Putting Principles Before Short-Term Profit

It was a difficult conversation and I mean ultimately it was a call that we had to make the founders of the company to basically say this is what we set out to do. Here is why we think ultimately it's going to be more valuable. And we had a list of arguments that for example, having the university support in especially the more, shall we say, prestigious faculty, the ones that are the superstars, having the support of the institution is going to be really enabling to recruit them. It's the only way to get access to the use of the university brand and that brings value to learners. So really what we had was, which was really important was a North Star on what is best for learners and having access to the university's content engine and brand was really the best thing for learners. And so we decided that it was worth the pain. And I will say this was not the only example where we made a principled decision that ultimately led to a good outcome for us as well as for the principles that we were trying to live up to. So one such example was the decision to offer a financial aid option to all learners. Even when we launched the paid product, which was the certificate product, we basically said, and we even told the team that we would delay the launch of the paid product by a week or two if they were unable to, from an engineering perspective, offer a financial aid option. Financial aid is basically just a payment waiver. It's not, there's not like a financial aid office or anything like that. But it's basically a process by which people say I can't pay. I attest that I can't pay and I'm going to, you know, get request financial aid. And we made that decision out of principles because we felt like there were so many people in countries like Bangladesh and Uganda and Nigeria who were never going to be able to pay the $50 that we required because it was like a month of earning for them. And we decided that we were going to offer this to everybod and there was a lot of pushback about lost revenue and blah, blah, blah. And we were very much adamant that we would continue to do that. And ultimately again, that history bore us out in a couple different ways. For instance, one of them is that we had, as some of you may know, a non profit competitor called edX. And there was a lot of narrative in the media at that time about nonprofit versus for profit. And everything that's for profit, of course, is immediately tainted and suspect as being greedy capitalists, which I don't think we were, but. And we were able to point to that decision as well as others that we had made to say, look, ultimately it isn't about what your tax status is, it's about the decisions that you make and are you a principles driven organization or not? And I think that wasn't why we made that decision. But I think sticking to your principles really allows you to, when there is controversy, to go back and say, look, don't judge us by our words, judge us by our actions.