How Stoa Is Democratizing Access To Business Education (feat. Aditya Kulkari and Raj Kunkolienkar)

I think the way I look at Stoa, and that is reflected in my Twitter bio, right? It's a place where we discover, we nurture, as well as, you know, back or vouch for the underdogs, right? The underrated talent out there, which is probably going to define the Indian economy for decades to come.

I feel like I've seen some of those myself. I'm very inactive on LinkedIn. So like, unless I see something from especially you, Aditya, you are the only source that I actually go to because some of the stuff you post is, you know, useful. And then I land into Raj's stuff and I'm like, what is this? What is he doing? But I always get a chuckle though. I think he delivers on a chuckle every time you check out his stuff on LinkedIn.

The challenge there is I think education and fitness are the only 2 consumer businesses where the customer has to pay money and then undergo suffering, right? Like it's something—

Yeah, transformation, right? Yeah,

suffering. And you can only do so much, like you can't solve the motivation.

Hello everybody, welcome to the Build in Public podcast. I am your host, KP, and today I am joined by a dynamic duo from India, the founders of Stoa. I have a lot of things to say about these guys. They're my favorite founders right now in India. I'm probably biased because I'm a big-time fan of Stoa and a small check investor. So putting the disclosure out there, of course, I'm of course biased. But having said that, you know, the founding team here that I'm talking to, they have done a lot of interesting, novel, out-of-the-box Marketing initiatives, you know, to promote Stoa and just to kind of, you know, build a movement around this alternative MBA. And that's what I've been a big fan of. Today, I want to uncover the full story, the origin story, how they got together, the evolution of Stoa, and everything under the sun. But first, welcome to the show, Raj and Aditya.

Hey, thank you, KP, for having us.

I almost had to like click on that annoying little speaker icon on your LinkedIn to pronounce your last name. I thought I had the hard-to-pronounce last name with the double V and the D, Puvvada, and you have the— you have definitely Worse than me. Kunkuliyan Kar, is that right? Kunkuliyan Kar. The kar is a soft sound, right?

Yeah, yeah.

You got that right. Aditya is definitely has got a very famous last name Kulkarni. So you know, I think we're good with yours.

Yeah.

Where are you both joining from? Give us a give the audience who may not know much about you a quick thirty second sixty second intro of your background. What were you doing before Stoa and where are you joining now from?

Yeah, so I've been in education tech for last ten years, right? Like have paid my dues for the first eight years, built couple of companies. I was fortunate enough that, you know, I had some decent exits. I mean, something that I don't regret. Yeah, like, so made some small cash. But yeah, last 8 years have been in education, explored a lot, primarily in K-12, a lot on the emotional well-being side for children. In fact, the legal name of the company, Questo Stoa, started as a teenager well-being platform just before the pandemic. Wow. So yeah, spent 8 years in K-12, realized that it's really tough to make money in early education and child education. And then met Raj and then Stoa happened. I'm joining from Bangalore, but Stoa, I mean, while we built it for last couple of years, I was in Nasik, which is a small town near Bombay, about 3 hours away. This has been an interesting 10 years, right? Like I'm almost completing 10 years after my MBA.

And you went to B-school like in India, you went to an elite B-school, didn't you?

Yeah, I went to IIM Bangalore, which is one of the top B-schools here.

Which is an interesting data point because you're building the future of what I think would be like, you know, MBA the next 20, 30, 40 years and you're almost creating a fork in making it a very hard choice for someone to choose the traditional MBA versus, you know, what's cooler, what's more bang for the buck, and what's more efficient and realistic and pragmatic in my view, which is STOA. We're gonna talk all about that in a second, but I had to put that out there because you actually were an insider turned outsider, you know. And so it's very, very fascinating in my view. Raj, tell us a little bit about you, your background, and where you're joining from, and what's up with this red background.

Yeah, so I'm gonna start off with where I'm based out of. I'm in Goa right now, born, brought up here, right? A lot of people think that one moves here because, you know, for those who are aware of India and all the tourist destinations around, Goa is like a— was a sleepy beachside, you know, laid-back, uh, interesting place to be, like a cultural hotspot. Pretty much picking up steam now. A lot of, uh, you know, tech scenes happening, a lot of tech nomadism kicking in. So I'm out of Goa, based on Goa, and, uh, after college, after getting a degree in physics, I, you know, dived into education, not thinking from an entrepreneurial lens per se, but coming at it out of curiosity, right? Like I wanted to teach. That was probably one of the only things that I knew I was good at after all those rejected PhD applications. And one thing led to another. I realized that the only way you could scale impact was by running it like a business. And that's how entrepreneurship happened. Tried out a few ventures. One was like, you know, Indian equivalent of Lambda School. Realized that income share agreements are probably not the best thing to have happen in India. I mean, not the best thing to try out, right, in the Indian markets. But through that journey, built an audience on the internet, like met Aditya on Twitter, and 2 years, 2 and a half years on, here we are, right? Like, we are here to not disrupt as much as, you know, put together a new system for business talent in India and hopefully the developing world in years to come.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that really stands out about your background, Raj, especially for those of the audience who know you, they will probably describe you as a cheeky teacher, right? You definitely have the teacher side of you. You're not afraid to share your insights, build in public, quote unquote, you know, like basically give away all the playbooks and, you know, all kinds of information that you learned and gathered along the way. However, there's a sense of mischief, there's a sense of an edge that I felt, and I loved it. And I think that gives Stoa a little bit of character, a little bit of a, you know, fun personality as a brand, which is, uh, because I mean, one of the things I shared with you guys when I first found out about you is that that's what got me into the Radar, is that a lot of the edtech companies, including the ones in the US, I think play too safe because they take education so serious. Right. But the customer base don't want to feel that way. Right. The actual customers are tired of traditional, very rigid systems. And if you can offer a relief on where it's expert-led, Number one. Number two, it's more relatable, more fun, entertaining, like edutainment. As we know, you hate the term, but as we know, that's like the future, the better it is, in my view. So that's how I would describe Stoa. But I'm curious how both of you would pitch Stoa to our audience here. If somebody doesn't know what Stoa is, stoaschool.com, correct? Actually, you even have the stoa.com now. Yeah,

we recently acquired stoa.com. That was like a dream come true. But here we are, right? place. Thankfully, we were able to invest in that. So I think the way I look at STOA, and that is reflected in my Twitter bio, right, it's a place where we discover, we nurture, as well as back or vouch for the underdogs, right, the underrated talent out there, which is probably going to define the Indian economy for decades to come. So it's an entire system which sort of replicates the traditional MBA landscape in India. Right, that's at least my way of looking at it. Aditya, what about you? How do you look at it?

I'm sure you have your own funny answer. So firstly, I think the way we are going about it or the iterations where they are headed is we want to establish a professional charter for business talent, right? So STOA is increasingly turning into a charter versus just being a cohort-based course, right? And as Raj said, as we understand, there are 4 important sort of components of an MBA system, right? There is the upskilling and learning part of it, there is the networking and the community part of it, there is the long-term brand signal when you say I'm from Harvard or Stanford or whatever. For sure. And then the 4th thing is a career shift, right? Like people do change functions, industries, their comp level at the end of their MBA. So these are the 4 sort of things which make up the MBA bundle. Now we're replicating the same bundle, but instead of filtering people at the entry gate, we are filtering people after they have had access to learning and community, right? So the signal comes from an exit exam or the charter exam rather than an entry exam like a GMAT and the application process. So everybody gets to learn, but they need to pass a certain bar at the exit to earn the brand and the career opportunities. So I mean, this is the sort of, you know, how Stovai is structured currently. And I think going back to your previous question, right, about the brand being quirky, Raj had this bio on LinkedIn for a long time, which is, why should MBAs have all the fun? Yeah. You know, I think for any education company, it is always a struggle, right, because you think of yourself as an institution But customers are looking at you not necessarily as an institution, they still look at you as a startup. Right. So where you land on that spectrum, right, like, and it's a very tricky balance. Like, if you go very institution-wise, the rules and how you treat your customers is very different. And if you treat them like startups, that is a whole other sort of story. So where do you lie on that spectrum, right? And And at Stoa, we have had this dance, right? Like we have tried to adjust ourselves. Like we were a lot on the fun side and the startup side, then we tried to be a lot more institutional. And then I think now the pendulum is swinging the other way a bit.

Right. No, I couldn't agree more. I think it's a delicate dance. And as you both know, I've been in the edtech industry myself for the last, I guess, 4 years now since I joined On Deck. I definitely didn't mean to get into edtech. It was an accidental entry. And all of my time, I've realized, you know, one thing that's probably a good thing for us to brainstorm on is that when you are an upstart, brand new entry into an established market category, especially education, nothing is way more powerful than credential, right? So as you know, like on Deck, we had an insane monopoly on credential. Like, I think, you know, it's not a lie. Like, of course, we had community, we had all these other aspects that were going well for us. But as I reflect on the journey there, you know, the education aspect of the learning aspect was actually light. was heavy on community, which was a welcome sign during the early days of pandemic because people were longing, craving for any ounce of community anywhere on the internet. So it clearly worked in our favor. But the credential actually was the strongest signal in my view, right? Like the credential of Silicon Valley's top elite people were there, et cetera, et cetera. However, as I kind of graduated out of that sort of camp and now I'm like day one and now I have a lot of friends at Maven, a lot of friends everywhere around, Credential can only take you so far. Maybe it can get you to the first quarter in a 4-quarter basketball game reference. The next 3 quarters are really predicated on good business fundamentals, discipline, you know, like not overhiring and all that stuff. And, you know, I feel the next 3 quarters, genuinely, it's best if you adapt the mindset of being a consumer platform or a consumer startup as opposed to being an edtech startup. Because with edtech, you kind of— what I've noticed is some of the founders that I work with is that you kind of subconsciously inherit the college playbook and you try to come compare yourself and your customers with the college-going kids or customers, but you don't have that college-level peer pressure to finish a course. You know, they're adults to apply for 15 credits. You know, there's like no pressure that's driving them to go through the pipeline, you know, which are— we love our pipelines, don't we? So it purely becomes the customer play at that point. It's almost like consumer play at that point. So you have to treat them— What I've learned, my final nugget of this thing is It's so much safer and better if the— if an up-and-coming edtech founder treats their edtech product slash offering as a consumer offering, because it means you really have to earn it every month. Because consumer, you know, if you're in B2C, they're very fickle, you know, and they're, you know, like credential doesn't matter, right? Like people buy because of how they feel and like the marketing and all that other things. So it's probably a good thing that you guys are swinging putting this pendulum back into like, you know, a little bit more cheeky and a little bit more fun. Because until, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 years, brand and credential won't manifest unless you had it at day one, right? The first day, it will take its sweet time and you cannot accelerate brand journey. All you can do is just have fun and let people have fun and make it more fun to them and be extremely disciplined with the business fundamentals, you know. So I actually am curious, sorry, was there a comment, Raj? Were you going to say something or—

I think just a thought, right, is that being consumer also helps you iterate, right? Whereas if you are an education institution, so to say, you're expected to, you know, start off in a rather frozen—

Yeah.

Post-PMF, as you call it, right? Monolithic state, which is just like a copy-paste of an existing college or university or a MOOC platform or so on. But if you treat yourself as a consumer player, then of course you open doors to That the startup mindset, right, that helps you sort of move in the right direction.

Exactly. To my point, the recent thing that came to mind, um, that I saw somewhere was like Brian Chesky talking about Airbnb, and he mentioned that they launched 6 times. I can't think of one edtech company that launched 6 times because, you know, they are too stiff about this, right? Can you imagine like On Deck launching 6 times saying like, we're the new On Deck, the new On Deck, the new On Deck? Because it's like they feel there's a sense of too much pressure. that you have to really have nailed it. Otherwise you're doing something wrong. As opposed to Airbnb, they launched 6 times before they got to PMF. And I think that's what I'm trying to get to, which is, you know, edtech founders, unfortunately, because they're compared with institutions that are usually century-long stable, like Harvard hasn't changed since 150 years. I went to Vanderbilt, hasn't changed since 150 years. That comparison, I think, is inaccurate. Although there's education, there's some learning, but really it should be compared more to an Airbnb or Uber. or, you know, some DoorDash or one of these tech startups, purely consumer, that are constantly iterating and finding out their place in the world at scale. Because the hardest thing, the reason why they're launching 6 times, 7 times is they're trying to figure out what is the messaging, what is the channel, who is the customer that can get them to hyper speed, hyper growth, right? Like this scale speed. And with ad tech, because you're just very stiff and you're like always comparing yourself against the wrong incumbents, You just can't get to hyperspeed because you're trying to think, oh, we're better than Harvard, we're faster than Harvard, so we should be doing something good. But that's not how the consumer perceives you. The consumer perceives you as the thing I talk about even with Day One Founders CEO Andrew, and we talk about it all the time. I'm like, look, Andrew, we have to do something different here. We cannot— our tag is $1,499, right? US dollars, $1,500 for my build track that I'm building there, and which we're iterating on the price. But when we first announced it, there was a lot of buzz. There's a lot of people who are excited. They're like, they trust me. I'm a trustable candidate in that niche. Mm-hmm. So they know that I'll get the job done. But as I talked, did more customer discovery after launch, as I was talking to a lot of people, like I'm sensing hesitation and I was like, there's something going on here. They're not feeling comfortable paying $1,500 in this inflation recession market we're in right now. And I caught myself going through the same process. I was at Costco, which is, you know, America's version of— I don't know what's the equivalent in India. Giant, big, let's say Walmart. I was there and I was staring at a TV and this is my favorite anecdote and the TV is I think $1,200. And my wife's walking past me and she's like, why are you staring at this for like 20 minutes? Well, if you want to buy, just buy it because you can afford it. And I said, yeah, you know what? I'm going to buy it for Christmas in December. You know, it's $1,200. Why do I want to let go of $1,200 right now? And it just hit me that that is how every customer in my pipeline is thinking, that they're comparing getting this sort of course or program, whatever, with an expensive consumer purchase. And they're like, would I want a brand new 70-inch TV or would I want it you know, joins to a chapter, for example. I don't know, I'm just making this up. Yeah. And so you really have to compete at that psychological level, not that, oh, we're cheaper than Harvard because Harvard's $200K. That's not even the question at this point, unless you're only selling to the 20-year-olds, 21-year-olds who are genuinely in that peer pressure that they need to finish college. Most people who finished college, if you talk to them, they feel like they actually finished something. They're like, why would I want to start back again? I just finished it. So the dark answer is people are not as inclined to learning as much as we think they are. You know, but they're more inclined to other things like status. They're inclined to getting a raise at the job. They're inclined to making more money, all these other things. But I don't think like education alone is like that much of a noble, you know, pursuit, especially in the day and age of internet where projects can be done for free.

The challenge there is I think education and fitness are the only 2 consumer businesses where the customer has to pay money And then undergo suffering, right? Like in some

sense of transformation, right? Yeah.

Suffering. You can only do so much. Like you can't solve for motivation. You can't solve for a bunch of those things. By the way, to your point, and I'm not just like, you know, trying to blow our own trumpet, but we did announce after our cohort 1 that we are shutting down Stoa and we did relaunch. And I think, you know, You did? Yeah. So 500 people turned up on that Zoom call and like, you know, we had a bunch of, you know, messages saying, hey, don't take it too hard, you know, entrepreneurs fail all the time. And we were like, no, we are shutting down this format and we are launching a new one. Like, but yeah, I think we have done that a bunch of times.

I love that. So checking back to—

I think, yeah, I've lost track of the number of times we've like changed the landing page and the offering as such, right? Like, and relaunch, I think, you know, that's— it's gonna happen, right? It's gonna happen for some time to come as well.

And the iteration is just part of the game. And I heard this from, um, I forgot it was— I think it was Arvid Kahl, one of my friends who's a serial entrepreneur. He said like iterated the landing page, you know, like I lost count, maybe like 50, 60, 70 times in the span of a year. And he said until it became a mafia offer where once they saw it, it was hard to refuse, you know? And it's not that simple to get to that core kernel of truth with just like first attempt. It takes a lot of, you know, reiteration messaging. So anyway, love that. So let's get back to the early days of Stoa. One of you, if you remember, what was the first actual offering of Stoa and who was your first paying customer?

So the first program was just 3 months, right? Like this was peak pandemic, right? Like right after wave 1 in India. It was a 3-month program, daily 90 minutes of class. So it was 90 days on a trot and it was priced at $1,500, right? So, uh, which was— oh nice, yeah. And we actually wrote the landing page thinking we will attract people who are coding but don't enjoy it, so want to move to the business side. But when we launched, everyone else except that consumer persona came in, right? So we had people who were pursuing PhDs in core sciences come in, we had chartered analysts come in, we had people who were already in business roles come in. The first cohort was actually 27, and it was a— I mean, we did have students, I think, from Singapore, US, and then India. Nice. And these US folks who turn up at 8 o'clock Their time and go through the training. So yeah, it was a 3-month, you know, alternate MBA, and I shot that first cohort, right? It was pretty much me.

Right. Back in the day, back in the day, we used to call it MBA, the MBA bootcamp, right? And, uh, I think progressively we've gone on to like the second version that what we named it was the Startup MBA. Then we realized that, wait, people are thinking that this is some, right, program for entrepreneurs, right? Like for people who are looking to start up. Then we changed the name to STOA MBA, right? Like we wanted to, of course, borrow equity from the MBA term, right? Like that was like a good pricing anchor and so on. And I think earlier this year we took the decision to sort of snip out the MBA term from the name completely, from the offering, right? What we call the offering completely. Back then, by the way, we were also called as STOA School. So Stoa School had an offering called as the MBA bootcamp or the Stoa MBA, whatnot. But now, like, the whole— now that we're like moving towards creating a system, the system itself is like called Stoa, right? Like, we've dropped the school, dropped the MBA. I think now we're just riding purely on the basis of our name, so to say, with MBA somewhere in the, you know, sub.

You know, I mean, something just came to mind when you said that through the iteration of sort of The value prop and anchors, finding the right anchor to anchor it to. Another observation that I had, I want to hear your thoughts on this, is that as you mature, especially in tech, as you kind of evolve as a business and grow through the stages, I think the job of the founders, or at least one founder, becomes completely about storytelling and messaging at the top of the funnel. Because if you've been in the business for this long, that means that there have been enough people that went through the cycle and then went through the product experience and transformation that the product actually works, right? I saw the same thing on Deck, even now at Day One. I see like the— usually with tech and fitness, to your point, the product actually works. It's that the people who need the product aren't willing to let go of the money, aren't willing to go through this suffering slash transformation. So the job to be done actually moves farther and farther up the top of the funnel, where if you can find a way to create an aha moment or magic for them at a micro level at the top of the funnel, they'll come in and it's really just on the top. And so I was just thinking about this and I'm like, because, you know, the inside of it works. Like, you know, for example, I trust by now that if I take a Stoa thing, I'm sure there's structure and systems inside of it, that there is guidance. There's, you know, like the journey is mapped out really well. There's the people around me are smart people, you know? So I think that part is very clear. The part where I think a lot of us, including, you know, my customers struggle with or are hesitant or they're on the fence. Because they're like, you know, how do I— like, is this for me? Do I need this? Do I have to put in more work? I don't want to put in more work. I'm lazy, you know. So it's about— I'm wondering if we can throw out a red carpet at the top of the funnel and make it like, you know, there's this concept of auditing courses in the US. I don't know if this exists in these schools in India too. I probably think yes. Is there a way to like get 15,000 people audit, you know, something and get a taste of it for free so that they can self-opt in and get into the deeper parts of the funnel themselves? Is this something you're thinking about? Is this happening already?

Raj, do you mind if I take that? Yeah, so see, we have— Go on, go on. The fact that a consumer will take 6 months to pay us, right? Because that is— now we have data for 24 months. We know that the average time from the first time somebody discovers Towa, or we have some idea that like, you know, they have come into the funnel, to the time they pay us is typically 5 to 6 months for us. Now we also know the markers, right? If somebody has attended 3 of our events So our top of the funnel is these weekly events that we do. So we do 2 events every week.

And these are free, correct? These are open to the public, general public.

Yeah, the typical registrations are about 1,500 to 2,000 and about 500 people turn up, right? And what we have seen work there is the more honest we are about what is possible and what is not possible, people actually buy that honesty. more than, you know, what the— I mean, they buy into us before they buy into the program, right? Wow. And a lot of events are essentially roasting people, right? Like, for example, very recently, uh, one guy came in, you know, and in the Zoom chat he typed like 3 long paras saying, you know, I'm 25 years old and I'm doing this, and it was a long message, and I'm a customer success executive and I want to become a product marketing You know, this is the this was the summary, and I literally told him on the call that hey, like if you want to be product marketeer, the first thing you need to figure out is how to write down those three paras in under five lines. I mean, product marketing will happen, but like writing well needs to happen first. And I think next day that that person called our program advisor and said I want to buy. And a lot of focus at store even within the program and we are increasingly having all this MBA and alternate MBAs funded. The challenges that we see in India is 99% of Indian learners have never had one single good learning experience in their life.

Yeah.

Their school was bad, their college was bad, and increasingly we are looking at ourselves as a finishing school, right? Like this is where we essentially teach people how to think well, how to write well, how to communicate And I think as long as we are able to do those 3 things well, right, like in the 6-9 months that they spend with us, it's okay if they don't learn anything about product or marketing or anything, right? Like, because the true transformation is actually there. So yeah, I mean, I don't know if I answered your question, but that just being honest and like, you know, telling people the truth.

So give me a sense of— so give me a sense. So let's say somebody on the podcast, on this audience, may want to attend one of these events. What happens in these events? What are some styles and types of, you know, things? Are they all similar events or are there a couple flavors in this?

So I think there are a bunch of flavors, right? Like, I'll walk you through the last event that I conducted, which was on how to write a cold mail. And the way we went about it was, I mean, we look at events as magic shows, right? Like, how can we make magic happen for the user, right? So talk through a few tips, breeze through a few tips showed a few examples of what is the right thing to do, what's not the right thing to do. But the most fun part was when we dropped a form at the start of the event and said that, listen, at the end we're going to roast 5-6 mails and redo the mails for you. All right. So drop in, drop in like a screenshot, who you wrote this to, what you wanted to get out of them. Around 80-odd people, all right, like sent in a screenshot in the middle of the event on a Google Form. And so we picked up mails and like made the chat sort of use the tips given in the event to, you know, like suggest changes and roast stuff. So it was pretty much like a, you know, one of a kind experience for a lot of people who came in. It was entertaining. You learned a lot. And especially because it was entertaining, I'm sure people would now, every time they write a mail to someone, they'd probably hear, you know, my voice in their head, right? Like roasting, like, hey, why are you, you know, capitalizing random letters in any sentence or Why is your paragraph so long?

Doing some social service to the rest of the internet. It's a magic show. Because it's like the recipients of all these upgraded and refined emails would thank you. They should pay you. They should pay Stoa more than the senders of these emails. That's funny. That's so— that's the one flavor, right? How to, you know, write a great cold email. So it's— are there a series of how-tos like how to create a landing page that sells? You know, is it Is it more of that type, or are there other sort of frameworks like product-market fit? Or, I mean, I guess that's more of an entrepreneurship topic maybe. Sorry, what else? What else is there?

So things right from, you know, cold calling, how to apply like for your next job, get your resume straight, right? How to manage your manager, right? Like, of course, clickbait right there. But pretty much stuff across, you know, careers, you know, tactical how-tos. Sometimes Aditya comes in and takes, you know, a class on, let's say, marketing. Or strategy, and it's more of crowd work, right? Like, it's not share a PPT and whatever. You pick up questions from the crowd. Like, for the whole cold calling workshop, what was done was that people in the audience had to make suggestions on what we would be selling to some other person, right? And we would demo it live on call. And you asked me about like, what's up with the red background, right? Right, right. So it's a part of the show, so to say, right? Like, you have to create that environment wherein people sort of get to check out of their reality and step into a slightly different world. Because I mean, people do have extremely, unfortunately boring lives and not so happening lives. And some form of entertainment for free, like why not? I'm

curious to know from you, Aditya, what was your— 2 things, 2 questions for both of you. What's the absolute best, the most fun session you ever led in your time at Stoa? And the second question is, what's the absolute best and most fun session you ever attended anywhere in your life? STOA or B-School, here, where, whatever. Could be a magic, literal magic show, anything. I'll give you some time to think. Let's switch to Raj. Raj might probably have a quicker top-of-mind answer for this. Raj, do you have an answer for this?

Yeah, so this is, yeah, this is the 7th of September. Wait, wait, today? Yeah, 2022. Yeah, in, in an hour, this movie Yeah, we're going to be heading into Apple's launch event. So I think that's something that I look forward to, right? Like it sort of marks progression of time for me. Oh man, like the new iPhone is sort of launched, even if I'm not going to buy it, right? I'm going to— yes, there's so much optimism in there, right? There's so much looking up to things and progress and, you know, like, yeah, we made it one more year through. I like the sort of distortion, whatever, right? Like they tend to create with those events, even for non- Right. And I've been watching them for almost like, what, a decade? It's a social experience, a lot to learn from there. Personally, for me, I think a bunch of these workshops— like, I would do these workshops around Twitter, right? Like how to use Twitter for professionals. And, uh, what happens is, I think for us, like, since we are so used to the platform, it's not a big deal, right? Right. We have a following, there's no cold start problem. You just tweet something, we're sure we will get attention. But for a lot of people, that's definitely not the case. So my favorite, like, workshop that I like to conduct are the ones helping onboard people onto Twitter properly, right? Like, that's something that I get kicked out of because someone did it to me, you know, did it for me, and now I'm reaping the benefits. That person is not even active on Twitter anymore, right? Like, but I'm reaping the benefits, and like, who knows, God knows, right? Like, who else may benefit from being on another learning platform. Do you also do LinkedIn too?

Do you Do LinkedIn specific?

I have recently started doing LinkedIn specific stuff because like now I am myself getting a hang of you know clickbaiting on and then shares on the

same

post on LinkedIn.

His own post on Twitter. He would go and write that on LinkedIn and then come back on Twitter and say, "Hey, like I just posted this same stuff on."

I'm washing your sins.

I'm just washing my sins. Oh my God! But yeah,

I feel like I've seen some of those myself. I'm very inactive on LinkedIn. So like, unless I see something from especially you, Aditya, you're the only source that I actually go to because some of the stuff you post is, you know, useful. And then I land into Raj's stuff and I'm like, what is he doing? But I always get a chuckle though. I think he delivers on a chuckle every time you check out his stuff on LinkedIn. But that's funny. I didn't know that he would come back to Twitter and then roast himself. That's funny. So Aditya, you got your answers?

So I think my favorite sessions have been actually sessions where I have helped on framing in general, right? Like, and I think that is where most people struggle, right? Like, when let's say you have a situation of conflict at work, let's say an HBR case study, and you ask people to frame the conflict in one line. And I have seen that as such a powerful thing, right? Like, once you get a hang of it, like, you know, just asking you what is the business problem you're trying to solve here, what is the business goal? And I've seen most people Like takes incredible amount of practice to develop that as a skill, right? Like just this framing and your frame basically determines everything, right? Like if you take optimistic frame or aspirational frame, solutions you will come up with are always going to be like how do I increase revenue versus how do I reduce cost, right? So that framing sessions that I have done personally are my favorite because I have a lot of fun, right? That also includes lot of roasting. Because you know, in fact, once I was doing the session and I think in the chat the learner started going like he just got toasted, right? Like I just ran through a bunch of submissions and saying, "Are you this is not good?" All of that was the my personal learning experience that I found very interesting, especially in last two three years. Is I did this workshop called This is This is run by Adam. Company is called This is Doing. They're a German-based company and they do this 3-day workshop on fundamentals of facilitation. And it is an interesting experience and I picked up a lot of insights about facilitation, about icebreaker activities, about pacing the session, about Zoom persona, all of that from that 3-day experience.

Do you mind sharing like one nugget from there? Anything you can reflect on now, like something that you didn't know when— before going into it, but that changed your life and now you're always using it?

So the framework is actually freedom versus control, right? Like when you're facilitating or when you're running a session, at every point you're essentially letting go, and you need to make these choices very carefully, right? At what point do you want the session to fly and let the learners have the control? versus when do you want to be in control, right? And that's a very interesting way to look at how do you pace. Like, you know, after that, actually, I started then plotting. If I'm doing a 50-minute session, I now literally have these 10-minute blocks and I have very clear sort of facilitation styles in my mind. What is it that I want to do? What is it that I want to achieve in those 10 minutes? And what is going to be my style, right? Am I going to let learners drive this, or do I want to be in charge for that 10 minutes?

Right. Fascinating. I think facilitation is an underrated teacher skill, you know, for everybody in tech. That's awesome. So switching gears a little bit here. So my next question is, how did you both meet and what was that first interaction like? You know, was it on a phone call? Was it on a Zoom? And what was that about? I'm curious how you, you know, I think

I'll let Aditya take this one because his side of the story is much more interesting than mine.

So there is a network called Transcend Network, right, which is a network of edtech founders based in ISEF. And Raj was their Cohort 1 fellow, I was Cohort 2 fellow. Now we have a lot of commonalities apart from that we come from the same college and all of that, but I mean, at that time I did not know it. So when I joined Transcend I actually DM'd Raj on Twitter, right? Like, so it started as a conversation on Twitter DM, and at that point Raj was selling a course on how to do your Twitter well for something like $20. So I paid that, and that is how we started talking.

You paid that to get to, you know, get to know him or get to interact with him?

Yeah. And then of course we, you know, we were from same college and both our companies were sort of not going anywhere, and we started jamming. And our first thought was, hey, let us at least like get a Productized service, right? Like how do we get to 10K MRR, right? Like let's figure that out. Then I think we experimented for about four months where we like you know went through a bunch of random ideas, failed at all of them before sort of store came along.

Raj, what is your side of the story?

Pretty much the same, right? I still remember Aditya's handle at the rate creator teacher and like you know it's like interacting with an account which had like very less. You know, following or activity. And like, you're like, can't really establish a reading on the person, right, with that less of activity and a generic name to add to it. So couldn't even link it in much. It's only when like we really got talking, he said he joined Transcend. I was like, ah, okay, like, you know, why is he joining Transcend? Like, uh, so it was like a bunch of questions and then, uh, we sort of got talking. And I

think if Aditya wasn't

trying to build

We met in person after our cohort 1 got over, right? Like, and the first time we met was we had already worked for a year together. And because of course the pandemic stuff, all of us were stuck at home. So we met a year— in fact, the whole team met one year after we started actually. Wow. Store.

Right. That's funny. So when, I mean, when you were just talking to each other, kind of building out some of the early experiments, did you always know that you wanted to be co-founders and like kind of figure something out where you're both partners and then, you know, Scale it up, or was it more so like, hey, let's explore, let's see where things go, let's not decide anything concrete?

I think we dated for 3 months or so before taking the call to sort of formalize it, right? Because the challenging part of that was I had already raised a small round in the— you know, so there were a bunch of complications. Right. We went through this, I think, dating period of 3, 4 months. He had a team, by the way, that whole team is now part of Stow and they're still with us, you know, 2-3 years out. But yeah, so we had a dating period of 3-4 months before we sort of formalized. Yeah.

So I'm curious, Raj, when you first met Aditya, right, what was one unique quality that stood out for you in him that you thought, okay, this is actually very interesting? And in what ways do you think he's grown as an entrepreneur since then to today?

I think, you know, just the turnaround times on things and the ability to pick things up and want to learn how things get done even in domains which are not core areas of expertise. I think that's something that I really appreciated, just the drive, right, like to push things and get them done. I think, and the energy, because I remember the time we met, Aditya kind of, I think, was— they were expecting their first son and that happened. And even in the midst of all of that, like, could really see things being very aggressively pushed, right? And we were used to operating at a slightly different speed as a team, right? Like you take your sweet time to do things. So I think that was— that's something that stood out right at the start, right? Because I can remember trying to tell him, you know, like we were exploring making a list of teachers to sort of contact, right? And we wanted to get a— we used BuiltWith. Right, the tool. Yeah, yeah, we saw people who were on Teachable and sort of made a list to get out, outreach them. So we were talking about that, and even before we sort of decided to move in together, and he was like already getting his hands dirty on that. So I think it's just that the ability to, you know, flatten learning curves, so to say, is pretty crazy, right? And yeah, I mean, over the years, of course, it's— I don't think any one of us has run a company. I've in fact never worked at any company, right? Like, yeah, so it's, it's been quite an adventure. To sort of go from like just, you know, like bumbling around to now like actually actively recruiting, having a team of, I don't know, like there are 50 or 50 plus 60 odd people on Slack right now. That's the only way I keep track of how many people we sort of like have around and deal with because I don't do the payroll, right? And, uh, it's been an adventure, right? At every sort of like doubling of numbers. Yeah. I mean, I keep on saying this, that if I knew how hard it would be, to run a company, to grow it, I'd probably not have started in the first place. I'd be like, look, like, let me sort of be a salaryman for life, right? But I think, uh, that's the fun part.

The naivety of, you know, the beginner, right? The beginner's eyes. That's always a blessing. Aditya, what about you? What's, uh, what's one quality immediately stood out for you in Raj back then? And what do you think— a slightly different question for you for part 2 is, what do you think is a quality that, you know, you know that he works so hard at And you're like, you saw him work really hard and he's now crushing it at that.

So the first, right, I think, and for example, why we even renamed the company Stoa, and like, you know, I think there are a lot of thoughtfulness that is associated with Stoa and a lot of, you know, for example, 100 Days of MBA or Stoa Daily. A lot of thoughtfulness in the company comes from Raj, right? Like, he's the— and we have a couple of more co-founders, right? Like, so even though we are the faces, they sort of execute the program part of it and all of that. But with Raj, what was very interesting is he's a voracious reader, right? Like, and he would go back to literature, and that is probably because of his physics degree or whatever, right? But with every concept, whether it is branding, whether it is, for example, charter— in fact, the charter idea, he started pitching, I think, 6-9 months back, and then he went down that rabbit hole. Like you know came back with the whole structured approach on how we can adapt it, etc., etc. So I often like when I now pitch roles to like you know when we are hiring, I often say this that he's the brain trust of Stoa, right? Like I mean of course the bias for action and some of the bad cop kind of stuff comes from me. Because it's right. Yeah. What do

you think is the quality that he worked so hard at over the years?

He worked at or I worked on?

He, yeah. What's the quality that you saw him work so hard at?

I think we are both learning, by the way, and this is common between us. We are trying to learn how to be managers. It's incredibly difficult, right? With the whole—

I think I just to add to that, right? I recently told someone on the team that listen, like I'm a good leader, but I suck as a manager. So like, please don't like, don't lead us to a place wherein I have to manage you, right? Like, you better sort of like do your thing, right? Like, in a way that you don't need to be managed. So yeah, that's like a fair comment. So in a way, right, like some may say that, hey, you suck at this, so why are you running a business school? But I think a lot of things that we—

Like manager, right? Like, we are very bad at it. Like, I mean, that is the general sense we have, which is like, you know, a lot of people are better off not reporting into us.

It could also be because you know so many of the principles and the frameworks on how to be best. And so you have a lot of sort of, you know, knowledge that you're staring at and comparing, you know, your actual action to. And most people are probably, again, just like how Raj was at the beginning, maybe they're just ignorant to their own blind spots. So they're not aware, but it's hard. I think, you know, this is one of my Reminds me of my conversation with Frenzy Samo, which by the way, thanks for— I can't recall if we talked about the intro, right? I don't know if we talked about the intro or we went through or not. But anyway, I did the podcast interview with Frenzy and I said, what was the hardest part of Redbus? And he didn't say anything about market, marketing, customers, products, none of that. He just said people. He's a leading, especially towards the end, just those many, I think they had 1,000 or something employees. And he said that was That was the hardest part of the whole RedBus story for me. And I really was like, wow, you know, it is always the people, right, as you scale. So awesome. That brings me to the end of my question list. I have a few more, but I'll save it for another round at some point. Thank you so much for being here, both of you. I enjoyed chatting with you both, enjoyed learning about your story, your reflections and learnings and lessons. And I mean, my belief in store is only magnified and strengthened You know, every time I talk to you, because you—I think personally—you both are very like well suited to run something like Stoa, and seems like you're having fun doing it. So keep on the good work, and I can't wait. Thank you, KP.

Thanks.

Thanks, KP. Thanks for the questions.

Of course. All right. I hope to see you again on you know on wherever we meet next. See you on Twitter and LinkedIn. Right? See you guys. Bye bye.