Pod Insights Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth Unacademy: YouTubers from India Who Built a $3B Startup in the US About this episode In this episode, we talk to Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini, the founders of Unacademy — a $3B edtech giant that started as a simple YouTube channel. They share how they scaled to 100+ channels, built an AI-powered English learning app disrupting the industry, and grew without spending on ads. We dive into the highs and lows: layoffs, panic attacks, going public, and what it really takes to build a billion-dollar startup in the age of AI.
Links:
Follow my Newsletter: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/
Companies & Products: https://Marinamogilko.co https://Marinamogilko.co
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/
X: https://x.com/siliconvalleymm https://x.com/siliconvalleymm
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
0:31 Speaker 01 Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100 degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light hydrates faster than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.
0:59 Marina Mogilko? Started as a YouTube channel, and now the largest educational company in India valued at around $3 billion.
1:07 Speaker 03 We had like 1,000 educators creating.
1:11 Marina Mogilko? Are you replacing some teachers with AI?
1:13 Speaker 04 You should not think that you are the only one who can do it.
1:15 Marina Mogilko? You're preparing for IPO, right? And you're still losing money.
1:18 Speaker 03 Men usually don't talk about it, but the 50% of whatever crying has happened, happened in back three. I was having a panic attack once a month.
1:26 Speaker 04 That was quite terrible.
1:28 Speaker 03 We were losing 150 million a year.
1:30 Marina Mogilko? You ever had this conversation like, let's just, you know, shut down the company, it's not working.
1:34 Speaker 03 You know, we just need a big win also again. Maybe we should build a dueling of competitor. And it just worked.
1:41 Marina Mogilko? Hello, everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. I have two most amazing guests today. I've been trying to get you on this podcast because what you've built is just amazing. Started as a YouTube channel, and now the largest educational company in India valued at around $3 billion. All right, let's talk about this. Can you walk me through this journey of like, hey, I'm going to start this YouTube channel to actually building a company on top of it?
2:08 Speaker 03 So thanks for inviting us to the podcast. I think I was in college and Roman and I went to Tution together. It's coaching for examinations. In India, test prep is a big market. So we used to go to this coaching center together. And then I went to Mumbai and he went to Delhi. And then I think it was the third year of college where Khan Academy was super big. I was always tweaking around stuff. I started coding when I was twelve. I was blogging when I was seventeen. So my parents got a two hundred dollar check from Google AdSense when I was seventeen. So they thought I'm doing some fraud or something like that. So I think it's been an interesting journey where we have been content creators first and then product people.
2:50 Speaker 03 And third year of college, launched a channel called Unacademy. This is back in twenty ten, started creating content, et cetera. And then went on to do other stuff. I started a company that I sold when I was twenty three. But the channel was always growing and at some point Roman, who was a medical doctor and he was the one good in academics. I used to just somehow pass my subjects. So he started creating content and those got millions of views. And then we decided that we'll create an academy, which is like a YouTube for education. And and we had seen Twitch was recently acquired by Amazon. So the thesis was that there is unbundling of YouTube happening. And if Twitch can be so valuable, and that's how Unacademy started.
3:32 Marina Mogilko? So you thought it's gonna be like a separate platform just for educational content, not like a test prep.
3:38 Speaker 03 In the beginning, that was the idea. We eventually moved to test prep. But the initial thesis was we want to build our own YouTube. I was a computer engineer, he was a medical doctor, preparing for UPSC. And we had never thought of teaching. So the thesis was can we get the smartest people to teach online? Because they will never teach offline, they're too busy with their lives. And the way his videos responded, our thesis became can we get more smart people to just teach? And what will happen with time is, is what happened to entertainment. That for every topic you'll have top hundred teachers and their videos will be watched by millions of people, et cetera. So it did play out the way we imagined, but the product was different.
4:20 Speaker 03 The product we eventually, that that does hundred million in revenue for us, which we are going to do an IPO in the next two years. That's a very different product, but it started out like.
4:30 Marina Mogilko? Okay, let's talk about AirLearn. First of all, congratulations. Six months, number five. I don't know, I haven't checked today, but like two weeks ago was number five educational app in the U S. And I remember we talked about you starting this app. Fascinating. Tell me why English, why you went into this niche? And why do you think it's different where like A I can replace some of the tutors?
4:51 Speaker 03 So again, going back to when we started the company, uh, the company was started because we want to do on, wanted to do online education. And then post COVID, because uh, there were headwinds for the core business, online business, we had to open offline. But, and that's a good business. Uh, we have a few CEOs of that business, et cetera. The, our core insight and our core motivation is to still make sure that online education changes the world. And we are like, what is that one category where, you know, A I can create a lot of impact? And we realized, uh, we saw Duolingo. I've been a fan of their product for five, six years. In literally every podcast that I have done in the last five years, I've spoken about that. I'm a big fan of Duolingo.
5:33 Speaker 03 So at some point I was like, you know, maybe we should build a Duolingo competitor because I've used the product so much. Uh, I have, I had a hundred plus day streak on Duolingo, but I could not speak the language. So it's very good in certain areas. But I knew I'm a, I'm a product guy. I've been building products since twelve. So I knew, oh, what if they could tweak this? What if they could tweak that? So we built uh, AirLearn with a lot of tweaks with a, a different pedagogy. And at this point, every third review is like, this is better than Duolingo. Duolingo is over gamified. So it will teach you. Like if you learn Spanish, it will start with, it's called manzana or water is called aguare. But it would not tell you grammar. It would not tell you the difference between masculine noun or feminine noun or when to use what.
6:16 Speaker 03 So we are like, let's try creating a new app with the stuff that we hate about Duolingo. And it just worked. I mean, our D thirty retention is awesome. We have done two and a half million dollars. Now we are at a two and a half million dollar A R R in six months. So it just worked and at some point we are like, uh, this, this is the next biggest thing that an academy can build. And yeah.
6:39 Marina Mogilko? Do you think it's generally a good strategy in entrepreneurship to go and build a competitor to a huge company already?
6:46 Speaker 03 If you are in your twenties, do zero to one. Because you are not too worried about the risk of failure, et cetera. Uh but if you see, see how big industrialists think, they think about big markets, like how a reliance would think in India. Or how um how the big uh big CEOs would think, like, like, why, why would Mark Zuckerberg launch Threads? As a Twitter competitor, because he knows it works. Why would Jeff Bezos launch Prime Video? Because, see, when you are in your early twenties, you want to change the world and. You know, you want to do zero to one, et cetera. And I'm not saying zero to one should not be done later stage. But I'm saying at some point, and and it happened with me, because you have achieved a certain success.
7:31 Speaker 03 You start, the, the fear of failure becomes high. So the need to do pure zero to one, which will take five years to figure something out, you can do sometimes that. But we did that in online education and. Post-COVID, it just tanked to fifty percent of what it was in COVID. And that was a depressing phase for three years. I remember um uh not sleeping without melatonin or having panic attacks, et cetera. So zero to one is hard because there were no examples. That was a new product that had seen a journey like COVID for the first time. So it was hard. So I was like, we are very good at executing stuff. I will do zero to one also at some point in my life. But we are great product builders. We are great marketing people. We loved great design.
8:17 Speaker 03 So if there is a market in which Cumvent is doing a billion dollars in revenue. Can we create a product in that market? So, so I think if you would have asked me this question ten years ago. I would be like, oh, I don't give a fuck about, you know, uh. Creating something that already exists. I don't care about big markets. I just want to change the world. Now we have seen a lot of ups and downs, especially post-COVID. And it was a very tough phase. So we're also like, you know, we just need a big win also again and yeah.
8:45 Marina Mogilko? No, I understand this. Interesting. Okay. And what was the best marketing tool that worked for for the past six months for AirLearn?
8:52 Speaker 03 Day one, we made a rule, no paid marketing, uh zero paid marketing. The best marketing tool is a great product. So we first in uh improved retention, et cetera. Then, the same YouTube playbook that we had used to crack an academy, we did it because everybody is like. Oh, you should hire hundred TikTok UGC creators. And they should talk about your app. Oh, I thought this, I got a deja vu moment because this is what we did in India with YouTube. And this came easy to us. I had the teams ready.
9:20 Marina Mogilko? So you did TikTok this time?
9:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:22 Marina Mogilko? Oh, interesting.
9:23 Speaker 03 And we, we are now doing fifty million views on TikTok a month. So.
9:28 Marina Mogilko? Through U T C. So they create content, you post it on your TikTok?
9:31 Speaker 03 No, we, they post on their YouTube.
9:33 Marina Mogilko? On their.
9:33 Speaker 03 And they have incentives. That's one thing that work. We did some influencer marketing, but dedicated influencer marketing, people who would give unbiased reviews about the app, who would say Duolingo is better than these things, Ailen is better. And sponsored, they talk about that it's a promoted video, etc. And, and, and K factor. So Nikita Beer is on retainer with us. The focus is product led growth with Nikita and he's helping us improve our K factor.
10:01 Marina Mogilko? What? It's like you're preparing for your IPO, right? And you're still losing money, right? I was looking at.
10:07 Speaker 03 No, I, I mean, uh, we are almost operationally break even. At one point, we were losing one fifty million a year. This year, we are going to probably burn twenty million, but that's also for CapEx for centers, etc. We'll be operationally very close to break even and we have one fifty million in the bank. So like a full year profitability maybe next year. Uh, but now, we, I mean, we used to worry about the core business burning a lot of money two years ago. Now there is no survival risk. Now it's just, uh, because it's an offline business with forty offline centers. It just takes its own time to make those businesses profitable.
10:48 Speaker 03 So enough, maybe if you're burning twenty million this year, even if I continue that burn, we have a runway of seven years. But, uh, every year we are reducing our burn by half. Hopefully next year we'll be profitable.
11:00 Marina Mogilko? By laying off people, so.
11:02 Speaker 03 Uh, by laying off, we laid off a lot of people post Covid. Because we didn't know that the online business is going to tank, uh, so much. Uh, so we did a lot of layoffs then, but that's one part of it. And that was tough because, you know, you had thousands of people.
11:21 Marina Mogilko? Of course.
11:21 Speaker 03 Uh, but it's mostly operational efficiency. I mean.
11:27 Speaker 03 It's like we have done a MBA for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now we know uh how to run a business better and uh. It's marketing efficiency, it's sales efficiency. It's building a culture in the art that everybody is obsessed about EBITDA, so yeah.
11:43 Speaker 04 And in offline centers, when you like, we are just two years old in offline. So it takes three to five years of compounding for the same center to generate more cash. You don't have to change the cost structure at all.
11:53 Marina Mogilko? Hmm.
11:54 Speaker 04 So the same center can go to X without even spending anything on that. So it takes three to five years of compounding over there.
12:01 Marina Mogilko? Have you ever had a moment when you were losing a hundred fifty million dollars a year? Like waking up in the night like what the hell is going on? How did you feel back then?
12:10 Speaker 03 We had uh, I I told you, I mean, uh, there were times where I was having a panic attack once a month. It it it was, it was tough.
12:18 Speaker 04 It was quite terrible.
12:20 Speaker 03 And.
12:20 Marina Mogilko? Especially like you had careers, right? You were thinking maybe I could have had this normal life. Yeah.
12:26 Speaker 03 I mean, I I I don't know about him, but I wouldn't personally trade what we went through for anything.
12:32 Speaker 04 I knew what we were signing up for. It's not like it was hidden. These are ups and downs.
12:36 Speaker 03 We definitely did know.
12:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, that like I didn't know until we like that up and like this much down, it's like Mount Everest and Mariana Trench, but.
12:44 Speaker 03 I mean, uh, men usually don't talk about it, but I have rarely cried in my life. But the fifty percent of whatever crying has happened, happened in that phase. Because it's just so tough that you're waking up, you wanted to build an online business, now you have to build offline. And I love the business, it's good, it's helping a lot of people, but that shift, that mindset shift. And then suddenly, everyone who used to tell you, spend more money in marketing. I mean, at the end of the day, I was the CEO, I'll take the blame. Uh, but you know. All your shareholders also shift perspective within six months.
13:21 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
13:22 Speaker 03 They're like, why is the burn so high? So again, I'm not blaming them. At the end, it was my responsibility.
13:29 Marina Mogilko? What about you, Roman? Really like, have you ever had this conversation like, let's just, you know, shut down the company, it's not working?
13:36 Speaker 04 No, no, never like that. Like, we had our moments, like, uh, it was difficult to sleep. I also was on melatonin for a lot of time. You have to. Uh, we started smoking during that time, like, so, uh, it's still like.
13:50 Speaker 03 Ne- never smoked until, till the age of thirty two.
13:54 Marina Mogilko? And then you start a company and all things happen.
13:58 Speaker 04 It was really tough, but it was never about wrapping it up. It was about, okay, you have a fiduciary duty, you have a responsibility.
14:05 Speaker 03 We are not going to give up. We were, we knew we were not.
14:08 Speaker 04 There's no way you'll give up. Figure out a way, become profitable, launch other products like Airline.
14:14 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
14:14 Speaker 04 Well, at the end of the day, people want to learn and there's never going to change.
14:18 Marina Mogilko? What do you think about A I? Are you replacing some teachers with A I?
14:21 Speaker 03 So what will happen is that, for example, language learning, where somebody is not so obsessed that. I want to learn from this particular teacher, unlike test prep. Uh, let's say, Roman's videos used to get million plus views each video. Because he was a medical doctor and he had cracked these examinations himself.
14:40 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
14:41 Speaker 03 So that becomes hope, that becomes that, you know, I want to study from this educator. Uh, but in categories like language learning or in categories like high school or middle school. The celebrity uh, value of a teacher, you don't need like a big celebrity teacher, but you need more personalized attention. So I think A I will uh, just to stop that. In fact, I would say that I don't know how it will look or what the U I or the U X will be. But there will be an A I tutor who will essentially uh, be teaching us everything. I hope Airline becomes that. That's our goal. We want to start with language learning and do uh, things. But we, we still don't know how it will look like. It still hallucinates even today, even the best models.
15:27 Speaker 03 Uh. Because the more context it has, in fact, when Sam Altman had come to India, the same question I asked him. The problem is it starts hallucinating more the more context it has. So, for example, if you have been learning maths for one year and it knows that these are the bad areas. But but the context is now, let's say, of ten million tokens, so it starts hallucinating.
15:46 Marina Mogilko? Interesting. But have you tried, hey, like Heyjan, for example, for one of your teachers?
15:52 Speaker 03 Oh, no, my belief is that uh uh in in in our core business, teachers are here to stay. That's my belief. What will happen is that if a class is happening, let's say you are teaching an English class. For real time doubt, you can have an L L M respond to queries, et cetera. So that the flow of the entire class is not interrupted. Uh. But but in test prep, I don't think teachers will be replaced.
16:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, it will become a supplementary product. So I used to use a lot of Wikipedia and all that, so that I have completely stopped now. So a lot of learners, instead of going to a book, opening it and figuring out that if you want to read about a small topic, you will just do a chat G P T. So it's a very, very, very good supplementary product.
16:32 Marina Mogilko? So you don't believe in replacing.
16:34 Speaker 03 But for language learning exam, for for school education. If you want to tomorrow, learn how to code apps in A I. You you don't need a celebrity teacher. You need somebody who will sit with you and tell you that, oh my, I'm not even able to run the app on my environment. How do you uh fix the environment on my MacBook or whatever? So I think for a lot of use cases, an A I tutor will just change change the world uh as we know it.
17:01 Marina Mogilko? But not for YouTube teaching, not.
17:02 Speaker 03 Not for, not for test prep.
17:04 Marina Mogilko? Um hum. Not for test prep.
17:05 Speaker 03 Because test prep is not technically education. Test prep is a, like how Peter Thiel puts it, it's a, it's a competition, it's a tournament. So when you are preparing for like, if it's cricket or badminton or baseball. The players want ex-coaches to train them, coaches who have been successful in that sport themselves.
17:24 Marina Mogilko? The mindset as well and everything.
17:26 Speaker 04 It's a discipline as a product. You really need someone to discipline you on a day-to-day basis.
17:30 Marina Mogilko? Let's go back to the beginning of Unacademy. So you had two separate channels, right? On medical things and on coding, right?
17:37 Speaker 03 Yes.
17:37 Marina Mogilko? That I understand it. So when was this shift? Like, I no longer want to create content myself. I'm gonna start hiring people. So I think it's a huge mindset shift for a lot of creators. Cause my journey was like, now I can do it like me. It has to be me. Now I understand it's not the truth. But when did you feel it? Like, hey, we can start hiring?
17:53 Speaker 03 So for us, I think when we, even before we started the company, we knew that it's not going to be just a YouTube channel. I knew very early, I think I was in sixth or seventh standard, I was twelve years old, where I told my dad that uh, uh, I wanna start a company called Doors because uh, Bill Gates has launched Windows. So, so I think, and he was a doctor, he was, he thought I'm crazy. And he sent me to a psychologist that he has gone crazy and he doesn't want to be a doctor. So I think the journey has been interesting. We knew very early uh, that YouTube is a stepping stone and not the end goal.
18:29 Marina Mogilko? Interesting. Roman, how, how did that feel for you? Like you had this stable career, you passed all the examinations at first attempt. And then suddenly you're just going to a completely different thing.
18:41 Speaker 04 So like, I had new Goro like for more than half of my life. We always stayed in touch on and off. Like, uh, it was very difficult for me to create content initially in twenty eleven, twenty twelve. Because of so much software's involved editing and we didn't have any help. So he had launched an app where it was very easy to create content using that. So it was kind of democratizing content creation. So I tried that and I was hooked on it and we were using that to post content. I did that for one to two years on YouTube. We were in top twenty, top thirty YouTube channels in India at that time.
19:17 Marina Mogilko? Oh, by using that app?
19:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:18 Marina Mogilko? What, did it optimize or what did it do?
19:21 Speaker 03 Uh it was what TikTok did to creating entertainment content, we had done that for education.
19:27 Speaker 04 So you need like three, four softwares, you need an editing software, you need a screen recorder, you need a pen tablet. They get required a lot of investments and a learning curve.
19:35 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
19:35 Speaker 04 You'll make a five to ten hour learning curve with and a lot of people don't have that kind of time. So we had created an educator app which democratized creating content. You can just put your whatever content is there and you can do a voiceover. There was no face, so it was like Khan Academy style videos.
19:50 Marina Mogilko? Ah, interesting.
19:51 Speaker 04 That's how it blew up earlier.
19:53 Marina Mogilko? That's so cool.
19:54 Speaker 04 We were like, I was a massive content creator in twenty fourteen, fifteen when I was twenty two, twenty three. But I had realized on Cora also, both of us.
20:01 Speaker 03 He had become number one by then.
20:03 Marina Mogilko? And so this this app also allowed you to hire new people because you already had the formula, right?
20:08 Speaker 04 Exactly.
20:09 Marina Mogilko? Did you see a decline in viewership once you replaced yourself on the channel?
20:12 Speaker 03 Yes, there were times I would call him at three A M. That views are monthly targets are not being achieved. So can you make videos? So we we used to do that a lot. Uh that was always a back plan, but at some point we had like one thousand educators creating. Uh and at some point, some teachers started becoming big than him. Uh that's when the power of the platform used up.
20:36 Marina Mogilko? So the secret to replacing yourself on YouTube channel is first of all, standardizing everything like the formula that works?
20:41 Speaker 03 But this was not YouTube, this was on our own platform.
20:43 Marina Mogilko? Ah, that was already your, but did you upload that content on YouTube as well or was just your platform's paywall?
20:47 Speaker 03 In the beginning, in the beginning we did.
20:50 Marina Mogilko? Okay.
20:51 Speaker 03 When we moved, when we changed the business model, uh then we did.
20:55 Marina Mogilko? You changed to uh test prep, right? And your marketing strategy became, uh I remember you showing me this app where you managed like thirty plus channels or it was more, how many was it?
21:06 Speaker 04 It was more than hundred YouTube channels.
21:08 Marina Mogilko? Okay, a hundred YouTube channels. So you did this switch after you changed the business model?
21:13 Speaker 03 I mean, if if I were to go back into time machine, I would not have killed that product. It was one of our best products because today, uh we are angel investors in this app called Seiko. Which is similar to what we imagined in twenty fifteen. And that's one of the fastest growing products in India right now. They have gone to sixty million revenue in one year. Because now in India, uh subscriptions through U P I auto pay uh are taking off. At that time subscriptions were not big.
21:41 Speaker 04 I think we were too early with, we were too early with that product. Internet adoption and auto pay were a huge pain.
21:47 Marina Mogilko? So tha- that started was basically Netflix for educational content.
21:49 Speaker 03 Yes.
21:50 Speaker 04 You can say like.
21:51 Speaker 03 And like two dollar a month subscription. With a two dollar a month subscription, that C E C O product is at sixty million. And that was, I keep telling the founder that, this is an academy one point O from twenty fifteen.
22:04 Marina Mogilko? That's amazing, fascinating. Okay, so you switch to this strategy where you just started to start YouTube channels. Do you know, or do you remember how much it costs to run one YouTube channel?
22:15 Speaker 04 So when India, like because we had democratized, like initially the educators were decent, like you can pay them a thousand dollars a month. And you can hire like another thousand dollars, you can hire two, three people. So it's quite economical to run a YouTube channel, but the problem comes then when they become big. You have to ten X or hundred X their salaries. So you have to keep churning out, like how do they do it in Hollywood?
22:38 Speaker 03 It's the news channel.
22:39 Speaker 04 Exactly.
22:39 Speaker 03 If an anchor becomes too big. So, so you need to have a sort of like a creator academy where you're always creating some celebrities. So even I can say, and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong. The top forty percent of educators in India became big on the free platform of an academy, the academy one point O. Because they became super big and, and those are still uh some of the top educators. And since essentially everyone else copied our product.
23:06 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
23:06 Speaker 03 Uh, we, we are proud to say that we were the ones who uh sort of took online education ahead.
23:13 Speaker 04 They would never have become content creators to begin with.
23:16 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, of course. And you gave them the platform, you gave them the algorithm, the team. How does it work from the I P perspective? Because I know, I've read somewhere that starting two thousand twenty four, you do not allow people create content aside your platform. Is that true?
23:30 Speaker 03 Yes, yes.
23:31 Marina Mogilko? And, but that only happened two thousand twenty four. Prior to that, they would just leave, take the audience with them.
23:37 Speaker 03 Yes.
23:37 Speaker 04 Exactly, this is the problem.
23:39 Marina Mogilko? And now you basically sign a contract that if you guys work for us, I guess for X number of months, you can't really.
23:45 Speaker 03 So they had figured out some loopholes. They were like, oh, I'm just going to do vlogging on my other channel. Uh but the same audience also loves to see.
23:54 Marina Mogilko? Of course, yeah, you you you follow the face. Uh huh.
23:57 Speaker 03 So.
23:57 Marina Mogilko? So is it still a strategy with YouTube channels right now? Can you talk about like marketing for an academy today? Is it still heavily YouTube or you think paid marketing? What is your focus?
24:07 Speaker 04 So YouTube is definitely top of the funnel as needed. We do a lot of events on YouTube wherein we invite all our educators, learners on one platform. Sort of like Apple's flagship event, we do it two, two to three times a year. It's like a massive event, a lot of Bollywood celebrities, toppers, our own learners, our online educators, offline educators team, they all like uh Indian cricketers. A lot of people gather in one place and we celebrate education at an academy. So we have started that like we have done, we just recently conducted it like a month ago.
24:38 Marina Mogilko? That's amazing.
24:39 Speaker 04 Uh apart from that, obviously like very well calculated performance marketing is also there. We have uh now we have pivoted to offline because that's what learners wanted after Covid.
24:49 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
24:49 Speaker 04 Always they wanted to go back, so we have like.
24:52 Speaker 03 So so not pivot, we have an online business, but offline.
24:55 Speaker 04 Online is still the main business, but we had to because learners demanded that they wanted to study offline as well. So now we have an offline vertical as well. So these are the major ways we acquire learners right now.
25:07 Marina Mogilko? Do you know for like, I've seen some of your channels, some videos get like two hundred, three hundred views, a lot less than they used to. Do these videos still make sense? Like you, do you track analytics on every single video like, hey, here we lost money, here we didn't, or it's just an overall branding thing?
25:23 Speaker 03 So what happens is that uh we have six hundred educators, um and out of them hundred are upstarts, they are new educators. So um uh if we only get educators who get hundred thousand views, that's too expensive for us. So we hire these interns, we have an internship program etcetera, we'll pay an educator five hundred dollars a month, which is huge in India. Uh to begin with. Uh and then they start with three hundred, four hundred views and then eventually get two. But I'm surprised because in most online categories, we are either number one, number two or number three. Uh between Physics Walla and some other competitors, so.
26:04 Speaker 04 But as we were discussing, you need a constant supply of educators. So what Gaurav said that you need to give them platform, let them have some breathing space. They might start with five hundred views, that might be their first video. And then it'll go to five thousand and fifty thousand from there.
26:18 Marina Mogilko? When do you cut the educator off? Like they've done it for X amount of months, no views. When do you say like, hey, it's not working?
26:25 Speaker 03 I think it's rarely performance-based because they are the ones who leave us. We try to retain them. So I don't think if the teacher is good, they're going to get less views. Either the content is bad. That in that case, if they're not teaching well, you know, we give them three warnings or whatever, or they are not disciplined. It's rarely a case that if somebody was doing hundred thousand views, now they are doing fifty thousand. We just motivate them, we just bring them. Because in education, uh the the long-term value of a creator, unlike entertainment, which is like a six year or seven years where you see the peak, in education it compounds very well. In education, if you have been creating content for fifteen years, uh then your brand is even bigger.
27:10 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
27:10 Speaker 03 Because.
27:11 Marina Mogilko? Because more people know you, they've grown with you.
27:13 Speaker 03 And it's a hopium business. Like people want the hope that, oh, this teacher has been teaching for fifteen years. And that teacher has reduced ranks. So it's rarely performance. It's either uh their teaching quality uh is not good or has reduced, or uh it's discipline, or uh Physics Walla poaching our educators. So so it's somebody, some competition poaching our educators.
27:36 Marina Mogilko? Got it. But you come up with topics for them, right? For those teachers? Or they come up with topics?
27:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, we have a, we have a team.
27:43 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, that's why. Okay, now I get it. To wrap up the YouTube um topic, what would be your advice for creators like me, for example? Who's been on YouTube for ten years? They're like, I love this, but I also wanna slow down on some particular topics. What would you advise, like hiring more people to run a channel, starting another channel?
28:01 Speaker 04 I think for most of the creators, they're they're really happy with the, if you just want to sustain it as a lifestyle business. And you don't really want to burden yourself for seventy to eighty percent creators, they don't need to do anything, actually. You can just create whatever you want to create, like four videos a week, two videos a week.
28:16 Marina Mogilko? I just talked to a lot of creators and like, I've done this for ten years, I want to retire, but that's my source of income, I'm like.
28:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, so you need to plan well in your head, you can't like, you, if you want to replace yourself, I think you can put a lot of faces, especially I'm. See you are like doing that on your channel.
28:31 Marina Mogilko? Playing with that, no, we started multiple, after a meeting, after a meeting, we just started multiple channels and, oh my god, thank you for that.
28:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I saw what you have done and you were asking about how to like contract them so that they get logged in and all that. So you have to be curious about it. If you want to replace yourself, you should not think that you are the only one who can do it.
28:50 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, I think that's the number one, because a lot of creators like.
28:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, you should not have that much ego, I guess, like, I I had been there, done that, so. And if you can pivot to some business where you can sell some product, I think that can be really, really good. It can be a course. It can be a physical product, it can be a D two C brand. So I think depending on what kind of distribution you have. If you can separate your revenue stream from your views. Uh, as you rightly pointed out, she has the only income source, whatever, and it's very difficult to retire now for her because she has to continue doing that. Because it'll get boring after five years, ten years, depending on the person. It's very, very difficult to churn out content. Regularly fifty two weeks a year, it's it's quite difficult. So if you can separate revenue stream from.
29:37 Speaker 04 Either you can become a prolific angel investor, if you like, in your case, you'll be meeting a lot of founders. So depending on the kind of distribution a YouTuber have, I think they can pivot uh to separating their source of income and the views.
29:50 Marina Mogilko? Let's talk about what's gonna happen in five years. Are you gonna move to the U S? Or in, because now U S is your permanent focus, I guess.
29:59 Speaker 04 I I think we love living in India, but we are going to be in U S for, let's say, a couple of weeks every quarter. But who knows, I mean, at some point, uh, but you know, our network is there, our friends are there, et cetera. And and like you are visiting New York, we also come.
30:16 Speaker 03 Backed back to back schedule and then sometime for Central Park or sometime to maybe visit a jazz club in the night. Uh but tha- that's about it. So uh and in five years, you know, EdTech has always been a services business. Even even Rosetta Stone in uh US, which was the precursor to Duolingo, which was an offline traditional company. And across the world, across the globe, EdTech is a services business. I mean, I remember that Kozla Impact Fund had, like this is back in the day in twenty sixteen. They had sent us a mail uh that they are investing, but last minute uh Vinod Kozla uh said no, that EdTech will never make money. Uh we met him last year and we told him that, so he was.
30:57 Marina Mogilko? What did he say? Cause he's like, we're gonna replace all the teachers, all the doctors. I heard him speaking about that.
31:01 Speaker 03 So he was surprised that our core business was able to make hundred million dollars. So but he had a good view. Uh that historically EdTech had not made money. In fact, what we did in India, Unacademy, Physics Wala. These are the companies that changed the game for the world. We made EdTech interesting. So my view is that it will become a product business from a services business. Um if with AI. What will happen is that uh whether it's language learning, whether it's test prep, maybe supplemental test prep to begin with. Or whether it's school education, you would not need your next door teacher, again services business, for homework help.
31:43 Speaker 03 So homework help is the biggest market there ever is because parents are busy with their jobs. Uh so so usually what happens in India and other parts, I don't know about you as. Is uh the parents would send somebody to the next door neighbor who would do tuition classes, again one to four, one to eight batches. Uh but again, a services business. So I think that will change a lot.
32:05 Marina Mogilko? Interesting.
32:06 Speaker 03 It will become a product business specifically for EdTech. But uh it is very tough to imagine what will happen to the rest of the world with AI. Uh it's very tough. I mean, I don't think our human mind can comprehend. For example, I definitely think that in five years. Robots will be cooking thirty percent of the food in the world.
32:27 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
32:57 Speaker 05 Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.
33:27 Marina Mogilko? Please, like I need a robot in my house. I can't just manage the whole household anymore.
33:32 Speaker 03 Yeah. Or we'll see more vertical use cases of robotics like that. What is called Rumba? Yeah, something like that. More vertical use cases of that. And then, you know, we already have self-driving cars in.
33:46 Marina Mogilko? Crazy, San Francisco. A lot of my friends, they just switched to Waymo just because it's so much more convenient.
33:50 Speaker 03 I heard it's 27% market share in San Francisco now.
33:55 Marina Mogilko? And if it continues at that pace, it's going to replace 200,000 drivers in the US.
34:00 Speaker 03 And the speed of innovation is so fast. You saw what happened with the Ghibli images or whatever it's called.
34:05 Marina Mogilko? Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, let's wrap up with this thing. Can you give advice to anyone who's starting a company for the first time in 2025? What should their mindset be? Pivot, I know AI. Let's talk about that, Roman.
34:20 Speaker 04 I think keep the team really lean. A lot of things can be automated. I have met a lot of AI founders, more than 20 of them. The most of them are single-digit team. Figure out what the customers really, really want. And try to think little futuristic. I think a lot of things that you are building now might not be relevant after two, three years. The kind of pace it's.
34:44 Marina Mogilko? Two, three weeks sometimes. You're building a product, OpenAI releases something. You're like, oh, pivot.
34:51 Speaker 03 I'll just add one thing to it because of the phase that we went through.
34:56 Speaker 03 Uh. Earlier, I used to think market is the most important thing. It's still super important, but now I think business model is the most important thing. Uh. If your business model doesn't have retention, if your business model is a utilization business, you're still going to succeed. I mean, there is still one or two airlines which make money, but it's going to be a tough journey. That's why, uh, why com- like, why come near to somebody who's saying eighty percent of their investments are B two B SaaS?
35:22 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
35:22 Speaker 03 Because the business model is so good.
35:24 Marina Mogilko? Retention, yeah.
35:26 Speaker 03 Uh, or DoorDash or Zomato in India or Zepdo, because the frequency and the retention is so high. So if you're building an internet business or a tech business, retention is super duper important.
35:37 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, love it. Thank you guys so much. This was really inspiring. I hope everyone who's building something in education watches this, because this is a lot of knowledge. Thank you so much for doing this.
35:48 Speaker 03 Thanks for inviting.
35:48 Speaker 00 Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks.
35:51 Speaker 06 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked three hundred fifty thousand Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
Previous Top Model Coco Rocha on the Body Image, Pressure of Industry and How She is Dealing with Hate Next Pay Rent, Get Rich? Ankur Jain Built a $3.1B Startup From That Idea Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated