decided to launch the first AI Visionary Program between IIIT and Talensprint, which was an instant hit. And now, all our strengths were playing to us. We were a tech company. We were having a platform. We were doing a classroom. We were doing online. All of that came together. And from then on, I think, we got the third big lift. And I think that pivot has got us to where we are today. OK. What did you price this course in? AI was good. Of the batch, we were doing 2,000,000 rupees per student. Right?
00:35:49
Speaker
because these are working professionals and these people have disposable income. And for a young professional, learning is a way to get the first job. But for somebody who's 30 years old, who's got an IT career, has two mortgages to get to kids in school, they are buying career insurance, right? For them, it became a really important decision because people are more scared of what they lose than what they can gain, right?
00:36:11
Speaker
So in that sense, we have something to know as people become far more focused. And of course, if you're in the IT sector for 10 years, you have disposable income. And then we are able to show that this was the starting point.
00:36:23
Speaker
Once that became successful, IMS and IITs had started coming to us, right? And then we started creating this program. So today we have research programs, not one, across various areas. And so we essentially realized that we are good at young professionals coding bootcamps. We are good at working professionals who do upskilling of new technologies. And once that got going and the pandemic happened,
00:36:46
Speaker
there the coding bootcamp everybody accepted that yes we can learn coding online as well. I think the pandemic was the first time that young professionals also accepted that we have to and we can learn coding online.
00:36:59
Speaker
So there we are after all that. Okay. This AIML course was how long? The due ratio. Yeah. All of these programs that we offer for working professionals were about six months or 120 hours, 150 hours total on weekends. So they would be like five, six, seven, eight hours of commitment for a weekend.
00:37:17
Speaker
that a student would have to put in, and they would attend a lot of live lectures online, sometimes come into the campus, do a lot of lab work online. And then all the good things we had put into our system in the second phase. Now the technology platform was our biggest negotiator. But to answer your question, working professionals like part-time,
00:37:35
Speaker
six-month weekend-only programs and that's largely 80% to 90% digital games. And did you need to offer placement support for this? Because these are already working professionals. Yeah, they don't need it. Working professionals don't really need placement support and one thing we also decided was that if you see too many people asking for placement support in a working professional program, you're probably attracting the wrong kind of working professional.
00:38:00
Speaker
because these are people probably are struggling in their current jobs. And therefore we're using us as a placement engine. So we decided to offer more networking services rather than placement services. And by that, so let's say today.
00:38:15
Speaker
There'd be often companies coming to us and saying, we are looking for a bunch of data scientists. We know you have this great competition science program with ISC Bangalore. If we post a job in your system, could you please ask the people in this program who was interested can apply and we would take a cent from this to send post it to them.
00:38:32
Speaker
So we played the role of saying, okay, there is some opportunity for you if you want to apply. But we never say that it will help you find a job. That we only offer to the young professionals. Okay. So how did the sales happen then? For your young professional courses, the job was a big part of spreading word about helping you get sales. How did the sales happen? How did you do your lead generation? How was the conversion done? I'll tell you about that.
Marketing Strategies and Brand Collaborations
00:38:57
Speaker
So the first and foremost marketing brand that came to us is that IIIT, IIC, IIT Kanpur, IAP Calcutta, they're all partnering with Devil Sprint offered joint programs. That brand itself had a word of mouth.
00:39:10
Speaker
Then there was, when there is LinkedIn, LinkedIn is perhaps the biggest place for us to announce new programs and promote existing programs, talk about success stories and so forth. So then LinkedIn and the LinkedIn marketing, we spent a lot of money there. And we also spent a lot of money on Google AdWords, which in any case, everybody and anybody who wants to search for something will go to Google and search. So if they say data, course in the data science, if you type, you will get programs from us. So we were doing a lot of that.
00:39:35
Speaker
So it became a digital marketing, digital marketing became very big for us in this process. And I would say today, the biggest differentiator is that we are a serious black hole for serious learners, because these learners wanted, I see, I have intense experience because while it is glamorous to say I'm taking this program, these programs are also fairly brutal in terms of their expectation from students. And these top schools don't like giving out executive vision certificates.
00:40:01
Speaker
just because somebody is willing to pay. They want to make you really slog, right? So therefore, we have taken a view that we want to be a platform that offers serious programs to serious learners. If you're a non-serious learner who wants to get an easy certificate, we are not that platform.
00:40:17
Speaker
And that itself has a brand. So I realize after a while, they're taking a posture that we are not all things to all people in executive education. I think that gave us an auto brand as well. Take one simple example. You look at ISC Bangalore, a number one ranked institution in the country for so many years, they have only one in the entire 120 year history. There's only one private partner with whom they have worked, just talent expert and they continue to work with us.
00:40:40
Speaker
to launch new programs. So we therefore created that premium effect and that I think has been our marketing. Okay. And how does the lead to conversion happen? Like you have a, once the lead comes in, that's how it calls that person and takes them through the process, I guess, because for such a high ticket, it would not be like an online checkout.
00:41:00
Speaker
No, it's not on my checkout. So what happens is you're right. So campaigns run and once the campaigns run, people come through the click through on the campaign and then that information is captured again through a system. So there is fairly significant digital marketing that happens on the platform. And then we track behavior of a lead.
00:41:18
Speaker
over time, there is a way of scoring the system to score to lead and say how much time are the spending looking at our various websites? How often do they open our emails? We don't call them the moment they click. We just, the system takes over and observes the behavior and says that the attributes see scores to all the behaviors and there's a threshold score. So if the engagement behavior to the threshold,
00:41:39
Speaker
It hits the inbox of a counselor and the counselor will then place a call saying that we think he will be interested in this. So the other part of being a serious player is that we have made it a very clear that we are not going to be like helping people by calling them. So you will just click on a link and for you know it, you get five calls a day. We just said no such thing, right? So therefore again, a more patient approach, a lot more systems behind the scenes to observe.
00:42:01
Speaker
how much engagement we see, and then acting recording. That's as much an art as a science. There's always debate around, are we missing? Shouldn't we be calling more often, more people? Are we calling too slowly, too fast? These debates fatigue you. For example, in 2018, we started working with Google on this famous program called Women Engineers. We work with young women students from second tier towns, identify them in their first year of college and who have high potential for becoming world-class programs.
00:42:28
Speaker
So we have this really fascinating program called Women Engineers where we picked 250 students a year from across India, from about close to 35, 40,000 applications coming every year. We picked 250 students and then they go on a full Google scholarship ad talent sprint for two years. And at the end of it, you'll be shocked to hear.
00:42:46
Speaker
that 25% end up in Google and the rest end up in Microsoft and Amazon. So we have fit these models now where we are partnering with top tier companies in the world to build coding bootcamps, often funded and underwritten by the companies themselves to create world-class talents. But I would say that since we work with the top brands, I think it has been a good experience by us.
00:43:08
Speaker
Okay. And in terms of numbers, revenue, tell me a bit about that, the digital business. What is the size of the cohort you did in the first year, like 17, you lost this. How has that evolved now? Yeah. So today, if you look at it, so we have reached a point where we are doing about maybe 10, 15,000 students a year across our fresher and working professionals level at various combinations.
Revenue Model and Affordability Strategy
00:43:31
Speaker
I think today, I would say that maybe 60% of our revenue comes from the working professionals.
00:43:37
Speaker
and 20% comes from young professionals. And of course, if you really look at the number of students, because the price points are much lower for young students, I think those same 40,000 would be, I talked about 10 years ago, is now priced at 75, 80,000, because that market really cannot pay a whole lot more. At one lakh, it will max out young professionals.
00:43:56
Speaker
So we've tried to keep things a little affordable for young professionals and priced more premium on the working professionals. So my theory is that we have to continue to re-benefit from the working professionals to invest in the young professionals with like a transfer of support from one to the other. Is it still like life classes for all of these cohort based life classes or how is that product evolved?
Cohort-Based Digital Learning and Engagement
00:44:19
Speaker
So it is a lot of online live interactive classes. So the physical world has gone, but the liveness of the interaction has not, it has been replaced by a digital classroom. So digital classrooms are the way to go. And I think, so there's been studies to show, in fact, if you look at the studies of this area for the last 10 years, the whole MOOC revolution that happened, Coursera is of the world, you realize that
00:44:43
Speaker
You know, the idea that if you make content asynchronous and non-covert based, some of our people will learn at their own leisure. That theory is not working, right? That theory is not working. So what it tells you is that we are social learners. We learn in good, it's like hunting in packs. We learn in groups, we learn in packs.
00:45:04
Speaker
So there's been a term to this idea that's called CBL or cohort-based learning, right? So what we used to think is the important part. It gives you a belief that cohorts are less important, but physical classroom is important. In reality, cohorts are very important and the physical classroom become a digital classroom is not an impediment at all.
00:45:22
Speaker
So what do you have place at digital cohorts as opposed to physical cohorts? And what you have is that I will learn it by own pace, asynchronously move self-contained. I think that part isn't really working as we know from the results. So our theory, which I think is backed up by some recent amount of research that cohort based learning on digital platform gives you the best of all worlds. Right. And the technologies are sophisticated enough that people can work. You see not to the pandemic workplace and we have teams, we have zoom, we have all of this.
00:45:51
Speaker
The technology for learning also has come enough that we can create our team. You can create a team of five participants who are geographically in five different cities, but working as a single team on the same project. And a mentor is hanging around in the digital room, helping them out. So that is now the talking variable. So we tried to rebuild the entire model.
00:46:11
Speaker
with everything that are the same except the physical becoming digital. Like for coding, maybe you have coding simulators where they're working collaboratively. The instructor can also look at what code they're writing and so on.
00:46:24
Speaker
Absolutely. So coding actually turns out the simulator world is quite advanced now, right? People can write and submit code. The systems can do the evaluations most of the time. Then people can do peer review of code. Yeah. We are discovering to our two is a positive surprise that once the mental barrier went away, like just as we always said that, Oh, we can't work from home, but we now can.
00:46:44
Speaker
We have realized that we can't code if you're not sitting in front of an instructor. It turns out that you can learn to code as part of a cohort, even if you're not in the same place as the cohort or the instructor. So I think technology now allows us to do a lot of these things quite well. But I think the problem with coding remains that
00:47:03
Speaker
unless we give students something to solve, you don't really get the outcome. So our whole model is problem solving is the real method. You give people tools, technology, support, peer group mentoring, but what you really give them is hard families to solve, which get the start-up simple, but as you make progress, you get harder and harder time to solve. And problem solving done right, or what we call competition problem solving, and the skill set is competition problem solving, meaning the problem is that you can have an algorithmic solution, right?
00:47:33
Speaker
Then I think whenever you seem to be working quite well. There would be some people who would be more proficient than others. So do you have that like segregation of patches and so on? Like how do you deal with that? Like efforts earning speeds and abilities. Yeah. Two very good questions. The two answers I'll give you in a different sort of way, two very different answers. One answer is.
00:47:56
Speaker
Very often we need to run something called remodel. So before the courses begin, we call it module zero. Because people come from different backgrounds and in the case of working professionals, somebody is being out of college for 10 years, somebody's out of 15 years, somebody's out of five years, very differential situations. So they are for one of their basic math, basic statistics, and they have to learn AI, right? All of which you can't learn without that.
00:48:17
Speaker
So we offer refreshers. So first of all, we often offer module zero as a refresher before the core starts to normalize this Delta, right? So people come in and say, okay, do this course, just refresh, get your basic concepts back, and then you start. So we spend some time trying to synchronize the starting point so that people don't start with a great disadvantage. That's one way of solving this problem that he has talked about. The other problem is actually a very interesting problem to say that
00:48:43
Speaker
Despite your best efforts, no class never going to have a homogeneous group. As the class progresses, some will learn faster, some will learn slowly, some will learn at the normal pace, and you can always have people who are overperforming, performing, or underperforming. And this is true for every education system in the world, not just us.
00:49:01
Speaker
And what happens typically in a college or school is that the professors latch on to the over performance delivered for them. At best try to pay attention to the performers and the under performers leave the class very dissatisfied and not being able to even get the basis right. This whole concept has been illustrated quite extensively by Sarah Khan from Khan Academy. If you look at his 10 lectures, he talks about this idea that, you know, the problem in education is tenure-based. We say that you spend one year in a particular grade, eighth grade, and then one year in ninth grade.
00:49:29
Speaker
And he said that imagine if you're trying to build a house in which the architect says that I'll spend three months building the foundation. And then the three months, it is not complete. I'll start building the ground floor. And after three months, it's not complete. I've made the first floor because I can use it, right? And instead, the tenure base makes no sense in education. What makes this outcome based?
00:49:47
Speaker
or competency-based, what we call competency-based. So some people can get to paid aid in three months, some in 12 months, and some in 24 months. You must allow them to go through it and complete and get the competency. So our education is not proficiency or competency-based. It tends to be very tenure-based, which is the problem. So now back to the point. In our assessment, so online courses have ongoing weekly assessments. So the system is observing who's over-performing, who's under-performing.
00:50:13
Speaker
Let's say you and I have the same class. We're taking the same tests together every weekend. You are overachieving, right? You are like performing at a speed where you can graduate not in six months, but perhaps in four months.
00:50:26
Speaker
Right? And I'm proceeding at a speed where six months is being short for me. I need eight months to graduate, right? System is observing this from my desk performance and your test performance. System then kicks in and without even having to consult with the instructor, system will start doing things. It will start saying to me that here are three videos that we should watch because I looked at your last test performance. You were good in some things. You were weak in some things. If you really watch these three videos, the weak area that you are falling behind, you can catch up.
00:50:53
Speaker
And I can watch this videos without anybody in my class ever doing that. The system goes videos to watch recommendation, what we call recommendation systems. Yeah. And you may be doing so well that instead of sending you the video videos, it'll send you the next class. You should watch this before the next class because then you can go through that even faster.
00:51:11
Speaker
So the system, so this is their innovation that we have done, that we are able to create a system behind the scenes with instructors doing their job. But the system is contributing the instructor by supplementing some people, remediating other people, reading up some people, helping people are slowing down, catch up and all of that purely through recommendation content. Right.
00:51:32
Speaker
That's an example of the benefit of technology-based learning. Never do this in a technical classroom. But the tenure is fixed or is the tenure also flexible? Like you have a four-month course, can I take six months to complete it if I am a slow learner? The tenure, if you are learning slow, we will give you more time, no doubt about it. For example, if your final exam is unsatisfying, then you can take another time, then we'll give you more time. So letting people do things for longer is not a problem.
00:51:59
Speaker
If somebody says, this is too simple, I can graduate in two months. I think we can't allow that yet. We don't have a way of letting people graduate sooner. We'll still talk them to two more.
00:52:08
Speaker
But the problems and projects are like the whole cohort is doing those projects and problems together. So that's one. And the other thing is that the more fundamental issue is that in the last 200 years, education has become a business, right? And if somebody says that, why am I paying so much tuition for two months when I'm finishing? So the work business model around things will start to break once you break the new. Got it.
00:52:31
Speaker
Yeah. People will say, you know what, I didn't need so much resources from you. So why are you charging me the safe as somebody else? We don't know how to differentiate. You should surprising in the whole education system in the world is based on Teddy, or if you break the 10 year model, a lot of business models will collapse. What about when you go to college, you're not just interacting with your batch mates, but there are multiple courses where you have that community which gets built and out of the college and alumni, like once you're an alumni, then there's also the lifelong thing. So what are some of the things you're doing there like to enable that?
00:53:00
Speaker
part of the community as an asset and like a life law and alumni base as an asset. We are building an alumni connect system, which is since early stages when it's going okay. But I think by definition, we are not a full-scale educational platform. We don't give our degrees. We don't hold people for years and years. It's not a career, not a two-year model. We are essentially an intervention.
00:53:24
Speaker
Why do people need us? They need us for an intervention, right? So therefore, our ability to create a lifelong bond is, in my view, fairly limited. However, it's critical because most people will not consume our products multiple times. It is important for us to build a great word of mouth for reference.
00:53:43
Speaker
So we need a referral system and therefore alumni are our best referral possibility. And then we have a 40% referral rate, even in a coding book, campus, and so forth. Yeah. So the point is that yes, building an alumni connect that is successful is a dream. It's something we are pursuing. What is the percentage split of source of conversion? What percentage comes from the reference of students? What percentage comes through digital marketing? Yeah.
00:54:11
Speaker
I think it's a good answer would be that in a best program, you're highly popular. I've even seen 60% reference, but then on average as a company, maybe 35 to 40% reference, one out of three students. And who would come to campaigning? Yeah. So I would say one third, refer to third campaign.
00:54:26
Speaker
is a fairly stable metric over time. But there are variations where in some programs, it might be even more than 3%. Do you spend the marketing beyond performance marketing? Say, I don't know what it takes to spend on YouTube as a channel, like building up the YouTube community, posting free educational content just to build brand and so
Building Brand Awareness Without Excessive PR
00:54:49
Speaker
on. Yes.
00:54:50
Speaker
I think in our business that's absolutely non-negotiable. You have to do that for SEO, you have to do that for reputation, you have to do that for brand building and all of that. We have been, I think we've been doing it and we have been doing it very, I would say systematically, but not in a very loud sort of way because
00:55:08
Speaker
We have never been very comfortable with the idea of just doing a lot of PR, loud PR. And I think one of the reasons why the top institutions like IITs and I's like working with talent students because they find that to be lightweight. They don't want a partner who's always painting the town red with something or the other.
00:55:26
Speaker
So in that sense, I think our approach is more powerful and little more, I would say low key, but we do it all the time. The content is available and content is being used for SEO and for lead gen all the time, but it is happening in some sense, very targeted to people who need it. So if you are, I always joke that if my grandmother knows about times when it's a big problem, because when I'm wasting marketing money in the wrong audience.
00:55:49
Speaker
She's neither going to go for upskilling nor going to look for a post job. So therefore I don't need marketing to be all things, to be all people. Scholarship programs that you told me, like the one you do with Google, like how do you ensure engagement there because the Surat is not paying anything. Does that come in as a sector or the Surats are engaged because it's a great opportunity for them? Yeah.
00:56:11
Speaker
So engagement is a function of how you select, right? Also not just the money you pay. So for example, the way this program has evolved into now it's in the fifth cohort is that every year in the month of February or March, we announced that the next cohort is going to be now created and resupply and that goes out to all the universities in the country and also on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera.
00:56:39
Speaker
Students applied. Last year we got 35,000 applications from across all states and perhaps about 400 to 500 universities and colleges. And 35,000 young women who had the first year of college applied. And from that we picked two. Then we ran a fairly sophisticated selection process, two stage selection process with 250 selections.
00:57:00
Speaker
Now the kicks are making into the system are already going to a fairly high degree of selection and therefore we know that they're motivated because the goal in life is to get a job in Google or Amazon or Microsoft start. So we are selecting for the most hundred years and the most I would say ambitious crowd up front.
00:57:21
Speaker
Once they're in, there is also the following. So they get a stipend. They get the education fee. They also get a stipend to buy laptops and like that that they will need, which is also very nice. Yeah. And then they are there. So the two year program is also structured that then the first thing I can apply for internships and Google another come. So now they know that.
00:57:39
Speaker
If they decide to just not be engaged, they're going to miss on all this opportunity. So first of all, you select the people who are ambitious, then you put milestone in front of them that are reachable, like internships, multiple kinds of internships, then additional awards, coding hackathons, et cetera. So they tend to be, if anything, they tend to spend more time on this and their own college education because they realize quickly that more than learning here has far better career value. Also, one of the really beautiful things about this photograph is that while the education part is taken care of by talent sprint,
00:58:08
Speaker
There is a mentoring network of Google engineers who are allocated to this program, who are Google engineers, their Google employees. They mentor three, four students each throughout the entire program, giving them ideas on how to prepare for interviews, how to write an resume. They give them mock interviews and they give them this idea that, okay, Google also is not exception to the rule. I've decided that Google has enough problems of its own and gender diversity, as you all know.
00:58:32
Speaker
So therefore, if you're a woman engineer, what kind of problems can you expect to face with all this momentum is also women engineers in Google. So there's a lot of surround effect that is going around. It's not just training. It is training. It's mentoring. It's preparing its goals and milestones. Yeah. Yeah.
00:58:49
Speaker
Absolutely. So I would say that at the end of it, completion rates are like 99, 98, 99% and placement rates are a hundred percent. And these kids are grounded, just post about their success on LinkedIn and go on. Some of them, last year, three years ago, students were the national coding competition. So they're a serious player, but they're not here just to spend time because you've gotten this program is so serious that we also drop students. If somebody is not progressing and we don't think they'll make it, we will drop them.
00:59:16
Speaker
middle of the program. So the fear of elimination is actually I also have motivation to move on the right.
00:59:22
Speaker
Got it. I feel that today an Ettic company also needs to be a FitTech company because if you're able to figure out ways of financing the cost to your customer through financial engineering, through P at PL options, through income sharing, and a lot of Ettics have different approaches in which they're doing it. So tell me about that element for you, like the FitTech element or financing that. Are you looking at income sharing or P at PL or any of those? Yeah.
00:59:51
Speaker
Good question. In fact, so the first part is easy that we have, I think, one of the earliest pioneers in this idea of zero percent DMI schemes, or in other words, BNBL. Even one of the pioneers in this idea of zero percent DMI schemes. In fact, BNBL, before it was called BNBL, we had started working, going back now, 2017-18.
01:00:13
Speaker
on how to provide our learners with good financing solutions. And this is generally, it was called training financing in those days, but now it's called big deck for EdTech. So therefore, if you look at it from that perspective, you'd be surprised to hear even Rajaj Kinsav began their first education product with Talensbridge. That is why I made the point earlier that I look at this as a consumer product,
Education as a Consumer Product and Digital Financing
01:00:36
Speaker
right?
01:00:36
Speaker
If you think of what we're offering is a white color consumer product, a white coat consumer product, then that's how it started. And then of course, there are a lot of startups that came in the last few years and today we work with all of them. So typically, if you are somebody joining a dance program, you are eligible to apply for this. It's a fairly quick session, a few points of data about yourself, electronic KYC, and within three to five minutes, you'll get a decision.
01:01:01
Speaker
or whether they approve the note for EMI, then we have a whole bunch of providers for this. So zero percent of EMI per 12 to 18 months is that deal. And I would say 50% of our customers are using it. Yeah. So that to me is fantastic because the suppression works in the way that we get paid our cash early. Again, going back to your early point about working capital, our cash comes up front. And then the fintech company would work with the student or learner to recover over a period of time. And that's, I think, working very well.
01:01:31
Speaker
If I look at this, and if I call presence to the ISA agreement, I think ISAs are a big danger. If you could clarify ISA and foreign listeners, it's an interesting... I understand what it means. ISA means income sharing agreements. And what that really means, once it does that, I will learn as a student today, and then you will incur as another platform, you will teach me. And then when I finish, if I get a job,
01:01:59
Speaker
I will start paying you back in the subframe of an installed profession. In some sense, it's like what a division knows used to be from a bank. If you went to an MBA, the bank loan, that's how it would look. I think better data, I guess, where it's a percentage of what you write.
01:02:15
Speaker
Now, there is data from South America and other countries that we will seek to have work for many companies. But in India, it has not worked for many companies where it certainly has not been something that we have been very comfortable with. Because frankly, the data between when the cost side incurred and when the revenue comes in is just too low. It's like having a cash collection cycle that is two years or three years behind the delivery.
01:02:39
Speaker
What that does is it actually is obviously very bad for a cash flow, but it's probably even more insidious in defense that very stupidness.
01:02:47
Speaker
when they are successful, do not attribute their success back to the people who put them to the system. So what makes for you? Do you see this as your final journey or is there one more which in you? Yeah. So I have, I mean, I can give you answers to that question, but summarize, I would say that I have another year to go on this particular, so it's a three year CEO contract that I'm working on. And I've told myself that I do not want to
01:03:17
Speaker
rush into my next, what makes, because I don't want to fill out my current time with the anxiety about the future. So I'm just living it in a much more comfortable way. I have a lot of different interests, so I can see myself as one thread, doing another dink as an entrepreneur.
01:03:33
Speaker
I can see myself heading a much larger organization, either for profit or even nonprofit. And I can see myself becoming a writer and a broadcaster, much like you. That's another thing that I've always wanted to do. And I'm also, by the way, I have a lot of interest in. I have a huge movie as a chef, so I love all that.
01:03:50
Speaker
I have no idea what I'll do, to be honest. One last question. Where does a talent spread stand in terms of the overall executive education market? Who are the other major players? And where would you rank? And would you be in the top two, the top five? Yeah, I think we'll be in the top five if you go by revenue.
01:04:08
Speaker
will be the top one if you go by who is profitable and who is not. But if you go by revenue alone, I think it'd be the top five.
01:04:24
Speaker
Anyone else? You've got three good names there, Abrat, Great Learning, Scaler, but also Emeritus, Simply Learned. So these are, I've been in Talentsmith, four or five, six names will keep rotating depending on what it is. I think if you look at purely from a perspective of, for example, we have a very strong presence in financial service and banking programs, right? Like tech and all that, which I think we are unique in that sense. And that also is the reason why I didn't see was attracted to us.
01:04:54
Speaker
The other thing that we are good at is, for example, I think if you look at the quality of partnerships with India, blue chip academia, then I think we have the most sought after partners. But if you look at the point of view saying that who's making the most noise in the market, certainly we are not bad. And so somewhere along the way, I think perhaps by design or perhaps by accident, we've come to be seen as a serious player.
01:05:16
Speaker
trying to build a serious approach to the space and doing it more patiently with a more thoughtful approach and avoiding all kinds of handfare and gimmicks. So we are a bit of an anachronism in this era. What is your India versus outside India revenue split? What's the roadmap there?
01:05:35
Speaker
Yeah. So we just started our international operations a year ago and a very happy banner. I was pleased to note that if you look at what happened, the women engineers program with Google in India was so successful and became such a template for how Google wants to do this kind of work around the world, which is inclusion and diversity and equity in education and learning. So we got invited a year ago by Google to set up a similar model in the US.
01:06:00
Speaker
for minority-led institutions. As in the U.S., in the Silicon Valley terms, or modern economy terms, Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and white Americans, urban are the winners. But if you look at African Americans, Latin Americans, and rural white Americans, they are not the ones who are participating in the living economy.
01:06:20
Speaker
And therefore, that's another correction that is in the process of getting addressed. And Google asked us to replicate the same model of government engineers that we did in India in the US. And we set up a program called TechWise. And TechWise has started the first cohort is on. 100 students across five minority-led institutions across the US are already running. And this is, I think, a great place to start because being invited by Google to set up a US operation was a great moment of pride for us because we didn't have to go and do any marketing. We just got invited to set up the US operation.
01:06:50
Speaker
So early days, this year we contribute a good amount of revenue, perhaps almost five, 6% of our total revenue. But I'm very optimistic that the kind of support that in that particular program is getting in Google in the U S that can expand significantly in the coming years. And I will not be surprised if the ultimate goal is to produce 1000s a year in the minority category of the U S for travel valley companies.
01:07:14
Speaker
Apart from that, we signed with Carnegie Mellon this year for Executive Education. We signed with the University of Michigan this year with Executive Education. Early days, we are in the US market today, very well in India, perhaps it's five or six years ago, so long ways to go. I'm guessing in a couple of years, US revenue will overtake India, wouldn't you? Yeah, it's the multiplier effect of conversion. Yeah, exactly. Quite possible. I hope that's true.
01:07:40
Speaker
Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. And that brings us to the end of this amazing conversation. At this point of time, I'd like to make a request. I want to know what you think about the show and how we can improve it. Do you have suggestions? Do you want to discuss your startup ideas? Is there any way in which we can add more value to you as a disster? I love reading your emails and suggestions. Please write to me at ad at the podium.in. That's ad at the t h e podium p o d i u m dot in.