How Pratham Mittal Is Fixing Indian Business Education?
India's a country of billion people, but only 700 universities right so i thought there was a massive massive scope in creating something very beautiful in education, something that you know propels India to the top of sort of these you know rankings. currently as it stands hardly any Indian institutions are in the top 100 yeah i mean and we think that we have IITs and IIMs and those are great and they are but on a global platform they're also nowhere and i thought that maybe i could solve that problem. So a couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking to the Pratham Mittal, the founder of masters union and we talked about his life and his entrepreneurial journey and there was no plan, the interview was not scripted there was no structure to it it was just a free-flowing conversation but the thing that i found really fascinating about his story and you can watch the full conversation by clicking on the link in the description down below that's the uncut version of this interview the one that i'm going to be showing you guys today is just a chunk of the conversation that him and i had but the thing that i found really fascinating about his story is that his entrepreneurial journey actually began long before he registered his first company from experimenting with yahoo stores as a kid to discovering hackathons in his college days and then building this really fascinating tool called Nuisance. what's really interesting is how multiple times in his journey he had to stop short he wasn't able to fully pursue entrepreneurship because of the demands and requirements of the education system that he was in, school ended up occupying so much of his time and energy that he couldn't become the entrepreneur that he is today until he'd finished up with university and so with his current company masters union, Pratham is actually creating a place, a program that allows students to experiment with and pursue entrepreneurial thinking to a much larger extent than he was able to during his college days.
This company encourages students to think outside of the box and tackle real world problems in creative ways in fact after we'd finished recording the interview Pratham told me that a quarter of the students that went through their first batch actually went on to found their own companies for me personally I learned a lot from the conversation he's a seasoned entrepreneur at this point so he has tons of gyaan to share about his personal philosophy, when it comes to business entrepreneurship and starting up and i hope that you're able to take away as much from these two hours as i did during the time that i personally spent with Pratham Mittal. What would you say was the first experience that you had that was somewhat entrepreneurial? yeah so uh i think we just got an internet at home for the first time this is probably i was like 10-15 years old and you know at the time on the internet there were all these ads like make money like make 100 rupees in one night you know those clickbait ads they try to tell you or trick you into like clicking something because they'll tell you you'll make money this way you'll make money that way right and i was just intrigued i was like wait this just sounds too good to be true right let me give it a shot so once i clicked on one of those ads which was basically trying to get me to promote an url uh for a product i think it was uh um those uh like phone cases like back in the day you have those large phones or pagers i feel like there was some case for that and like hey if you tell 10 of your friends to click on this link and they purchase using that link then you get you make all this money and i was like hey this is easy money then i started going deeper deeper deeper what is drop-shipping, what is e-commerce what is amazon doing, what is like this flipkart thing right so i just went deeper and deeper and started understanding a little bit more about the internet economy so i think that's my initial sort of curiosity bug right and from there on uh you know once you're curious enough and once you go deep into anything that just becomes your passion then i was like wait all these people are making like such interesting businesses without any investment through dropshipping and through e-commerce i gotta try this i gotta figure it out right and so i remember setting up at the time some yahoo store shopify came much later but yahoo stores i think came in like much earlier just i set up a yahoo store i didn't even end up selling anything but just the you know just the fact that i like set up an account on that website try to sort of like put on some products as listings etc i mean i think that was just a lot of fun just to do right um and then you know then the indian education system happened to me so this was before boarding this is before boarding school or during boarding school okay then i would come back home for holidays but in the boarding school i would get so busy with math and science and history that all these things would sort of go for a toss completely so your curiosity takes a back seat to the traditional education which means you have to score well right i mean you have the you have to of course because then you have to go to the you know the best university and then you have to yeah so you don't have time to yourself uh and to explore your own passions i think as an in as a product of indian education system uh still i think i was lucky because i was in a boarding school that focused a lot on sports okay right so i ended up playing a lot of sports ended up you know swimming quite a bit all of that stuff so i think i learned a lot of uh things about life from sport uh you know about again hustle because you know one time what happened was that i was swimming and i said okay i'm gonna be a backstroker right i was naturally good at it so i became a backstroker and at that time again uh very early days of youtube very very early days of youtube and i was like wait we have a coach here uh and he's teaching everyone the same backstroke that he knows i have a feeling that perhaps there's someone better on youtube who can teach me swimming better right and so i went on youtube and there was this video of this guy teaching backstroke on youtube right and i realized that our coach had been teaching us something fundamentally wrong really yeah so i mean like there's a certain thing you have to do when your hand goes back and he wasn't teaching us that and that would easily shave off 20% of your time wow right and i was like wait he's not teaching us this now i know something that nobody else does and the next day or whatever the next week there was a competition i participated and i won that i mean i kicked ass in that competition right and i was like wait i mean i just like you know there was this information asymmetry i knew a little bit more than anybody else sure this is like people call this the unfair advantage right you had the internet everyone else had the internet too yeah but you knew how to leverage it to actually get ahead of in this case competition um but anyway so you went through that you went through doing school then you went to the university of Pennsylvania um i hope I'm not skipping over any entrepreneurial experiences along the way because i think the next one that comes to mind from my research anyways is this hackathon so yeah i mean it seems like that's the next experience it could be that there was something else was there anything else in between no no so i think i think entrepreneurship is also like a mindset right so you're entrepreneurial i was entrepreneur i think i was entrepreneur in my swimming i was entrepreneurial when i was applying to colleges right so for example all my friends thought that pen was beyond our reach so nobody even applied right people were like no no we can't apply to these top 10 because the sat score requirement is this much and that and like you know let's give it a shot i mean like let's set a target let's give it a shot and so i applied to top 20 all 20 colleges like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Pen all of the colleges i just applied to i was like what's the worst i'll get rejected but at least i'll know that i tried and i got rejected from all of them except for Pen i was like all right one out of 20 times luck will like save you i don't think i deserved it at all but i got it i think just because i applied enough places i was bound to trick somebody into accepting me that's amazing i think so that's also entrepreneurial and i think again it comes back to that same idea of the going on YouTube and looking for something that nobody else was even thinking to look for which was how to do the backstroke properly everybody just assumed that the teacher was teaching it properly right uh your father setting up the lovely autos like everybody just assumed that that was the way to do things you go to another city to buy your school scooter right and and and everybody assumed that you can't set up a private college private university it's just not possible it can be done right so the entrepreneur in you in your family and your bloodline has this propensity to question the norm and sort of try to see if there's any gaps that nobody else is noticing because they have this herd mentality and they don't even look around to see if there's opportunities lying in weight yeah bloodline is a stronger word but yeah sorry you know what i think it's just uh i think you know i think 10% of or maybe 20% of all people have this right it's also that i was i was very privileged to to have opportunities to like uh you know set up a yahoo store i mean i had the internet i had a computer at home most people wouldn't have that right so i think it was it was the perfect storm okay so you went to the university of Pennsylvania uh which is also very cool i love talking to entrepreneurs that have been outside of india that have traveled i'm assuming you had some american friends while you're there people from other countries as well because it's university of Pennsylvania everybody wants to go um so tell me about this hackathon that i think you and your friend was it casey set up yeah yeah okay so were you were you uh weren't you i think i remember hearing that you had like sort of taken that idea from Princeton and did you up yeah so i'll tell you the story okay sure so it's actually quite interesting um there was this again this email newsletter and it said that hey you know there's a startup weekend happening at Princeton right now this sounds cool right i mean it's at Princeton you know it'll be a nice holiday i'll love to see the campus as well it was like two hours away from where pen was and so i asked one of my friends i was like dude i mean there's a startup weekend essentially it's 48 hours of a hackathon we'll go set up an idea build a team you know build that product and then we'll see what happens if we win we when but we'll just go worst comes to worst we would have seen princeton right it's a beautiful campus right it's this old victorian campus uh so my friend is like okay let's let's do it right so we took a bus to princeton we reached there and um that was that was it right we just wanted to see princeton and how far away is princeton from like a couple of hours okay just like you took a greyhound yeah yeah yeah megabus okay so we we we reached princeton and there we understood the format of the competition the format was that hey listen you have to first pitch your idea to the entire audience and then you have to build your team and then for 48 hours you have to hack your product and then at the end of the 48 hours you have to present and pitch to the investors or the judges and we said fun okay let's do this so we had an idea uh we weren't going to do too many details that's a fun idea you know so actually let's go into some details uh it was basically a news product which would give you personalized news so for example let's say something happens in japan right like there's a nuclear attack that happens on japan right i don't know or is the nuclear leak let's be less political gosh this has happened so let's say there's some there's an earthquake in japan right it's not relevant to you in any way but what this product would do would tell you exactly which of your friends associates acquaintances will be most affected by that depending on you know who was in japan you know who had maybe done a foursquare check-in or maybe had put up a facebook update from japan whatever right so it'll make news very contextual so we built this product out built a team of seven eight people uh we had no intention of winning uh because there were people who were much older than us they were mba students and they were phd students and they were all princeton princeton yeah at the end of the day um and so we had no like we didn't even try to win right we just tried to have fun we tried to so we built a team of five six folks uh you know we worked over the overnight um and then we hacked out this product and then we went and presented and it just so happened that at the end of the presentation when they were announcing the results um i you know they start with like rank three like rank two and then they go to rank one right like you know third prize second prize first prize and then the the people who got the third prize were people who i did not expect to even win right or like even come top ten how's that more interesting like maybe we still maybe we actually have a chance and then second was someone that was predictable and then third they said nuisance and we're like wait what like like we didn't believe it for something and then and so we all went to sort of accept that price and then there was like this confusion on my face and the judge who was giving us a place like why are you so confused why do you look so confused you actually won that so i think that victory really gave me a lot of confidence that hey listen like you know we're not less than anybody else or like these Princeton folks or these PhD folks our idea actually had some worth or some um merit to it and and our execution wasn't all that bad and our presentation at the end of the day sort of brought it all together so that confidence that it gave me was was transformational i think because i think that's what validated the entrepreneur and make you okay you can do this right and thereafter i sat out of the on-campus recruitment cycle so at penn we have these like google and facebook and bain and bcg and mckinsey all coming in recruiting but i decided not to sit because i was so sure of then continuing working on my startup harder wow so you took nuisense as a as a startup to actually build out as a founder yeah i was like might as well i mean like these three judges feel that it's a good idea i have a team already let's just build it out wow so we started building it out a team sorry a team like a group of friends that you so the people who attended the hackathon hackathon yeah so you built a team amongst the people who were at the ag got it just new people that you've never met never met before wow never met before so most of them i mean they left the team obviously because i mean it was a weekend thing for them right uh but a couple of them you know stuck by uh but then even like over a couple of years as we worked on that idea uh we realized that this idea is actually not going anywhere because it's very hard to monetize it's very hard to scale there are these issues that issues dependency on foursquare dependency on facebook dependency on twitter they change their algorithms every day we said okay forget about it but that insight into all of those things was amazing sure right you learned i learned so much about that entire ecosystem apis how to work with apis because we had to call all those apis um you know i forced myself to learn photoshop i forced myself to learn marvel at that time all these apps to sort of you know build the initial prototypes etc so all in all a great experience it ended up completely as a failed startup but a great experience nonetheless wow and so thereafter i realized the power of hackathons and then i started another hackathon at my own school at penn or hacked the change with casey which is i think sure we'll we'll get to that yeah i want to understand it's a really important experience for you a failed startup right and i think people skim over that they don't like to talk about their failures they just want to move on you want to talk about masters union you want to talk about more recent things but i you know so many people who are watching this video right now are either dreaming of starting up meaning they're like on the cusp or they're currently like actually ideating they're in that that sort of ideation seed stage whatever stage you want to call it right where they're they're kind of like trying to find a co-founder or they're trying to maybe talk to investors like pitching some sort of prototype or mvp um that must have been a really difficult thing for you to let go of right nuisance or not really were you kind of like oh it's not working out that's fine i'll just start something else uh i mean i think i've been working on it for like over a year so there's something yeah there's a certain commitment you have right however as soon as i realized the inherent flaws in the business it became very easy to let go of it right like i'm not married to this i'm 21 or 19 at the time or whatever 20. i'm like you know i can definitely take the best of my learnings uh and create something new right so so that's what happened i mean i didn't get married to it uh it was very easy to let go it wasn't that hard i mean in hindsight i'm thinking whether like i really love that idea enough or not i mean but but i think i was flexible enough to let go of it i think i think it's easier no wow i don't know i i get sometimes i think about startups and businesses as the same way i look at like relationships and i feel like a lot of the time the first startup that somebody creates is almost like their first love their first girlfriend or whatever it's very hard to get let go of it's like this very like you think you're going to get married and have kids and live happily ever after but maybe coming from a business background you know your family you'd seen your dad build multiple things your grandfather as well maybe you were kind of like you just didn't have that uh sort of puppy dog love for your first startup you're like no i can start another thing later on it's fine i think i had puppy dog love for starting up period ah okay right we weren't ready to let go of that i wasn't later at go of starting up i had some very good companies offering me jobs right i mean all of that was there but i i i did not let go of starting up i let go of that idea and i knew that idea was going nowhere got it does that make sense no it does make sense yeah yeah did you have something that you were like ready to jump into next or it was kind of like i'll just wait and see no again i mean like you know college is hard right uh i mean maybe you know exams or trials started and then like you know we the focus completely shifted and then you also want to score you know you have all these expectations from home that you'll do well in college so i think um it was like a zigzag sort of a time right like entrepreneurial not so entrepreneurial okay some you have some time become entrepreneurial and then you have exams and then you let go of it sure so you sort of you know zigzag a little bit uh but then uh another thing happened which was that i i met i was part of this class and in that class we used to have local companies come in and give us problem statements that we would have to solve for right the class was called engineering entrepreneurship or something right so solving problems through engineering essentially and so one of the local companies that came was this company called philadelphia inquirer which is a local newspaper in philadelphia one of the oldest ones and they said hey listen you know we have this website we run it on wordpress i don't know exactly so they just run it on wordpress and then they wanted to run some polls on the website because elections were coming up um they're like you know we're gonna do these like obama versus at that time romney i think right these polls and uh right now we have to code these polls ourselves right and can someone in the class help us create a system where we don't have to code these polls every time and so randy and i randy is one of my friends from from that same class now my business partner we decided to build out that small widget or that small product for philadelphia enquirer as a project and we send it to them over email and we said hey listen this is done and they replied back saying that hey listen here's like a few thousand dollars um can you like make it a little bit more secure right like because there was no security feature that we had built into it and we said okay thanks for the cash by the way but so you know we made a few changes and we sent it back to them and then they sent us another leg check of like a few thousand dollars can you make these other improvements and what we realized was that we were actually building a full end-to-end product for them which by the way we could have gone and sold to anybody else as well so then we went next to new york times and we just like knocked on john pogue's like office and then we said hey listen you literally showed up at the office and just yeah it was in new york we were interning there with some company um so we just like went to i think it was 48th and 11th like the 40th 40th street 11th avenue um went up to them and said hey can we get a meeting with john pogue they said sure he's upstairs you know 11th floor go we went to the 11th floor said hey listen you know we built this thing would you be interested in trying it out he's like i was looking for something exactly like this wow and we got a like like a hundred thousand dollar check from i mean it took some two three months after that but essentially we closed new york times as a client and they're like hey listen we have hit the gold mine now you know let's just finish college and like let's go full deep into it none of both of us are not ready to drop out so we said we'll do this on the side oh my gosh and that's when we sort of you know stumbled upon this sas style pricing you know that 30 a month 60 a month so we created these three packages like a startup package and a you know mid-tier enterprise package and a full large enterprise package so it was started off thirty dollars per month and went up to like hundred thousand dollars a month uh depending on you know what services you were using seriously a hundred thousand yeah yeah our largest customer uh like a hundred thousand a month they were willing to pay that much their business depends on it wow that's incredible so what was it like was it profitable then yeah yeah i mean so the thing is that when is a company not profitable a company is not profitable when it spends a lot on marketing right that's usually the major expense that causes you to burn cash right um and that's the case with all the indian startups over the last couple of years right if your acquisition channel is word of mouth if your acquisition channel is genuinely the uniqueness of your product and not just you giving discounts right in otherwise crowded market you will be profitable right because even if you look at for example zomato right on a unit economics level they are actually profitable but it's just that as a company they are not profitable similar i think it's true for various other companies on academy etc so you know essentially if you get that cat game right um which if you have a good product and good uh first initial early adopters who are ready to sort of you know give the reference for you i don't think you will be unprofitable right like i i fail to see sometimes that and like what are these guys spending money on why are they not profitable what is like this 600 million dollar bond like why where is that money going that's what number two the other thing is that when you're uh acquiring customers right google and facebook is the easiest way to acquire customers right you can just throw more money at google you'll get more customers more money at facebook more customers not in a sustainable way though but when you have money it spoils you right it doesn't force you to think about other cheaper acquisition channels like this is working why would i sort of change right so i think funding and easy funding makes founders lazy and they stop experimenting with you know unique acquisition channels they just rely or over rely on google and facebook and that's when they become unsustainable and i think it gives them a false sense of of uh maybe security isn't the right word success success right like oh we've got so many customers coming in they don't know if that's a result of their heavy spend in marketing or if that's actually people who are genuinely excited about their product until the investors stop pouring money into the startup and then suddenly they're like oh okay it was a lot a lot to do with the marketing not so much about the product now we need to quickly scramble and fix the product up but seems like you were basically listening to your customers as things went as you started to improve you're getting more and more revenue from these customers because the value that you're adding is increasing day by day i mean so we built the company over 10 years had we had funding and we were serious about it and we were not lazy with it maybe we would have been able to do that in four five years i would give you that that i think fundraising can sort of accelerate the growth right but it's up to the founder to be responsible as to how that growth comes but definitely i mean i think nothing wrong with fundraising but i think you have to be you have to be what's the word responsible yeah you have to use it in in the right way so um by the way that company is still in existence all around absolutely absolutely so randy and i ran that company for 10 years together now randy runs it full time uh it's still based in the us uh are you still you guys are the only owners yeah the only owners um and uh it's been it's been a great experience i mean like it's a in in hindi we call it dhanda i don't know if you've come across that term you haven't dhanda is pure raw business wow right without these uh embellishments of fundraising and you know burn and all of that ghanda means like profit and loss right i feel like the mittal family is a dhanda family india india's country like ambani adani etc all these companies they're all scaled up companies though those are yeah the traditional you know big companies but when we talk about startups that's a that's a different thing right i'm not sure i mean i i challenge you a little bit there i think there are plenty of tech companies that did not fundraise and have scaled up i mean fresh work soho nakri i mean these are not companies that raised funds early on in their lives yeah and they became profitable and then they raised maybe a little bit of money or went public uh to raise more funds but uh i think you'll find more successful examples of bootstrapped companies in india than successful examples of non-bootstrap companies in azeroth i mean you talk about zoroza so much on your channel yeah yeah yeah 10 years building outgrow and then what was the point where you i mean you you would have learned so much along the way right about leadership about building a startup uh not about fundraising a lot of time saved yeah because so many founders spend all of their time out there like my two co-founders one is like the stakeholder management founder and one is the ops founder yeah one of them is just on a plane constantly so you saved yourself a bunch of time um what was the point where you kind of started to realize that maybe it's time for me to start something else so uh outgrow is a niche right uh we don't have too many customers right we have limited set of customers and we don't intend to have more right because we have to service them well so at a point um you know two things happened in around just before cover two things happened one was that outgrow as a product uh was reaching maturity right there was only so much that i as a product person could bring to it right um and randy who runs the business side of things the sales and the marketing side of things his job was now more important so essentially we discussed that you know he will take over the company and at the same time i wanted to move back to india uh okay because i had been out of india for a while and i never intended to leave india and i felt that with all the knowledge that i had gained in the u.s working on outgrow from penn i thought the dividend that i'll be able to extract out of that in india would be a lot more than it would be in new york right also i wanted to work in education in india because my parents had been working in education in india and i saw how fulfilling it was for them to be in education right so i thought that education is something that has a couple of things going for it first it has great gross margins right so you don't have to rely on fundraising so that's the kind of business that i want to run where i don't have to rely on fundraising um second that it has a lot of impact right people are straightaway touched and thirdly uh you don't have to haggle with the customer they're only a few things in life that people save for right buying a home right education um uh maybe a car um but that's about it right so when people have already made up their mind that they have to spend on education um you know it's easier to sort of to close that deal right um so having did you when you went to college i know you dropped out of when you went to college did you negotiate your fees no never right nobody does yeah who does right so i thought that with all those things going for it education would be like the right space for me to enter but most importantly it was also that india needed good institutions right uh india is a country of billion people but only 700 universities right so i thought there was massive massive scope in creating something very beautiful in education uh something that you know propels india to the top of sort of these you know rankings um currently as it stands hardly any indian institutions are in the top 100 of either business schools or engineering schools or i've no i've noticed that yeah i've always wondered that too because you hear all about the ivy leagues and oxford cambridge yeah you know universities in germany etc but none in india yeah i mean and we think that we have iits and ims and those are great and they are but on a global platform they're also nowhere uh and i thought that maybe i could solve that problem um why did you decide i know you said you wanted to get back to india and you would also identify this this problem was there any like was there any hesitation there like should i start a company in the united states or go back to india like i feel like a lot of people idolize this life of you know moving to the united states as a startup founder be in new york right the big apple you know a lot of people would would decide or opt to stay in the united states once they've and you've spent 10 years right you've built up probably a group of friends you know you you have your favorite cafe and restaurant like your life is there right um what was the thought process there coming back to india or was it like a non-decision you're like this is just what has to no i think it's a very utilitarian decision right i mean i i remember like you know making an excel sheet and comparing the two options opportunities the thing is that in india uh other than the fact that i had my parents here the opportunities in india are boundless right in the u.s first of all the market is of 300 million
in india it's one point something billion right so first of all the market is much larger number two the market is very underpenetrated right for every you know one company in india there are 10 in the us right so when you enter a market in the us you're already competing with a bunch of folks in india when you enter into a market more often than not you're competing with fewer folks and by virtue of my experience in the u.s i thought i would have a natural advantage over them which by the way turned out to be wrong in some cases because they knew the market in india a lot better than i did but still i thought that i had some maybe you know technical dividend or maybe i had some you know insights that might be helpful in india so you know in that sense i realized that you know to build a business in india would be a lot simpler than the us also in the us human resources very expensive right in india as compared to your revenue um or your overall cost the human resource cost is actually slightly lesser so all those factors i realize that if i have to start a company might as well do it in india and also education is a much bigger problem in india than it is in the us very it's still a problem in the u.s by the way of course a big one but in india it's it's it's a lot more grave so i thought you know india would be the right place all right so you made up your mind packed your bags bought your tickets or did you already start planning the the company while you were in the u.s or was it like feed on the soil i'm here in india now let's start um i forget actually i think it was a little bit of both right i knew that i had to do something in education but then i came back and then like spent two months having conversations with stakeholders talking to students talking to my dad market research market research um and then after doing all of that i realized that hey listen okay i've made a lot of mistakes in life i don't want to repeat any of those right um so one of the mistakes that i had made was you know spending too much time thinking and building the product before going to market right so here i thought you know i'm going to go to market first right and then build the product around sort of the problems that i see um so lots of those learnings i utilized in in in you know in this chapter two um and then uh so i think it was like a mix of it so i knew which industry i wanted to get into but to figure out exactly what i wanted to do maybe a couple of months of market research i think we we kind of skimmed over that with outgrow but i think what you're hinting at with the problems that you or the mistakes you made in the past was that you had kind of gotten this early validation from those customers and so you like built out the product really quickly but then it was really messy and sloppy and you and you realize that like a lot of this stuff is not even adding value and nobody even wants to use these features and so was that kind of what happened without grow yeah i mean so outgrow was an unplanned product and that's what it looked like at the end of five years so for the next leg of our journey we had to really sort of uncook that entire meal and cook it again right in a way that made sense so with master's union so with masters you don't want to make sure i don't make that same mistake and that i know enough about the market beforehand that i plan my product and i plan my approach in a strategic way right not just sort of throw darts um at the world so what did that what did that like consist of uh in in you know the real world you first do a little bit of market research you're talking to people then what you start building or i mean so i planned it like you know so masters union is a planned project right i knew on day zero exactly how much money you would have in the bank in year three in year four in year five right so masters union was a very well thought out business plan and playbook and execution plan and we have stuck to it right so i sat down spent a couple of months just sort of making sure that you know okay in first year we're going to target these many students and year two we're gonna target these many students in tier three because of the kind of results you would have given in year one we would we can target these many students this is how much you would spend in marketing i knew exactly how much you know what the the keyword mba costs right on google so i'm budgeted for that i knew exactly what kind of conversion rates i would have right because of all the 10 years of work that we had put in we knew exactly you know what these economics and these funnels look like so we planned for all of that and so when we sort of built the car essentially on paper and then we sort of wanted to manufacture and build the campus we just had to execute the playbook that we'd already planned out got it right so um you know on day one we you know launched our website um and by the way we didn't even have a campus right we started building the campus once the first class had already been admitted oh right what did did that uh did that sorry what's it called cohort yeah did they did their opinions inform your decisions about building the campuses right so for example first year i said that you know i'm going to target 60 students right uh and you know this would be their age category this will be their experience this will be all of that but would i be able to get those kind of students i had enough confidence that i would be able to but it wasn't for certain right now imagine if i built this beautiful campus right i spent money doing that uh and then students actually don't end up joining for whatever reason and by the way we'll speak covet right so there's another risk there right that what if like i you know schools were shutting down the shutting down right and we actually built our masters union in the middle of pandemic like wave one by the way and uh so there was a lot of uncertainty so we said all right let's first admit the students let's first admit the students let's go through the admissions process and once we know that they're coming in then we'll start building the campus and in fact uh you know you have you require like capex right you need to spend money building these walls and carpets and you know tables and chairs and so it was only when the students paid their fees i was going to ask about that right i was like how did how did you do this financially like so you actually that's like taking a a note out of these like ev startups right they take pre-orders they use the pre-order money to build the product that's what we did i mean it's kickstarter right essentially yeah so we we we collected the fees from our first cohort whatever like little amount it was and then we used that to build the campus wow so we had a negative working capital problem right we didn't have to raise capital then so uh education for the last five ten fifteen thousand years has not changed it's still the same where a teacher comes in front of a bunch of students speaks something the students take notes or make mental notes and then there's an exam at the end of which it is tested whether the students understood what the teacher said that has not changed maybe it has come online some of those aspects but still it's somebody talking to somebody and somebody sort of taking an exam right it's still the same education has not changed and we know that to an extent this works but it doesn't work very very well right and if i were to ask you a question right or if i were to ask anybody a question here uh what is the one thing that you remember from your classroom or from your college time right more often than not people will have an answer which has nothing to do with the courses they took it would be you know the experiences they had in the hostel it would be the experiences they had running a club it would be the experiences they had starting a company but it would never be that hey you know what i learned this concept in a classroom and that was the most rewarding experience of my college life we forget all that stuff we forget all of that that means whatever we are learning from college or what we value at a college is everything except for the classroom but we spend for the classroom right we pay money to sit in a classroom so i think what what we understood or what the hypothesis was that hey listen we need to look at the education system from a different lens right and we have to throw out all the norms and all the sort of understandings of how things work today right we have to sort of look at it from ground up and recreate it right and so we thought we'll do three things essentially three experiments the first experiment was that we'll try to bring in practitioners rather than career academics to come and teach in the classroom the reason for this was that in the us and india across the world you have people who are teaching in a classroom many of who have never actually worked in the industry so you're learning computer science from somebody who might have never worked in the software industry right and maybe what they're teaching you is useful to you sure but i think there is somebody else who maybe can teach those concepts better and we always say that you know our graduates are not employable and all of that this is the reason if people who are teaching them are not the people who have worked in the industry how do you expect the students to be ready for the industry now if you think of a medical college right a medical college always has teachers who are actual doctors who are doing surgeries right so why is that not the case in computer science education or in business education or in any other field right so uh so that was the first experiment we wanted to run which is can we bring in practitioners to come and teach and of course we'll have academics as well who will bring rigor to the classroom who will bring uh who make sure that the students are serious about the assignments and all of that so you need sort of a mixture of the two um so that was experiment one second experiment was that we said you know what we will not do classes traditionally we will not have accounting 101 and management 101 and you know computer science 101 we will not have um you know exams at the end of every class where you know there's 100 marks and then 20 marks of practical and t marks of theory and all of that just throw all of that out what we do here in masters union is essentially we've divided the year into eight terms and in each term students run a business right in term one as it stands today they're running an e-commerce drop shipping business so all the students and teams of five will be running a business and competing with each other on revenue not grades so wait are they literally generating revenue they're literally generating revenue huh wow right so someone's someone's running uh sort of a store where they sell you know bed sheets right that are star wars themed right someone's selling you know phone covers and someone selling cutlery someone's you know so people are actually doing remember what i use the word right so business school teaches you nothing if not how to make money right so first term itself they're building a business they will make mistakes they will get things wrong but because it's no investment there's no investment required right there's nothing to lose only some things to learn this was my experience in school where i wanted to get out there into the real world and start making mistakes and making money right consequence and reward but the thing is that it's very scary when you get out there because you don't have any safety net you don't have a master's union or like a safety net to kind of protect you from the real world so here there's a bit of a buffer right it's like we're building something but there's also not really a huge investment there's also not really huge consequences because if i make a mistake it's actually a benefit because i learn from that mistake so that when i do get in the real world i can actually you know perform better absolutely i mean see in college it's risk free right you've already paid the fees you're already here you're here to learn now now you know and universities and colleges were safe spaces for experimentation that's why they existed in the first place we made them about exams and about classes but that's not how it's supposed to be um so in term one they build this drop shipping business in term two they're all gonna be building a blockchain business in term three they're gonna all be building a youtube page and they're gonna make money off of that youtube page in term five they're gonna build um uh a cloud kitchen in term six number seven so similarly they're gonna create these eight businesses and they're gonna learn business by creating these eight businesses and making mistakes and doing all of those things right we have professors and practitioners and academics who come in but they come in and teach workshops that directly help these businesses that they run right so today that they're doing this this drop shipping business we have someone who's coming in and teaching them you know direct to consumer branding how that works we have somebody coming and teaching supply chain we have somebody coming in teaching accounting so that you can keep accounts right so those things help the business directly and there are practical skills that they need to learn as well right absolutely what happens in schools is that you learn something and you only get to apply it four years later when you graduate by that time you're forgotten right so here you get to apply all the stuff that you learn in courses right in the evening as you build those businesses so that's how we're trying to create a differentiated higher education institution right and the third experiment we wanted to run was that we wanted to mix business and technology right so most universities are like hey listen here's an engineering degree and here's a business degree right and you choose one of the two but that's not how the world functions right i mean you run your own uh youtube channel it requires tech and it requires business understanding right similar is the case with most of the businesses out there so students today in masters union study both business and tech right so that's why we don't call ourselves an mba we call it tbm technology and business management so those three experiments are around which we created masters union and and you know built our first cohort i don't know how exactly to frame this but i'm listening to you describe masters union what you're offering to your students and i can't help but look back on the story that you've already told me about your life dune school you're building a yahoo store you go to university of pennsylvania you're building nuisance and you never got a chance to really build those out fully you never got a chance you also didn't have mentors who are like coaching you or teachers in this case or professors who are actually like walking with you through that journey or maybe you did i'm not sure if you ever shared this with your instructors you might have talked about it but you didn't have something like masters union where they're actually like a structured way exactly you never had that opportunity and so i i don't know if you've ever looked at it from this perspective but it really feels like you are trying to give students what you did not have while you were going through school in the traditional education right now you're offering an alternative education essentially right it is like a a business school but it's structured in a different way right you guys are doing you're doing something innovative disruptive i don't know do you ever like it's a great point actually i never thought of it like that it's almost yeah it's like subconscious right like you're just kind of you have you had that desire when you were growing up and now you're you're not able to go back in time yeah but you're able to offer it to other students i i generally never thought of it like that but i think to me that's how learning happens you can only learn by doing you cannot learn by sitting in a classroom i just don't think learning happens that way uh you know there's a class called accounting uh fundamentals of accounting or something right uh that was the most boring class i did when i was in college right i used to wake up in the morning and like accounting class i mean i don't know when i'll use this uh i don't think i'm gonna become an accountant i know it's important because you know to run a business but it was just very irritating to be in that class at masters union one of our very popular courses is accounting and the reason for that is that the professor the way he teaches accounting is that he tells you that the business that you're running in the evening i'm going to check the books for that business every day right and i'm going to see exactly how clean those books are i'm going to see you know exactly like how close to standards the balance sheet is what is the quality of you know the appropriations all of those things right and he's basically built it into a game right and so even though accounting in an alternate universe or in an original i mean in other universities is considered a boring course here because they get to apply it and learn from it in real life and see you know how it impacts the business maintaining those books i think it improves the student engagement in the class like a hundred fold definitely it feels it feels real but it's not real right he's not actually the income tax department but he's pretending to be exactly whereas in a traditional education there's not even that professor who's watching over your shoulder and trying to coach you along the way right it's just like textbook exams assignments that are just you put it so well i mean he's not the income tax department but he is that's so that's perfect it's great right i love it i love this side he's gonna audit the books yeah just the way perfect yeah and the thing the thing too like that i just can't believe that i can't wrap my head around is that if if i heard about if i if i hadn't met you if i hadn't researched master masters union i would have just assumed that this is like a very idealistic company and you know your your your customers your students who are coming here they don't really they're not going to actually get anything out of this right they have a great experience they had their uh 16 months right and then they left and they actually went and did a real education so that they could get their degree and get a job but but the crazy thing is that when you graduate from masters union you actually get a job and you get a salary or an offer that's higher than most most is it most iims most yeah yeah right yeah that's the thing that blows my mind because that that's like proof that this actually works right i remember the story of dipinder goyal he finished his college he actually couldn't get a job that's the way he said it i'm not sure if that's that's the reality but the way he said it was kind of like or at least he couldn't get a job that he wanted you anyone can get a job you can get a job at mcdonald's right but he didn't want like some low-level job he wanted a a good job and he couldn't find anything i guess maybe his grades were a little bit low or something i could be wrong about that but then he went and started the sort of early version of zumato which was foodlet called foodlit at the time that failed but he spent time building it up right he had a small team of people and then when he went to go and apply for bain and company that was what he showed them during the interview he said i've just spent time i've been building this company food lit it didn't work out but these are the things that i learned along the way and they hired him because of that like that's what he said he's like i probably would not have gotten the job at bain if i hadn't started foodland so it sounds like it's sort of a similar thing right it's exactly that i mean if i mean i recruit people right i'm an employer here and if somebody comes and tells me listen i started a company didn't work out but these are my learnings from it i know three things one is that the person is entrepreneurial so he's going to be entrepreneurial in the job he's he has or she has that dna second is that they've learned from their mistakes and that's the nature that they they carry and thirdly that they're hustlers yeah i mean you know they've they've like done something which is hard which maybe like 90 people won't even think of doing so you have to give them that and that's straight away like a 10 or 10 on attitude and you know so even if the skill is slightly less i would still prefer that person over someone who has a skill but does not have the entrepreneurial bug or dna so basically anybody who's watching wants a job at masters union those are the three things that you need to have in order to get a job okay the next thing i want to talk to you about again coming back to the current landscape in the edtech space we're kind of realizing now in this funding winter there's a lot of com and we're talking about this earlier too there's a lot of companies that are not profitable they're losing they're burning through tons of money and as soon as the investors back off then suddenly they just crumble and they go out of business right um so is masters union sort of aiming towards profitability and and if so like what are some of the initiatives that you guys are actually using to get to that to that point no it's you know very interesting uh globally education businesses are some of the highest gross margin businesses right so when all these tech companies were not making money i was thoroughly confused as like it does not make sense it's impossible to lose money in education right universities schools colleges across the world if you look at harvard's like balance sheet it looks so pretty like if it if harvard was a business i'm sure it would be as big as like apple right if it was a it was like a listed business you know right okay in terms of like the the price to earnings ratio in terms of beta margins in terms of all of those things right so when these tech companies are not making money um it begs the question why are they losing money right the reason a lot of tech companies are losing money is because their core dna is sales and not outcomes right when you have to sell a product right and when you have to push somebody to buy that product from you your cac will rise but on the other side if you are giving outcomes to your students they will go and market your product for you let's let's compare uh there's this company called allen i don't know if you've heard of allen yeah are they quota based the quota based uh uh the tuition the je tuition and need tuition company right uh they are probably some two lakh students may be enrolled in island i think their marketing budget is minuscule right because they're on one ad or maybe a couple of ads every year where they say hey you know what j rank one my student j rank two my student j rank three my student that's all they need to do it's an announcement post right but on the other hand some edtech companies feel the need to like hey you know our product is 40 000 rupees but you get 20 20 discounts so it's 30 000 rupees whatever right let me give another example right so when we have some online programs as well called master camps that we run which are fully online so when people apply to a master camp they actually have to pay me an application fees oh right with other ed texts by mistake if you leave your email somewhere in their jungle they will call you a hundred times so you see the difference in the approach right where if you are a institution that gives outcomes people will actually pay you to apply to your college but if you're not the kind of institution that is offering outcomes and just sort of selling a product then sort of you'll have to sell you know so that's really the
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