Ariel Renous (CEO of Augment) on democratizing access to business education

So Ariel, you are currently the co-founder and CEO of Augment. This is augment.org.

The key thing for me was like entrepreneurship, and I had too many ideas. I could not focus. I didn't know what exactly I wanted to do. So that was like a very, very challenging time. An interesting story to start this company from outside the US, bring all those top US founders to Paris. What founders are really fighting against

Like an average person on the street cannot get the founder of Shazam, but you had a powerful magnetic mission, you know.

And so seeing this disconnect between traditional business education, expensive, super exclusive, and the wide range of content that was available and of high quality on the internet, that was like, okay, I need to bring those top founders and co-create courses with

them. Welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host KP, and on this show, I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Cat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildingpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. All right. Welcome to the Building Public Podcast, Ariel. Thank you for accepting my invite and being on the show.

Thank you, KP. Super excited.

So Ariel, you are currently the co-founder and CEO of Augment. For folks who are just tuning in, this is augment.org. There's a lot I want to unpack in your story, you know, and I usually like to lay out like what we're going to talk about so someone can anticipate some of these elements. So we're going to cover the origin story of Augment. We're going to cover what drives you, your mission, you know, behind this company. And we're going to cover a handful of key inflection points from the beginning to today. And we're right now, as we record, this is January 2024. And I wanted to also learn about some of the difficult and hard barriers you had to break through, because every founder has those, that you overcame through Augment's journey. And also want to learn a little bit about your roadmap, what's coming down this year. I'm sure you have a lot planned. And of course, I want to learn about— this is a self-awareness question at the end, which is like, what pitfalls do you anticipate, you know, and how— what are your thoughts around it? You know, something that I do as a personal exercise when I go into a new year, I always think about what are the 5 ways I can fail. Like, Charlie Munger has a great line like, show me the area where I'm gonna die, I'm not gonna go there. I think so.

Yeah.

Um, it's— so that's sort of what I have on the agenda. So let's kick it off with the origin story. Tell me how Augment got started.

Let's go. Thanks for having me. I'm, I must tell you that I'm quite excited because I, I'm a strong advocate of building in public.

Yes.

And we will touch upon that, but building in public has changed my life and brought me to where I am today. So I'm a big fan of the—

That is the only quote I needed from this episode. So I think we can wrap here. Just kidding.

Let's go.

But no, thank you. That means a lot. And I know I have a similar story to yours about building in public, so I would love to unpack that in a second. But yeah, let's talk about the origin.

So the origin story, Augment. So first, what it is, we're building an alternative MBA. So super high quality business courses with the best founders, executives, CEOs, in the world. So we've built classes with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Chris Barton, the founder of Shazam, Steve Chen, the founder of YouTube. We've got the founders of Waze, of Lime, of Eventbrite. We had the chief of staff to Jeff Bezos, the right hand of Eric Schmidt at Google. So it's really like building a premium online business education that's affordable, but also grounded into the realities of business. from companies and products that we know of and we use in our everyday life. And so we have some sort of emotional engagement towards. So this is Augment. As you may hear, I'm building this company from Paris, France, hence my French accent. And so it's been an interesting story to start this company from outside the US, bring all those top US founders to Paris, film classes with them here, and then of course sending them back to the US. And the origin story was that I'm not a business person. I went to college and I studied history. I was passionate about reading, about writing, about history stuff. But then I realized that, okay, I learned the concept of startups and entrepreneurship, and I really wanted to do it myself, but I knew nothing about business, nothing. So I had to learn. The natural move for me was to go to business school. And so I got into HEC, which is the top one business school here in Paris. But at the same time, I consumed content on the internet, podcasts like this one, YouTube videos. Newsletters, etc. And I realized while I was at HEC, this top MBA, top business school in Europe, that I was learning so much more online by myself, just learning from experienced people who've done it in the past.

Right.

And so seeing this disconnect between traditional business education, expensive, Super exclusive. You cannot unsee what you— yeah.

Wow, it's fascinating. You know, I think I, I can resonate with so much of what you just talked about, right? Which is the traditional classroom, you know, education. Now business education is one angle, but there's so many adjacent, you know, fields also that are missing out on, you know, tapping into actual practitioners knowledge and insights, right? Because you can tell the difference between someone who is academic versus someone who actually has real life battlefield experience when it comes to experiments in business.

100%. For instance, we have the founder of Lime on Augment, and he gives a class on crisis management.

Wow.

So when they put the first scooters on some US campuses, some kids got hurt and he had to talk to the parents. And that's the example he takes about crisis management and how you manage these situations. We have the founder of Shazam teaching about how do you build frictionless product. And the Shazam app is arguably one of the most frictionless products in this world.

Yeah, 100%.

You've got like the founder of YouTube on how do you sell a company. He sold his company for $1.7 billion to Google within the first 15 months. And so it's like bringing those amazing, incredible stories to applicable lessons that you can use in your everyday life. And this is what I love about the internet. And we just like curate that, package it into a very efficient, succinct lesson that we deliver online. But what's available on the internet, it's insane. It's insane.

Right. So one question that comes to mind naturally is I'm trying to picture myself in your shoes when you had this sort of slow realization over the course of 2 years and you were like, okay, there has to be a better way. Something has to exist that is an alternative. That's your catchphrase, right? Alternative MBA. And so what is the next immediate thing that you did? Like, where— because I'm think— I'm looking at the roster you have today, which is the founder of Shazam and, and YouTube, and these are— I'm assuming they all must have come later, obviously. Like, what was the first, like, yes, uh, that you heard from? And like, what was the mind— thought process that was going on in your mind about pitching and getting these people on board?

Um, so when we got the idea, of course, we're like 2 kids in France No connection whatsoever to Silicon Valley. And so we did what, like the most simple and the only free thing that we could do was just cold email everyone.

Wow.

I cold emailed everyone in Silicon Valley. And one day, Chris Barton, who's the founder of Shazam, got back to us and he's like, okay, this looks interesting. Let's have dinner. And we—

And you were still in Paris?

Still in Paris. We said, Of course, let's have dinner. And so we flew to San Francisco, sat down with him, we had dinner, and the rest is history. And I was still on the phone with Chris today. He became a good friend. Wow. And so, yeah.

So he was the first yes. He was the first, like—

He was the first yes. And once you get the first yes, suddenly you hear yes more and more often.

So I'm curious—

up to the point where no one says no.

Right. I mean, of course. I mean, I think what I'm curious is, first of all, congrats. That was amazing, that kind of high agency move where you just emailed without waiting for anyone's blessing or permission. What I want to understand is if you look back and reflect on that pitch that you wrote, the email copy, whatever, what was the appeal of that, you think, from the— like objectively, like what do you think stood out for Chris?

This is an interesting question. I think he was at the time of his life where it was A lot more about giving back and building a legacy than anything else. And that he needed some platforms. And so he was in this—

Like an outlet.

Yes, exactly. He was in this phase. And I believe he was just curious and we had nothing to show. We had nothing to show. He was curious. And having done an MBA himself, I believe he also Resonated with the mission.

Yeah, that's, you know, one, one theme that I'm hearing across, um, so many, uh, founder stories is the mission is so important. And we, we like to think that, like, generally business school also teaches you that mission is like some, you know, gibberish and some like jargon, you know, put some buzzwords. But it's actually, you know, it, it's not true. Obviously, I'm sure you know this, but Like, but a great mission is a magnet that attracts other, you know, early believers. And sometimes I'm surprised that the early believers could be someone with such great success like Chris. I once did a program. I had a creative, crazy idea called Founders Hotline. So what I thought was, what if there was a call-in hotline where people could call in, right? Like 1-800. In America, you have the toll-free number on the billboards.

Yeah.

Yeah. The 1-800-DOCTOR or whatever. So I bought 1-800-FOUNDER and advertised it and we had a website and I said I was going to host an online show once a week and call people, call in anonymous or they can declare their name and then say, hey, here's the pressing issue I'm struggling with. I need some advice. So I would try to give my advice or sometimes I bring guests and make them share advice on a theme of marketing or whatever, right? I thought this was a cool idea. Again, this is such a dumb thing looking back, but I said, oh, that's actually a really cool idea. And I bought the domain and everything. So I cold emailed, uh, just like you did. I cold emailed, um, Alex Sohanian, Brené Brown, whoever I thought were like very empathetic people who want to give back. And of course, one of the, one of the many, like many of them ghosted me. Obviously that's fine. One of them happened to be Gary Vee. And he said yes. And this was actually— I emailed his team who forwarded it to him and we had a connection there. But still, he could have said no, right? And he said, hell yes. And within like 3 months, he showed up as the finale guest. We had 25,000 people dialed in that day because, you know, GaryVee has a massive audience.

Wow.

But when I look back, I always think about like, it's not necessarily the fact that I was very successful or the fact that I have so many connections or anything, which I did not at the time. It was purely the fact that that idea was so bold and so mission-driven that on the receiving end, somebody else felt it, you know, like Gary Vee, right? And so I'm thinking the same thing, like an average person on the street cannot get the founder of Shazam, but you had a powerful magnetic mission, you know?

And there are so many lessons to your story. A big one is you only need one yes.

Yes, true.

One yes can change your life and one yes can lead to many, many more yeses in the future.

Yes.

The second is that, and I believe this is true for both our stories, is best story wins.

Yes.

And your story is super catchy. Uh, and I, I can, and I can go and have dinner with a friend and say, oh, JP told me about like a project of his, uh, and it's, it's, it's fun, uh, it, it's, it's, it's creative.

It works, right? So my litmus test is I do so many campaigns like this for, um, founders and whatever, whichever job I'm in, I'm always targeting serving founders. My litmus test is I talk to my wife. My wife is completely removed from the founder world. She's a teacher, school teacher. And she doesn't give a shit about our, you know, my life. And same with my girlfriend, same thing. Oh wow, that's so funny. So every once in a while when I pitch like, hey, here's something I'm working on, what do you think? Her eyes light up and she'll say, oh, that's a good idea. And that's a very rare compliment. I don't get that often from her. And so then that's when I know that that's a good idea. You should really put all, all, all force into that and proceed. So when I told Founder Hotline She told me that is one of your good ideas. So I was like, got it.

This is good because what founders are really fighting against is indifference.

Yes. Oh, yes. It's not anti-reaction. It's just indifference, like you said.

Yeah. Anti-reaction is good because it's at least a sort of reaction. And most people don't even get the benefit to have an entire reaction.

Yeah,

they get indifference.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's one of those things, Ariel, that you— we have to constantly remind ourselves with is how many— it's very easy because, you know, sometimes in your career you get busy with the minutiae, the trivial things, and the OKRs and KPIs and the, you know, the, the, the knickknacks of business life that sometimes you forget that You need to make space for big ideas because without a big idea, like, you cannot drive people to do something you want. It's not the copywriting. It's like, I mean, they're all important, but they all flow from the fountain of a good idea, right? Like a great idea. My, my, I learned this the hard way where if you can't sell someone in one line, you can't sell them on a landing page, right?

100%.

So a great idea is just one line. It can sell itself in a line. Now, You don't always get there. You need a lot of bad ideas to get to the great idea, but you know when you see it. 100%.

And when we started, the easy path would have been to say, oh, we're building the best business courses in France.

Right.

Easy.

Yeah,

easy.

Yeah.

We would never have raised— we raised $2 million in pre-seed and then a total of $6 million. We would never have done that for this idea. We went, okay, let's build the best business courses in the world, the best instructors, the best quality, the best brand. And a good idea or a big idea attracts capital, talent, and support.

Yes.

And you

know what I think is on that note?

It's counterintuitively easier To do something big.

Then do something small and work your way to the— I, I— this is a very, very non-obvious lesson that I learned too in my career. Because in the early days when I was very raw, when I was very young, I had big ideas, but I had no proof of work or no, you know, because I was completely fearless, right? You know, when you're 21, you're like fearless. And then slowly, like, I'm 35 now, so slowly reality kicks in and you're like, you know, be realistic, be pragmatic, and all that kicks in. and look at your peers and they're all like playing the safe reality game, which is fine. So you forget the fact that just like you said, to really make a dent in the society or in the universe, like, or among the top people you want, you cannot ship, you cannot transact with small ideas. Yeah. Because they don't have the time and energy and all that, you know. And so you need big ideas. It's very counterintuitive, like you said. Yeah. Because it requires risk. It looks dumb, right? Like when I pitched the 100 Startline, uh, it was like, it sounds, it sounds so dumb. Like why would somebody want to call a radio thing when we have the internet? Like, you know, like why would we? But my point was like, it's a different experience, you know, you just gotta try it. So it's like, it's just, you know, same thing with building in public. Back to what you were saying, building in public on paper is the dumbest idea, you know, on paper. Because you're

like,

why do you want to be vulnerable? Why do you want to give away your secrets or like tell them what you're doing and all that? But we know human beings cannot put down a story. With Building in Public, we get to weave a story in real time and leave them on cliffhanger. So they have to tune in next Monday morning or whenever we tweet, whenever we make the episode. What is the next thing? What happened? So I made a tweet December 14th about the fact that I'm, uh, I don't know if you've seen that, when I was switching from, uh, winding up my company VIPF, the fellowship company, and then opening myself up for a next role, what I'm doing next. Okay, I wrote a full thesis on what happened 2023 last year, how many cohorts I served, uh, how much fun I had and all that, revenue I made. I mean, not super detailed, but like rough figures. But I also learned that there were some fundamental flaws in that business model. And so this year and next year, whatever, I wanted to switch to working, you know, at a company, at a startup. And I got like 25 people thanking me and saying like, congrats, man, like so brave. So I'm like, I don't think I did anything brave because by now I've been doing building in public for 4 years that I just did what I thought was the right move. But what, what happened there is that that became a magnet for luck. Yes. So I got like so many DMs from founders and I haven't announced this yet. This is the first time I'm talking about it. CMO of a billion-dollar company DM'd me from that thread.

Wow.

And I haven't announced, so I can't share this yet, but I'm joining that company.

Wow. And it

took me 40 minutes to write a thread, you know. And so there's so many people waiting for what's next, what's going on, what's going on. I haven't shared what's going on yet because I want to sign the contract and like, you know.

Wow. Wow.

But the, you know, so that is the power of building in public. And you know this, I've seen it. And so If you don't put yourself out there like that— now, some people, like, I'm sure 2% of them, maybe they thought, oh, KP is too, like, thirsty or too public or too— I don't know, I don't know what they may think, but I'm just saying it is risky. It requires some risk and vulnerability to open up, but I, I can't think of anything better to do, you know?

100%. Uh, and actually, that's how I got my first job, and that's how I raised money.

Really? Yeah. Tell me more. Tell us more about that, actually. I'm curious. Yeah.

My last year at HEC, the business school, uh, to pass the, the, the, the MBA, you need to write a big paper.

Okay.

Um, and I was like, there is no point. No one is gonna read that ever. Maybe my professor will skim through it for like 5 minutes, but that's it. So I just published it. I turned that into a series of blog posts on the creator economy and media businesses, and I just published that online, which got me in touch with the founders of Jellysmack, a multi-billion dollar company. They were like, this is interesting, come work with us, which I did.

That's your— oh yeah, I saw that on LinkedIn. You were running a creator program for them.

Exactly. So I was working at Jellysmack. It's like a big creator economy company. So they go to YouTube stars and they bring their content to other platforms. So mainly Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. And I got the opportunity from these blog posts to build the celebrity business for JellySmack.

Wow.

So going to athletes and chefs and comedians and TV stars and offering the JellySmack products and services. That's how I learned how to reach out and connect with pretty much anyone. That led to Augment later on. But had I not published this piece, I would never have gotten this job, you know.

The— also, the other thing is even the funding announcements that you publish, and I think one of the recent ones, you made a thread about it. And in the thread, of course, there was the announcement, there was a talk about the funding round and the raise. But to be honest, that was only 10% interesting to anybody like me, because that's like You know, of course, it's— you got the funding, it's sure. The 90% that was interesting was your beliefs around why Augment should exist. Why? What do you believe? And, you know, and that is an authentic, unique belief that you have, right? So that triggered me to like— because I think the same way, of course. That's why I was at On Deck. That's why I'm serving founders. That's what— like, I believe in cohorts and so on. Like, this is obvious. That's why I was, you know what, Ariel, I would love to do a podcast episode on you. And here we are. 2 months later.

Yes,

right,

exactly.

Who knows who's listening to this when it goes live?

100%. Uh, you know, I, I, I made so many friends on the internet by just being myself and sharing some stuff.

Yeah.

Uh, some, some friends I went skiing with, and, and, and, and, you know, we became really, really good friends. I, I would— I, I was at a friend's wedding whom I met on Twitter last summer.

Wow.

But just because there's so few people being out there and sharing genuinely.

And that's the key part. That's the key part, right? Genuinely.

That's the key part. Of course. Of course. It's very easy to talk like a brand and to talk like a multi-billion dollar company, but you're not going to connect with anyone.

Right.

Yeah. It's the genuinely part that's of course super important.

One other factor that is always top of mind for me is I was reading this biography, Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight, right? Nike's founder.

Yeah, I, I have it just behind me. Do you have it? Yeah.

It's on my nightstand in my bedroom, and I was reading, like, you know, I'm like underlining, and oh my God, it's one of my favorite books. One of the things what he talks about is that he, he says he wishes he documented— I'm sure, you know, if you remember, he wishes he documented more of the first 5, 6, 7 years journey, right? Because he completely forgot about all the decisions they took, all the ups and downs and highs and lows. After they go to IPO, of course, then you have like a staff and you have like people document. And he always says like, I just wish I documented the first 10 years of the company. And I think that's one of the things that I love about building in public is that I have a record of everything, you know. I mean, not like—

I love it.

Not everything, but like the big inflection points, right?

I, I never, I never thought of that this way.

But think about it, like, and so people are always afraid, like, what if that doesn't work and you have to be embarrassed about that thing? I'm like, okay, fine, so what? But what if it works, right?

Yes, 100%.

The upside is so much higher than the downside, right?

And, and what if making— and what if building it in public makes it work?

Yeah, exactly. And so it's— I think it's, it's, it's again like we, we know this in theory, we can get it. I think it's just the like a very, very few people I feel like really embody this, you know, because just you have to have a certain kind of success with it, like the way you had it with Shazam's founder. Like you have to see it for yourself to believe like, oh, you know what, this works. As long as you're authentic, this works. And so once I did that email, I was like, I can email anybody on the human— on the planet. Like you, you have this, you feel like I can As long as it's valuable to them, you can email anybody on the planet.

You know, one day we brought the build in public mantra very, very far because, so we do super heavy production. There are 30 people on set.

Yeah.

The videos that we produce are super high quality.

Right.

And so there was this investor that I really wanted on my cap table. And so I just, Nice. So that's, that's like next level building in public. Yeah, he's on the— Someone.

Yes.

To just because you want this person to see you in action.

Yeah.

And, and, and, and that convinced, uh, this angel investor to, to, to, to invest in the company because, oh, actually what you do by, by building in public, you tell people, oh, this is real, this is legit, look at the progress. Uh, one step further is like building in public physically, having this person watching you build the product or whatever. Uh, so that was, that was very fun. And of course production and filming sessions are super, super fun. They're always fun.

I was gonna ask you about that actually. How did you, like, how did that come about? Like how did you make like the first ever course creation happen?

So 2 years ago I knew nothing about production.

Yeah.

Nothing.

Wow. Because it's very apparent, it seems like you didn't go to film school or anything, right? You went to business school.

Oh, no, no, no, no. I really, I knew nothing about that. Turns out it's not that hard because you don't need to do it yourself. You can just pay people to do it. And so that's what we did. I interviewed tens of production companies. Some of them were like, too big and too expensive and they don't even want to talk to you. Some of the ones who are just like one random guy saying, yeah, I can do it for super cheap, and you don't want that either. So you had to find the right balance, which I believe we did because we did 12 filming sessions with the same production company. We've been super happy with them. I believe that the only thing that we did right was just to take our time and to talk to a lot of different potential partners. And once you've got the good one, just like you, now we know exactly how to work together. I learned all the technical terms, so I know a bit more about what's going on and I know how a filming day is supposed to take place. But yeah, you just need to find the right people, serious guys, and they 100% deliver.

What I love about the way you operate so far from what I'm hearing, Ariel, is that there's a couple times where you said, I knew nothing, and then you followed up by saying, I figured it out. I love that energy. I love that mindset of, oh, I just knew nothing, because a lot of people would view that as a blocker. And I think— I feel like you, you just like accept it and you're like, okay, I don't know anything here. Let me start here and then we'll go figure it out on the way, right?

It's interesting. And maybe something that's been quite liberating for me is, I know today it's not very fashionable to say that you need to raise money and bootstrapping is more popular these days.

Right.

But something changed in my mind once I raised money for the first time is I realized, oh, actually, my job is not to actually do the thing, is to collect the money from people who have money and pay other people to do whatever I'm supposed to do.

Right.

And that changed a lot of things for me, even personally, in the sense that the range of possibilities is much broader because it's not limited to what I know or what my friends know. It's, oh, actually, I can do basically anything. I just need to tell people, I need money to do that, collect the money, and then pay other people to do whatever, what I want them to do. And so I think that's—

Again, it goes back to story. It again goes back to like the, the power of a story, because you're telling a story to one group, which is the investor group, and then you're taking, you know, you're collecting the resource of money in that sense, and then you're then telling the story of, hey, what do we want to achieve, to your production team. Right, so it's just the story again and again. What was surprising about fundraising for you? Because you're a first-time founder, correct? Or have you done—

Yeah.

Okay, so what were a couple counterintuitive lessons about fundraising and just, you know, talking to investors?

So many counterintuitive lessons. Really? Yeah, yeah, some like very tactical ones, like don't do a business plan. I believe like there is a negative correlation between having a business plan and raising a pre-seed round. I was quite lucky in the sense that I did a 6-month internship in VC. And so I learned so much and knowing the terms and just the jargon and— Right. Being able to understand when you go on a fund's website, what's their investment strategy? How do they stand in terms of like deployment period? How much money they have left? What's their network? And understanding all that, basically reading the mind of someone who's in front of you, just because you know exactly how the economics in venture works, because you've worked in ventures in the past. Right. That's been like game-changing because you know exactly how to focus in terms of like, okay, This person, like, we fit 100% into their fund strategy. We know exactly that, like, that we would be the right fit versus other funds. Like, it's not even worth talking to them.

Right.

For many different reasons.

Right. I think people—

In any negotiation, it's just like understanding the other's viewpoint, which may be a bit obscure when you're a founder, but really studying the economics of venture funds And how they plan to generate returns and what's like a great return for one fund. Maybe it may be different for another one. And just understanding that and then calibrating your pitch to the investor, super important.

Right. With Augment, what do you see in the long term? Are you envisioning a 10-year plan in your head? Not a plan like a business plan, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. But do you see a massive company could be formed from here?

So the 100-year plan—

I love that. It's not just 10 years, 100 years.

I

love

that. Is to build the best business courses in the world. And so the mission is so simple. But I love just to wake up every day and we picked one thing. For us, it's like business courses and our mission is just the best in the world. Just this. We do one thing really good. And I believe I want to be the next HBS, a super high quality brand. of online business programs grounded into the realities of business by the people who've done it in the past. That's Augment, that's the vision. And that's, I don't know, for me it's like the most exciting business I could ever dream of building.

And your current ICP is someone who is on the fence of joining a traditional MBA program or someone who may have joined it, but they want to augment like their learning journey?

The main ICP at the moment is really doing this 0 to 1 for people who know nothing about business. And we bring them from, I know nothing, like I was myself, history student, I know nothing about business, to I've got the foundations. of business strategy, entrepreneurship, finance, leadership, management, strategy, sales, accounting, et cetera. So we do this 0 to 1. If you're super experienced, don't do Augment. Go do a traditional MBA or do a very specific online marketing program or whatever. And it's been fascinating to meet with all the students we have. They come from so many different backgrounds. We get a lot of doctors, Designers, data engineers, scientists, people who know nothing about business, uh, and we're the zero to one,

right?

Making those seemingly complex topics easy to digest, very, like, super tangible because based on real products and services that they use and they love,

right? So when, when you started this, was Were there other competitors or players in the space? Like, I'm— what comes to mind is MasterClass because that's their course product, right? Yeah. Um, but that's a course product. And then obviously from a cohort point of view, there was Reforge. This is 2, 3 years ago. And then there was On Deck, which was not necessarily a structured MBA program, but they were more so like community, you know, around a particular fellowship or a particular niche. So when you entered the market, what was your assessment of these players?

I love them and they're a big source of inspiration.

I love Masterclass.

Yeah, I love Masterclass. I know the founders. I watched a lot of their classes. I like Reforge even though it's a bit like it's product oriented and I'm not really a product person. I resonate a bit less with the content just because of my position and taste. But I love those companies. I believe that the biggest competitor in edtech is the status quo, is people not learning. And so I'm super happy and I root for their success. And I really want people to have as many learning, high-quality learning opportunities as possible. And so we're fighting for the same cause,

right? I love that you're viewing this as a non-zero-sum game, right? A positive sum.

And you know why? I even cold emailed Brian Bathory, the founder of Reforge, one week or 2 weeks ago, telling, like, congrats, you're doing super great. I love what you do. We're doing this. I'm sure we can learn a lot from one another. But, and that's it, you know, wish you the best.

How do you— you know what's fascinating? Like 7, 8 years ago, I heard the phrase, I think it was some— someone from Bezos, you know, stories around like, don't focus on the competitor, you know, focus on customer. And I was reading his book, Invent and Wander. Where Amazon, like, he was so maniacal. Like, I don't think I thought— I didn't expect that much intensity in terms of customer, right? Like, I know, I mean, I care about customers. Like, you seem like you care about— but he was actually blinded. Like, come— like, you know, and their caption, the, the wording they use, the choice of words they use is very telling about Earth's most customer-obsessed company, right?

And That's a statement. We're talking about like a big idea. That's, that's a statement, right?

I'm like, I, I took the screenshot and I went like, you know what, I'm gonna save this in a document where like when I start my company, that should be one of the foundational values. Because like think about that, Earth's most customer-obsessed company is a value that we all can share. It's not a zero-sum thing. Like only Amazon doesn't have trademark on that, you know, care. But it's such a great philosophy because every time I listen to some of the interviews, Every time somebody brings up iPad versus Kindle, he would always talk about, I love iPad. I wish all the best for iPad. Because iPad's like 800 times bigger market size as opposed to Kindle at the time. But he would say, you don't understand my audience. Jeff Bezos was saying, my audience is different. They want to hold something in their hand late at night with no special lights and apps and games and shit and just tap, tap, tap and black and white read. And so my audience want to continue the love for reading. So the way I felt that he was obsessed about understanding that customer base ICP, he almost didn't care about— I mean, like, he almost didn't not care, but like, he didn't like worry about the other players who were doing other things. And I thought in a market like yours, and there's so many markets, I talked to Beehive co-founder CEO where, you know, there's Beehive, there's Substack, there's ConvertKit. Like, some of these markets have multiple players. Yeah. So like, you have to have that kind of maniacal, relentless focus on the customer. Otherwise, your attention can get just drifted away into like what competitors are doing. Let's play catch-up, you know.

Any entrepreneur would tell you that it's so easy to go on someone else's website and say, oh, this is such a good idea, this is why they're doing so great, and try to copy and implement that into your product. It never works.

Works, yeah.

Uh, and, and it's, it's, it's never the, the right way to, to have an idea and we've done it a few times and always we realize, actually, maybe they did a mistake or maybe it's just like the tip of the iceberg and we don't know exactly why they do it this way. And we are in a different business and we've got different ICP and brand and persona and go-to-market or whatever. So 100%.

Yeah. I also wanna share something that came to mind, Ariel, which is, I think you'll appreciate as a founder in the same situation. I mean, I love these founder stories, man. As you can tell already, I'm a huge nut about early stories of great founders because I feel like that's where the magic is, right? Um, so this is like— I took notes on this the other day. I was listening, uh, to a podcast called Founders by David Senra.

Love it.

Love it, right? Like, oh, shout out David. In one of the episodes where he's talking about, of course, the founding story of Amazon, what I loved there was the year Amazon was founded was 1994. 2 or 3 years into the game, they were still like figuring out their MVP and figuring out their, you know, and it was so niche that it was only— they were only selling books online, right? It was just books, which is crazy to think about. Such discipline with the niche, just books, nothing else. But his pitch to investors was, we're going to build the everything store. So from day one, he knew we're going to build— you're going to buy whatever you want. You can buy boats today on Amazon. You can buy whatever. But his focus, maniacal focus again, was just on books and getting that right. Right. Like you said, like highest world-class experience on books, right? I took notes on this because I, I Googled to see how big Barnes& Noble was. And Barnes& Noble in America is the retail physical store.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That you, as you may have heard, and they were $2 billion in revenue, $2 billion, and they had 20,000 employees at the time. That is when Bezos decides, I'm gonna go against them. How much balls and guts should you have to think, That is the biggest competitor in the area, in the space. I'm going to go after them. And of course they scoff at him. They laugh at him because they're like, you're a lilliput, like a minnow compared to how big we are. We're 20,000 employees. But he would, he would, he didn't care. Obviously he was betting on internet. And so they come join the party 3 years into the game. They have a .com website also, but they're not as focused as he is in the internet store. They're still doing retail and all that. So eventually they lose out. And the CEO invites him to buy him, buy Amazon. And he laughs and he says, no, you can't buy us. Of course not. I'm not going to sell Amazon to you. And the guy threatens him by saying, no, we're gonna, we're gonna do like video games, DVDs, other things on our dot-com. And Amazon is like, I don't care, you know,

I'm gonna do it too.

So I thought that was such a like a huge reminder because we always sometimes, especially founders that I talk to, sometimes they they get threatened by, oh, there's another big player in the game, right? Like, oh, whale, you know, big whale in the game, and you're a small fish. That is the biggest freaking whale you can imagine. $2 billion in revenue, not valuation, revenue. And then 20,000 employees. And this guy thinks we can do something here. And what I also wrote, I took a note of this, something for me, for my own inspiration. From the founding day to Amazon becoming a trillion-dollar company? It was 24 years. In 24 years, uh, a balding guy in New York— and, you know, eventually moves to Seattle— creates a trillion-dollar company out of thin air. How crazy is that? Like, think about history of mankind, how long it took for the first trillion-dollar company to be created. Thousands of years. And within 24 years, this guy creates the next one. Of course he was riding the internet wave, but a note to myself I took from that episode was, what is the next wave, KP? And what is your 25-year story? I took my note for that. I'm like, because that's message, right? And of course, even if you don't create a trillion-dollar company, why can't we settle for a $100 billion company? You know what I mean? So when you were telling me the 100-year story, I was like, yeah, that's the horizon you got to think about. We can't play the Q1, Q2 game.

No,

so

I love that.

I feel like we could go for like forever on, you know, chatting. I— the also, it's also a testament to me about what are the kind of founders who get inspired by stories like that versus who found it— who find it to be— who find so many flaws in like some Amazon or some Apple or something. I'm like, that is usually a testament of like who really gets the point there, right?

So yeah, I, I cannot be more passionate about These type of stories, uh, I built an entire business based on these stories.

Exactly. So

obviously, uh, and we, uh, I, I had like so many great anecdotes from Anne Hayat. She teaches on Anne Hayat and she, she teaches on Augment and she's been Jeff Bezos' right hand for the first 4 years at Amazon. And then she became the first ever chief of staff at Google.

Wow.

For another 10 years, something like that. And she tells some amazing stories from the early days of both Google and Amazon. And I remember the first time we met, I was like to prepare the course. There was having a coffee in front of the sea and she was like telling all the stories and I was with my notebook writing them down. And I felt so energized and with this feeling that I had like a firsthand witness of like the greatest minds in history and the early days of like the birth of one of the greatest companies of all time.

Juggernaut, right? One of the biggest. Yeah. Okay. So let's get into, in lieu of time, I'm trying to make sure that we cover a couple of good points. Let's get into some of the difficult barriers that you had to overcome in the journey.

Interestingly enough, I've been willing to be an entrepreneur for 5, 6, 7 years before I actually started Augment. And I believe that the most challenging period was before. Now, of course, I have a lot of challenges, but those are like the expected ones. And you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm ready for them and I embrace. But when I look back at my younger self and like 3, 4 years ago, I was this kid that I wanted to build a company. I was, uh, uh, my mind was like sparkling with ideas. But I could not focus. I did not really fall in love with one specifically. I didn't know also how to approach building a startup. I didn't know what's like the, what was the first step. And this period of time where you're just like exploring, it seems like a lifetime. Yeah. You have no, you have no idea whether it would end or not, and whether the outcome would be positive or not. And I believe that at that time, I was completely lost working, but not enjoying it and feeling that I was missing on the key thing. And for me, it was like entrepreneurship. And I had too many ideas. I could not focus. I didn't know what exactly I wanted to do. So that was like a very challenging time.

What's your advice for someone who is there today in those shoes right now?

Learn as much as you can. And this is also why I'm building Augment, but study business, really, because I believe that my feeling of just not moving forward Was because I did not clearly understand what's the right first step, what's the second next step, and that had I had a better business education or listened to more podcasts like this one, okay, I would have had a clearer picture of the entrepreneurial journey, and that would have been. That would have unlocked entrepreneurship slightly earlier, I believe, for me.

I think a lot of the times it's just like hearing founders who are 5, 6, 7, 8 steps ahead of us even like mention what they went through, right? The soul searching and this exploration. That reassurance itself is so soothing.

And that's part of the journey. That's part of the journey. And of course But for me, it's the most painful part because now I've got a lot of challenges, but I know I'm on track and I know those challenges are part of the journey. Whereas in the past, those challenges were, you expect the journey to start, but it never starts. And so you're in this feeling of despair and you don't know whether it's going to end.

I was gonna ask you this, which is how did you navigate, like how did you manage to arrive at one idea? Because you were talking about potentially 4, 5, 6, 7 ideas in your head. How did you get rid of all of them and just like get the clear focus on Augment?

Hundreds of ideas.

So 4 is a lowball number. Okay.

Honestly, yeah. Every now and then I'm on my computer and I open a file and it's a random pitch deck for an obscure idea. I completely forgot that I built like 5, 6 years ago. And I was like, wow, so many, so many different ideas. But I believe, I believe that at the end they were all, I don't know, circling around the same like media businesses, education. And so I believe that they gravitated towards Augment.

Augment, yeah.

And I had to combine something that was like visually interesting, uh, and, and design is very important for us, uh, uh, teaching about business because that's part of my journey and, and, and, and what I want to do, uh, the learn from the best, the celebrity parts, uh, connected to my, my, my past job, uh, and so I don't know, I feel like I, I, I, I grab it as Towards this idea, and then it became kind of clear at some point. But I didn't have this big aha moment. Oh, I should build this. And actually, I had so many aha moments on very bad ideas that I don't believe in them anymore.

Interesting. That is a counterintuitive insight also, right?

I think so.

Society expects like some kind of a light bulb moment, like, whoa, you know, this is a.

The best ideas are, I don't know, they come from within and you build conviction over a long period of time and then they become obvious and it seems that like they've always been there. You've built this conviction over time. But yeah, I was like, oh, I'm gonna build like a premium education platform for kids. Oh no, actually I'm not really passionate about kids. So what, that's about, and so you see like you're playing around with many different aspects and then, oh, actually all the pieces fit together and makes all sense.

You know, I, one of the things that David Sander on the Founders Podcast talks about is that how companies are basically extensions of founders, you know, personality, right?

100%.

And I feel like the way you described it made me seem like you're kind of like looking in the mirror and assembling the pieces of the puzzle. That becomes an image of you ultimately, and then that becomes the company, right? And then open to the world.

I believe that for some people entrepreneurship is a creative act. Yeah, like painting or like writing something. And, and Chris from Shazam actually told me that one day, that it's, it's, it's putting yourself out there and building something. But, and some people create music and some people create companies, but it's, it's, it's Comes from the same impulse.

Yeah. So one last question, which is, you know, what are some pitfalls and traps that you foresee as of now, and that you would love to avoid and be careful about as you navigate the journey?

It's interesting. It's now like the company is 12 people. We raised a little over $6 million USD. We've got more than 600 students from 20+ countries. It all happened super, super fast. Like last year, exactly at this time, it was only Roy and myself, my co-founder and myself.

Wow.

Now we've got a team and I've never managed and built a team. And my role within the company is changing a lot. I'm learning a lot about, okay, look what it takes to bring a company from 10 to 100 people. And it's a totally different challenge. And I believe I was a terrible, terrible manager. I had no background. Now I believe I'm only terrible. So it's improved a bit, but clearly building a team and just like having people working hard towards the submission, et cetera. It's hard, it's tough, and so many challenges and new things that I knew literally nothing about one year ago. Funny enough, last week we gave like the beginning of year presentation with the entire team and I reflected on it and I was like, okay, one year ago I would've been totally— I knew literally nothing about this presentation. I wouldn't be able to believe that I was, I would deliver this speech and this presentation because, uh, I knew nothing about the topics I, I, I talked about. And so crazy, well, like how much you can learn in a year.

Rapid, rapid learning. Yeah.

And, and, and it's scary at the same time because you, you say, oh, uh, I knew literally nothing last year. I'm sure that I will say exactly the same next year. So you, It feels good and bad at the same time.

I think it's just the fastest way to— I mean, a company forces you to level up so quickly, right?

Yeah.

You're getting your own version of the MBA even as a manager.

Oh, yeah, it's super meta. So I'm building an MBA, but that's also an MBA. And so it's very meta, but I love it.

I'm so happy for your journey so far. And it brings me so much joy because your story is so many, so many synergistical elements that we both share, you know. And fundamentally, it's how we operate as founders. Also, funny enough, we see the world and the future in a similar way, right? Um, we talked about, uh, earlier before the recording started, we talked about how like I came from a small town in India and you were in Paris. And in the future, I want my kids, hopefully your kids, to not doesn't matter where they— the zip code, you know, where they were born or where they were raised. Like, I feel like greatness should not be concentrated in any neighborhood, right? Greatness should be democratic. It should be, you know, democratized across the world. And the best channel we have is the internet. And so what you guys are building is a curated layer on top of that, right? Which is the best, learn from the best and that kind of thing. So really rooting for it. I'm a big believer in that, as you can tell by now. And Very happy and excited for where you go next.

It was a pleasure. It was so fun. We have the same reference. We listen to the same thing. So it was so fun to meet you and I wish you the best.

Thank you, man. I appreciate it. And with that, it's a wrap. I'll add all your links and Augment, of course, links on the show notes and hope to see you in a future episode again.

Thank you. Thank you, KP.