Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Raj Valli, CEO of Thinkster (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This is an excellent discussion, regardless of whether we agree or disagree. It’s a kind of discussion that is very interesting for the readers to think through and participate in. I’m going to switch gears because we’re running out of time. When you look at the universe of online learning and I imagine that you’re looking at the space in a broader way just as an industry observer, where do you see gaps that you would recommend new entrepreneurs to go and address?

Raj Valli: If you’re strictly looking at online learning, it has fallen into three categories. One categorization is saying that the delivery of content is supremely important. It is where you have Khan Academy and Alex McGraw Hill where if I deliver the right content at the right time in the right format, magic can happen.

The second is ignoring content delivery where personalization and one-on-one tutoring happen online instead of in-person tutoring using Zoom calls. The third thing is some combination of the two which is what we are doing.

I think that there is an extraordinarily high opportunity area to personalize learning outcomes the way we are doing it. If you think about learning per se, it’s a cradle-to-grave opportunity. There are people who need to be better salespeople, better finance people, and better Java certified engineers.

What we are building is a knowledge acceleration platform. The fundamental question is, how can we improve someone’s learning outcomes. I’m going to give an example here to drive my point home. This is where I think the biggest opportunity is.

Let’s look at three third-grade students. Let’s say student A finishes third-grade math in ten months. Student B, who is an advanced learner, finishes third-grade math in three months. Meanwhile, a slow learner, Student C, takes two years to finish the same third-grade math.

In all these cases, finishing the material was needed. It is the necessary condition. How fast they finish the material is a sufficiency condition that allows you to make a label or put a label on students A, B and C.

Coursera and Udemy are doing phenomenal work, but, unfortunately, a four-week course is a four-week course however you take it and whether you have any prior experience.

True personalization should be, “Hey, if you want to take this computer science course, you should take three weeks, Sramana. Raj, you should take three months. That’s the ideal way of doing things in my view. The world has become too plain vanilla delivery without personalization and they are focused more on content delivery rather than knowledge absorption.

I’m inverting the requirement. It’s no longer about content delivery, but it’s all about how quickly I can absorb knowledge. That I think spawns a lot more opportunities that people can go after.

Sramana Mitra: What do you foresee would happen? Would the Courseras and the other companies participate in that or does that still come from new players?

Raj Valli: It could come from both if Coursera and Udemy are more focused on continuing to assemble and curate the world of content delivery. There’s a lot of work to be done and they can say, “Well, we have enough sand in our sandbox that we’re going to be busy with for the next hundred years.”

They could take that view or there could be players like us who are taking a completely different view where we are saying content is insufficient to be relevant for accelerating knowledge. It’s necessary, but I want to have a completely different view of this and we’re going to be building opportunities for somebody to quickly accelerate knowledge acquisition.

That’s how we are thinking about it. It could be a combination of existing players buying out new players or existing players doing the same things on their own or new players having the complete set of different DNA and approach to the whole problem that needs to be solved.

Sramana Mitra: I very much enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Raj Valli, CEO of Thinkster
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