Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the sweet sauce of your curriculum? In the market, we have Khan Academy. There’s a lot of curriculum out there. What is it that you bring to the table in your methodology that is different?

Manan Khurma: The biggest underlying trait is what we call learning by reasoning, which is understanding the why behind the what. Every fact and algorithm that the student is expected to learn, they also need to understand the why behind it. For example, if they’re in grade four and they’re being taught how to add fractions, they also clearly need to understand why their algorithm works. They also need to learn why it’s true.

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why would another test prep player buy this business if you were not going to come with it?

Manan Khurma: We spent a little bit of time there. We essentially managed to build a good brand. We had a lot of good curriculum and study materials. I didn’t start the next business right away. This exit was in 2011. Cuemath started in December of 2013. There was about two years.

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 1)

Manan’s professor parents in Amritsar didn’t want him to be an entrepreneur. Now, he is changing the trajectory of Math education around the globe by leveraging an underused workforce: stay-at-home moms with strong mathematics background in India. Brilliant story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

7 Udemy Courses on How To Build an EdTech Startup

Online learning has exploded in popularity over the last decade. In Covid, the field has found a tremendous force multiplier.

Many founders are now turning to online education for startup ideas. Here’s why: it can be extremely profitable because online courses do not require physical classrooms, startup costs are more affordable and startup time frames are shorter. The ability to scale fast makes this space very attractive for new ventures.

Non-Technical Founder Building a Tech Startup to over $10M: David Moricca, CEO of Socialive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have a political science and law background. Then you went to McKinsey to do some consulting work. This brings us to 2006 now?

David Moricca: 2005.

Sramana Mitra: What happens then?

David Moricca: I was itching to move from consulting into more of an operational role. Because of my previous background and my interest in education and combined with media, Scholastic jumped out at me. I had an offer with Google. Google had not yet gone public.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 5)

Stuart Udell: I have the pleasure to be one of only two members of the EdTech community who are part of the American Association of School Administrators’ new commission for student-centered and equity-focused education. The goal of that organization is to create a blueprint for the future of American education.

While there was a lot of good in the old model, it’s not good enough anymore. There’s a ton of investment coming in. There’s a lot of private equity investment for the middle-sized and larger companies in the space. It’s a really exciting time for us to take learning to a new level. That’s true in the school level and in higher education. 

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We’re hearing a lot about going into accounts through the teacher network. It seems to be working really well. You’re reinforcing the point by getting products in the hands of teachers through some sort of a freemium model and getting people to start looking at the product. There’s a virality to this. It seems like you’re seeing a lot of that. Could you speak more to that trend?

Stuart Udell: That is a trend. Teachers do like to talk to each other. It’s not just because they’re chatty. When they try a product, they’ll usually talk to other teachers first in the same grade. Then the other teachers will try it too. Then they go to their principal saying, “We’re all trying this individually. We’d like to unlock more tools.”

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When the teacher is assigning this reading through your product, is the student doing that reading at home?

Stuart Udell: Before COVID, about 46% of our reading was done after school hours. Since COVID, that number jumped to the high 80s and even touched 90%. The nice thing is, there are lots of flexible models that can really work here. The student can read individually at home. Then the discussion can happen in the classroom the next day. The classroom can mean physical or remote. Then there are lots of teachers who will tell kids to silently read for 15 to 20 minutes and discuss in the classroom. It’s a very flexible implementation model.