[CTQ Smartcast] Lessons in Community Building from India's Alternative to an MBA, With Aditya Kulkarni

Aditya Kulkarni is the co-founder of Stoa School. An alternative to MBA, Stoa School has taken an interesting approach to business education in India. He speaks about his experience of building Stoa, his perspective of community building and the existing business education in India.

This Smartcast hosted by CTQ co-founder BV Harish Kumar is a great opportunity to understand what the future holds when it comes to education and learning and how one can grow and benefit by belonging to a learning community. Aditya also talks about the philosophy and the meta-thinking that led to Stoa School.

 

Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.

 
 
 
 

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(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)

SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • The philosophy behind Stoa School

  • How should one think about applying learnings at different stages of their career?

  • The importance of peer-learning and community-based learning

  • How to maximise the benefits of a digital community?

  • Cognitive overload: bane or boon!

  • Insights on how a community can thrive

PLUS

  • The future-relevance of tech-product companies in India

AND

  • The future-relevance of B-Schools in India

LINKS TO THE LEARNING PLATFORMS, PEOPLE AND BOOK MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST

LEARNING PLATFORMS


PEOPLE


BOOK

If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like The Role Of MOOCs In Staying Future Relevant, With Kapeesh Saraf

TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

00:00:00

Harish Kumar: In this episode, we talk to Aditya Kulkarni. Aditya is the founder of Stoa School, an alternative to MBA. Stoa has taken an interesting approach to business education in India. So we decided to pick Aditya’s brains for lessons in future relevance from his own journey, experience in building Stoa, and insights into community building. Aditya shared many valuable lessons which will be useful for many people in our audience, for a founder who is trying to build a team that has a sense of belonging, an educator trying to build an online learning community, or someone interested in the future of education and learning. We also spoke regarding the slightly senior folks or middle managers as they say, how they should think about leveraging communities like this as how startups can leverage their expertise. This chat is packed with a lot of insights, hope you find it as useful as I did. By the way, remember to subscribe to our show on whatever platform you are getting this on, that way you will get notified when we publish a new episode. Rate us, write a short review or comment, it helps others like you to discover us. You should also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Upleveler, on our website choosetothinq.com and find us on Telegram where we share stories, articles, discount codes, and prompts to help you uplevel for the future relevance.

00:01:40

Harish: Hi, welcome. Welcome, Aditya to the CTQ Smartcast.

00:01:43

Aditya: Thank you Harish. It is a pleasure to be here and I look forward to an interesting conversation in whatever time we spend together.

00:01:53

Harish: Sure. Good that you left it open-ended because there are a lot of interesting things I want to pick your brains on. So when I read about Stoa School and what you guys have been doing, a lot of questions came to mind. But let me start with something that gives a preface to what is going to follow. So what is the whole philosophy and meta-thinking around you setting up Stoa School?

00:02:16

Aditya: Sure. So largely we feel that as the internet penetration goes up and what we've seen play out on the consumer’s social side will also play out on the education side, which means you can actually create institutions on the cloud. These are asset-like institutions, no physical campus, no permanent faculty. Because they operate from a low-cost base they will be able to do a much better job in education at a fraction of a cost than typical, traditional institutions do while exploring better learning outcomes, ensuring better career opportunities and so on. We don’t look at this space as building another edtech company. I genuinely feel that these internet native education brands will become institutions in themselves. That is our take and a bigger overall picture. The good thing about these institutions is that they are much more nimble, responsive to what’s happening in the market. They'll probably iterate on their curriculum, mode of delivery, the way they approach education every six months compared to let’s say every five or ten years like what a traditional institute does. It will also allow the creation of an open-door policy for industry professionals to come and teach and then go away, and maybe come back and teach and go away. In that sense, the industry academy won't be siloed. It will essentially merge academia and the industry, the work and learning of these things will merge and I think COVID only accelerated that in that sense. But we’ll discuss that how we got started maybe once we dive in.

00:04:01

Harish: Right. So is there a specific niche audience that you're looking at as people who will get the maximum value out of Stoa school? Is it for tech entrepreneurs? You know, founders, co-founders kind of market only or is there a larger base because I read that this is primarily aiming at people becoming better at decision making in business. So, that would involve everyone from people working in established roles, even people who have done their MBAs, can you talk a bit about that as well?

00:04:34

Aditya: Yeah, I mean it's a design choice. Where we have started and we primarily right now serve people who have already started their professional journey and don't see a traditional MBA as an option for whatever reasons, like maybe they already have enough years of experience behind them so then it doesn't make sense, maybe there are certain family constraints or economic concerns where they can’t take two years off. And then there is the whole question of RoI etc, so if I join an early stage start-up and grow with the company. I mean I am going to grow much faster than let's say going into an MBA. Very interesting story, Manoj, who is one of my co-founders at Stoa. He took a break from work, he got MBA to admit and then he went to work for Swiggy, I think he was one of the earliest members at Swiggy. Till date, he regrets the decision to go for an MBA. So imagine 2015, he was working at Swiggy and then he decided to go through an MBA from UT Austin. I think he regrets that and one of the reasons why he joined Stoa was like, I don't want what happened to me for the decision that I made, happen to anyone else. Yes, but you're right. In general, if we have to sort of build this economy and sort of, let's say, create an Indian dream in that sense, we need much better talent, we need a lot more people entering the tech ecosystem, which will continue to be our focus and when they enter, they have to grow with the industry and they have to sort of build this together. They need to be better decision-makers, not just in their professional life, but also in their personal lives. Like, so if you see all the jumping around that is going on, let's say when it comes to developers right now. It may be good for them in the short term because salaries are going up right now, but at some point in time, these musical chairs will stop. And I'm guessing it will stop. So when we say better decision making, we just don't mean in the business sense, we also mean it in general, like, you know, when it comes to personal lives and I think that is why Stoa is not just a business institution. A lot of conversation we have or our community has between them beyond just immediate business. It’s about personal clarity, career path, we really want to be an entrepreneur, like do I even want to work at a startup? When we measure the success of what we do, it is as much about whether some person was able to make that transition into the tech ecosystem, which is somebody deciding not to pursue entrepreneurship and I think that's a great success too. Like if somebody goes through our six-month program and realizes they're not ready, that's a good outcome in my opinion, because then they would have saved a few months, a few lakhs. But in general, we have started with this niche tech, alternative MBA, for people who don't want to go for traditional MBA, but the way this industry I see evolving, it will encompass all the professional courses that actually are pathways to break careers. If you just look outside of Stoa, the designers who are doing the design education, Newton School, Masai School, who are doing tech education for people who are coming out of colleges. I’m pretty sure Newton and Masai will become a university or college in themselves at some point of time. Then you have Scaler which is likely pivoted away from the undergraduates, to people who are already in tech roles and so on and so forth. So this whole ecosystem is getting built right now, and you're still in maybe year one or year two of this ecosystem. And my sense is this will play out over the next decade or two where all these names will essentially become institutions.

00:08:24

Harish: Right. Yeah. So, when you talk about these other alternatives as well, what do you think is going on in the minds of people who are taking up these courses or programs, whatever you want to call it today? Because these people are definitely thinking about their future relevance. They're exploring different options. There is clearly a sense of dissatisfaction with what is the incumbent alternative, which is why they're exploring these options. But I'm sure there will be some apprehension. So if there is something that you can talk about how you have alaid apprehensions for people? Or what have people come to you saying ‘this is what I'm looking for as a way to address this apprehension. What could that be if you can talk about that?

00:09:12

Aditya: Yes. So when it comes from a career perspective, people are clear that these options are clearly better. Where things sort of got pulled back is, you know, the societal aspect of the social perception. So for example, Stoa’s MBA is not a recognized degree, they don't even offer a diploma, which means, what do you tell your parents? Let's assume that your parents are paying for it. They're never going to agree to pay for a non-accredited course. Then there's the whole marriage market. Like, you know, for example, can you go today and say I did my MBA, but I did it from Stoa School, which is this online internet thing and I did not actually go and spend two years at a campus. Is that really acceptable to people? That is one. The second thing that is a challenge in some sense is the people still look at some of these programs from a cost angle. Which is, this is not an investment that we're making in ourselves, but this is like a top-up over, like I've already spent four years in an engineering college and spent 20 lakhs there. Do I really want to spend another two lakhs, two and a half lakhs on Scaler or signing up elsewhere? What actually happens here, even though we are creating much more value than let's say in most colleges, we still are looked at as a cost side of things because you have already spent, you know, 20 lakhs and this is an additional top-up of 2 lakhs. I think those mindsets will take some time to change. So for example, one of the things we get here at Stoa is there's like a six-month part-time internet thing. So why is it 2.5 lakh rupees right? That's a very cost centric perspective in terms of almost calculating like these guys are daily wage earners and I need to pay them by the hour or something like that. It's not a value perspective. And in general, I think because people have been burned by the traditional education system, they are also sceptical in terms of like, will this program live up to my expectations? Second, am I competent enough to go through the program? Let's say if I'm going through Stoa or if I'm going through Newton, am I going to stay motivated? So there's a lot of self-doubt in that sense. So there are all these interesting aspects that are playing out right now and I'm pretty sure we're all trying to figure out how to address those concerns, but primarily it is the recognition and the degree-diploma angle and which I think, and the regulations will probably be liberalised in that sense. Because if you look at the other OPMs, let's look at upGrad and Great Learning. They have taken a very different approach, which is also valid, which is that we will tie with existing institutions and that is very valuable. If you look at Sunstone for example, which is in the same MBA market, they have taken that approach like we will issue a postgraduate diploma by tying up with existing institutions. Whereas if you look at us, we have deliberately taken on a different approach. We will build Stoa as a brand and we want Stoa to become some sort of signal. And you're willing to work towards that for 10 or 20 years. Yeah, I think I went on a rant there. But all these aspects in terms of how society perceives these programs, how hiring partners perceive these programs. So, for example, we know that startups don't care whether it's Stoa or IIM, because they're going to hire a competent person for the job. Looking at traditional corporate, I'm still sure that somebody who puts Stoa on their resume may not pass the HR screening. This is still maybe a year one, year two of all these cohort-based programs or online programs. Over time they will build recognition. You know, also depends on what talent, how we build our business models around building credibility with the hiring partners.

00:13:22

Harish: Yeah, it's very interesting. We recorded an episode with somebody from Coursera. He had a slightly nuanced take on this. I was asking him the same thing about, with the plethora of certificates that I see on LinkedIn these days, does that credential really mean anything because everyone posts something. So he said, yeah, it is the same challenge even for us. We have the so-called institutions backing, giving their stamp on the certificates, but eventually, you have to show what you have done. And that's where the whole notion of the portfolio comes in. And that's very interesting in what you are doing, because, as you said, these designers have always had this notion of the portfolio. You can create a portfolio, what you've done, you have something like a GitHub for the techies to actually show what they've done. But when you talk about business, unless you have actually tried your hand in setting up some t-shirt printing business or something or the other in your college days, it's very difficult for these entrepreneurs to actually have something like a portfolio of what they have done and what they have learned. And I'm seeing this as a potential alternative to that. That I have done something. People these days even record podcasts as a way of articulating what they have learned. So, what is your take on this for entrepreneurs and business people, basically?

00:14:58

Aditya: So, what you're saying right now, actually, I think there is a better word than a portfolio and it is proof of work.

00:15:04

Harish: Correct.

00:15:06

Aditya: My general sense is most of the ways you show proof of work gets commoditized very fast and you can’t actually build a competitive advantage. Like now so many people doing podcasts, you have so many people building something using a no-code tool to signal and so on and so forth. So just like a resume or cold emailing, all of these things get commoditized very fast. But it is important. That is where trend surfing could help even though, I mean I'm not sure if it is good when it comes to careers, but at least when it comes to showing proof of work, what are the new trends In terms of showing your competence. So one of the changes we made at Stoa’s program very recently, was that earlier we used to have these small breakout rooms within the light sessions where people would go and apply what they have learned in a 10 to a 30-minute breakout room. And we realized that even though it was creating value for the individual learners, it was not creating proof of work. So we said like let's remove the breakout rooms from live sessions. Let live sessions be more about learning the concept, maybe understanding whatever practical use cases, how somebody else has done it. And now we started doing case weekends, which is like a 24-hour competition of thoughts within the cohort. You have a business problem, you work on it, you make the presentation, you make the presentation in whatever format. If you want to record a podcast, you do that. If you want to rap to a song that's fine. If you want to prepare a PPT, that's also fine. But create a proof of work. Yeah, I totally agree that proof of work is important and other things like certificates with what you mentioned going back to the Coursera example, I think the traditional institutions have just cheapened their brands by issuing certificates, left, right and centre. Like if you go to LinkedIn for example, you will have all these people claiming that I'm like an IIM alumnus or I'm like a BITS alumnus. You go and double click on the profile, you realize like it's a being on campus, being part of the flagship is still very different and that plays out internally within these communities as well. For example, if I'm part of the BITS community and somebody approaches and says he is a BITS alumni, this and that. I'm sensing most of the alumni will go and check on LinkedIn for which program they were part of. And if they're not part of the flagship undergrad program, the interaction will play out very differently versus if somebody was an undergrad. People are generally helpful no doubt about it. I'm just saying that the perception of the cheapened certificates. I mean this is a very strict personal opinion, me a lot of certificates now signal something negative about the person because if you're just collecting and collecting certificates from all over the place, Stanford, Harvard, IIM etc, I would rather see growth in this person per year and the responsibilities they're taking in an organization rather than like what certificates they have because I'm pretty sure we learn much more at our job than watching videos on the internet. So it's just a personal thing, right? A few days back I looked at one profile and the education section was just not ending. It was all these. I also think that in some sense those act as counter signals if you're overdoing certifications.

00:18:48

Harish: Right. Yeah. And generally on that note, if you were to advise someone who's looking at adding something on the knowledge front via certifications or anything like that, what would be your Goldilocks ratio or approach that you would advise in terms of knowledge and application?

00:19:12

Aditya: 100%, I would go for the application. Particularly I think if it is just about knowledge, you don't even need Coursera or even Stoa, or we don't need anyone. You just need YouTube because knowledge is something you are after. You should actively pursue opportunities where you can actually learn to apply and this has played out in how we have also changed our curriculum over time. So we are just nine months since we launched the program and we have already undergone three iterations. I would do any certification or any cohort-based program or anything only for application because knowledge is abundant if you really care. It's there like content is free. And I guess YouTube is the best university in that sense because you have the best professor on YouTube, you don't even need to go and purchase, let's say a $10 Udemy course or the annual subscription to Coursera. Knowledge is really free, you should actually find out the opportunities where you can get to apply. I wouldn't pay for any certification to pick up knowledge, knowledge is really cheap.

00:20:24

Harish: What would be your take on how people should think about the application at different stages of their careers? I'll give you the context from where this question popped into my mind. So, we help companies develop this culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. So usually what we see is in these hackathons, it's the youngsters, you know the fresh grads who are like full enthu and they're sitting through the weekend and coding something. The senior people are usually, you know, 30-35 plus who have great experience and knowledge. They're like SMEs, in fact, they will be in some companies, they are these consultants who are being approached by their clients who just come and give gyaan. Because they're that good and they're not being leveraged internally in these hackathons. So, a lot of companies, what we've done is, we've actually said, these guys should be almost like angel investors, the knowledge of the senior people with the legs of the younger folks, you can actually combine and then you can create something because these people will have the right kind of network. Any interesting idea they’ll say go talk to that person in the company or I will introduce you to this client and that's the value that these people don't have. So that's how we've said, everyone can contribute in their own way to building the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in the company. So now, when you talk about people trying to do this. One of the ways in which people can help is to go tell a startup that, see I'm available, please come and use my experience, right? Because that's where I can also apply what I'm talking about. We get some sense of apprehension from these people that I don't know where to go and actually offer my services. I don't know whether the startup entrepreneurs will be willing to take my advice and you, as a third party, know that these people have that knowledge. What is your take on that? I mean, do you see this happening more? And do you in your programs also see these entrepreneurs saying that this is the kind of knowledge that I wish I had. But I want to hire that person. I don't know how to get them in as an advisor. But these are people working in all these large MNCs who have great knowledge and expertise, but that's not being tapped. 

00:22:47

Aditya: There are two angles to this. So one, let's look from this person who is working in an MNC, and then let us look from the other angle where somebody needs expertise that these people have. Now when it comes to these people who were working at MNC, even if they want to advise unless the problem challenges you or the space excites you, I don't think you're going to feel good about giving advice. Because just let's say somebody working at Slack or Mindtickle and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure any company building B2B sales, SaaS, or something like that, those people are going to benefit hugely from just these people's knowledge about what competition does, what other practical problems of the salesforce or US clients. So for example, if you're building out of India and you have never been to the US, you don't know how territory alignment happens and how these people work, what are the problems they face? What is the ramp of problems and so on and so forth? I'm pretty sure anybody within these B2B SaaS or companies like Wipro, are going to have very specific domain knowledge that a lot of startups could benefit from now. How do we sort of broker? What I found very interesting is the role that AngelList is playing. If you are investing on AngelList and you get access to this deal flow, maybe, you know, there are people like Vaibhav Domkundwar and Kushal and all these syndicates. They have some of the best deal flows and a lot of young entrepreneurs working through, you know, we’re raising from better and First Check and 100 SBC and so on. That's a great place for people to not only discover where they can help but actually take a bet if you feel the problem is valid. If you're part of the syndicate, I'm pretty sure that whoever is leading this is going to be more than happy to make the connection. And in that context, I think AngelList is a great place to be that broker between entrepreneurs and people with experience. Not only are you giving advice, but you're literally putting skin in the game, maybe 2-3 or 5 lakhs in that company. Now, where I see things not working out and I've seen this is people approach entrepreneurs and then say I'm good at tech, I know this industry and I want to be an advisory for it. That just breaks. Like even before the relationship is formed, it just breaks because increasingly what I'm seeing from people who are in traditional industries is the expectation is advisory quickly. That actually creates significant problems for the entrepreneurs and they're trying to raise around why they have this 2-3%, And then everybody who comes after has that expectation. It becomes a very complicated relationship. That is where I would say that AngelList, put your skin in the game. You have a much better chance of making a significant amount of money by being an advisor and shareholder rather than to just see. I don't think that should be the primary motive also. I'm pretty sure some of these senior folks can do very significant software businesses themselves, maybe years down the line when they're ready. So I would ideally try to maximize my luck surface area. Yeah, just talking to more entrepreneurs, trying to be helpful and so on and so forth. Now, let's look from the other side, which is entrepreneurs. A lot of times entrepreneurs feel that, oh, these big competitors, like for example, I'm building something and still why would somebody at Mindtickle help me? Like wouldn't that be a competition and so on and so forth. But what I have found is that there are all these small pockets of opportunities that these new firms don't want to pursue or go after. If you're building in that space, these people are more than happy because it not only helps them understand what are the pain points they're not addressing but at some point in time a potential strategic partnership could evolve. Yeah, in general, I think entrepreneurs anyway reach out. But from the other side, this is how I would approach it.

00:27:15

Harish: Yeah. But I think that there has to be that systematic pace for creating that exchange, right? Which I think AngelList is great at doing. In fact, at one company, we created an internal AngelList kind of a thing where we said, everyone won't be able to do this innovation work but you can offer advice. So in fact we created an internal Kickstarter, a kind of a thing where instead of money you actually volunteer time. I have three hours of marketing effort and I can do good storytelling for you know, whatever hackathon idea that you have and things like that. So AngelList is a great platform. Next time anyone comes to me with that question, I'm definitely advising them to go and join some of these syndicates. So coming back to Stoa, what is your take on the whole peer learning and community-based learning aspect of what you're doing?

00:28:15

Aditya: Yeah. So the first thing is all this cohort-based, peer learning-based or community-based, it's really not new. Like learning even in what happens in college today is largely peer-led. BITS or IIT I'm assuming has like few great professors and a lot of long, average or not so good professors and you learn more in your hostels rather than your classrooms in most cases. So it's not a new concept. Now, what is new here is not being in the same physical space and not having that extended period of four years or two years, the whole...

00:28:54

Harish: The whole absorption and soaking of the whole experience.

00:28:58

Aditya: That could be both beneficial, it has pros and cons of both. This really means that you're at your best behaviour in online communities, especially you are not going to fight off some ego battle even though I'm guessing as to your skill, you will see those as well in these communities where you know some couple of people may start dating and things went wrong. There is a real possibility of that and I think the younger folks are really good at building relationships in the virtual world. In fact, they may not be so good, I'm guessing at building relationships in the offline world. Specially whoever has gone through their 1st and 2nd year of college through these last two years, I'm really curious how they are going to just go back to the real world because they would have gotten used to seeing their classmates on a Zoom and maybe, I think, I don't know on Instagram or WhatsApp etc. In general, I think people are coming through this digital space where the kids now have their iPhones much earlier. I remember when I went to college in 2005, I only got my desktop in my second semester. And I'm guessing that whatever 18-year getting a desktop has now come back to maybe you know like a +4, +5 kid having them with the internet. So these people are inherently internet natives. In that context, what happens online is very interesting. Because if you go to the larger internet. You can of course go to Reddit but it is largely pseudo-anonymous, there is a real possibility that some abuse might happen and so on and so forth. Whereas these niche communities that are forming now, like cohort-based programs, what really does a good job of is bringing together people with similar interests, actually providing structure to interactions. You can go to Omegle also and talk to random strangers on the internet, but what these programs really do is bring people together. That is why a lot of effort goes into the curation of communities and making sure that you're getting the right people in. That is something special about this new model of education because I think even Coursera or the earlier versions of online education did not really care as much about who is coming together and how they can build relationships and how they can benefit from each other. You can look at Maven, On Deck, and 10kdesigners or even Stoa School. What we're really doing is we're curating the right set of people to come together and go through a journey of maybe three months, six months, nine months, eight weeks, 12 weeks; timeline which varies and then really compresses what would come out of four years, six months or three months and provide structures for those relationships to get built. Because if you look at Stoa, I think one of our programs lasts for six months. By the end of the second or third-month people have already found friends. They're already hanging out with those friends outside of what we're doing and we don't even have visibility at times in terms of all this underground community building that is happening, which is not being done by us. Of course, initially, we have to sort of take a lot of loads in terms of arranging events and so on and so forth and then it just flows. Yeah, just to summarize my point, it is not something new. What is new here is that it is just happening in the metaverse or the internet or in the cloud rather than in person. That has its own pros and cons.

00:32:44

Harish: So two parts to my question. First, how should people, probably of your generation and my generation, who, as you said, didn't start off their careers in our digital native, internet native world, but are sort of tuned into all these kinds of things? They know the latest things that are happening. As a member of this community, what would your advice be to people who are joining these kinds of communities on how they should maximize this? Because they're slightly at a disadvantage as compared to somebody who's probably 22 or 23, for whom this is a natural way of life. Where is somebody who's maybe 30 or 35 plus? What would your advice be to them?

00:33:37

Aditya: Yeah, so I think it comes down to a lot of self-coaching before you join these communities. So I'll give you two specific examples from Stoa. We use Discord for our community server and it's just overwhelming anybody on the other side of 30. Even when we started doing Discord, for me, it was like, what is this dark mode and why are there so many channels? A lot of cognitive overload. The way to manage this is twofold. One, sort of hold back judgment, which means, don't make quick assessments of what is going on, what people are doing and what people are saying, just hold on. Second, manage your community overload in terms of if there are 50 channels, just figure out what interests you. And if you're just in time on those 2-3 channels, for example, is good enough. Another aspect of it is, self-coaching that I have something to learn from these people. For example, I personally feel that over the last 12 months, as I worked with these people, Raj, Sharmad and Shelton, who are about 23-25 and I would have never imagined myself but I see a significant self-growth in terms of understanding this customer base or consumer base. What is happening in these people's lives? What is their perception of the world? How do they think of opportunities and so on and so forth? I was never comfortable with no-code tools, I hadn’t even heard of that. Because I started working with these folks that I even came to know and now I can't imagine, let's say hiring an agency to do my website ever. Because I personally feel I can just go and build it on Bubble or Webflow, etc. So yeah, just being open-minded, understanding that you are going to face cognitive overload and being ready for that cognitive overload. Even the way people converse, for example, I'm not sure how many of us are okay, especially if we have become parents as you know, community and people using their words, right, left and centre. The whole conversation being something with GIFs and memes and so on and so forth. It takes a while to get used to. But I think if you are open-minded you understand. Finally these people, even in their early 20's, are pretty interesting, and they're not as shallow as some think. It's the case with every generation. If you hold that back, I think you normally have a good time. In Stoa, the funniest people in all our cohorts are actually probably the oldest guys in the cohort. I remember from our cohort when Neeraj who has about 13-14 years of experience at John Deere, was amazingly funny. In the current cohort, we have Anand from Capgemini. In fact this weekend, he was probably the funniest guy because they did a roleplay, which none of the other guys did. The younger folks were still doing PPT and this and that. And Anand, Anurag and some of these folks who are seniors in the community went for a totally YOLO approach. They said like you're going to be in the boardroom and play the rules of board members and they projected whatever the scenario we were talking about much better just in terms of presentation format. It was interesting to see that these people are not like serious corporate people who have lost humour. They are still funny and it's interesting.

00:37:29

Harish: Yeah. I think the part you mentioned about cognitive overload is highly underrated. People don't understand the damage it can do and how important it is to take control of that. Or rather at least have some kind of rationalization of the cognitive overload. I think that’s a very important point that you brought out there. So the second question that I had was as a community manager, what are your insights around how to create and make this community thrive and flourish? The reason why I asked that is not just from the point of view of someone who's actually running something like a Stoa school, but as if you think about it whether it's your personal brand or whether you are in a large corporate where you are responsible for creating a group, the whole notion of community building has become extremely important. Whatever cause that you're talking about, there has to be some sense of community building because that's when people will go that extra mile to do something otherwise, it's going to be just a tick mark for most people. So having that belief in that community, what lessons can listeners draw from what you have been doing in whatever they're doing, whether it's a, you know, it's about running their company or you know about themselves or an NGO that they believe in. That's the reason for this question.

00:38:58

Aditya: Sure. So firstly, let me just say that my team is far better at this. I don't take much credit for how our community has shaped up. It's largely people like Shelton, Raj who have proven thought leadership when it comes to building community. But from what I see, there are a few things that really are important to understand about community building, whether for a course or within an organization. There's this book by David Spinks and the title is very interesting. The community here, essentially in the business of belonging and creating that sense of belonging amongst all the community members. Now, if you look at the community from that angle, I want to create a feeling or create a sort of strength that I belong to this place. What are the things you'd ideally aim for? You would aim for people being vulnerable, being able to express whatever they want to say or discuss and so on and so forth. That is one angle. The other angle is I want to find at least a few people like myself in the community who are maybe thinking the same, we have the same interests and so on and so forth. Lastly, not breaking down the community, is equally important. Yeah, we mostly approach this from a positive angle in terms of let's get people to belong, but you also need to be actively thinking about what it is that will break down this sense of belonging. In the times that we live in, for example, political opinions are highly polarized and there’s really no centrist in that sense. This means if you're a community manager, you really need to be thinking about are the guardrails or are the things that are acceptable to discuss within this community and what are the things that are not acceptable and saying that upfront. So for example, one of the things we have avoided at Stoa is just getting into political arguments and people may say freedom of expression etc., but within the boundaries of this community, we have deliberately said because we know that this will lead to the breakdown of the community, that this is not acceptable. It was setting rules or trends in terms of what is acceptable behaviour, what is not acceptable behaviour and not just laying down it as a rule, but explaining the reasoning behind why you are making this rule. So rules are important. Second, rituals are important. Common touchpoints where everybody gathers together because there might be some Brownian motion and some chaos or some self-organized chaos within every community. Because that is the best way communities form. If you force law of structure then the community actually doesn't form, you need to have common touchpoints or rituals where everybody comes together and then it's free to go and explore and then come back to the ritual. In our case, it is the Thursday night meetings that happen every alternate week. Just team meetings or quiz nights or game nights. It is just fun and people are not expected to prepare and come, just hang around going to small, breakout rooms, we will compete as a team and so on and so forth. That’s something like a ritual for us and the inspiration that you can take is from the religious or quasi-religious organizations. Like if you look at church, the Sunday morning mass is such a central piece to the community. If you look at the Art of Living, that short kriya or coming together for kriya is such a fundamental part. Like Vipassana, it is just that shared experience.I might have done it in the past in America, or someone else in Korea. But we have that shared experience that both of us went through that 10 days of silence. These memories of shared pain are equally important when it comes to building community. There has to be that element of something being hard, something being difficult, something being painful and going through the shared experience actually tightens the community bond much better. If you look at, for example, US Navy Seals, that means videos on YouTube about how they go through seven days of rigorous training. It might seem like this is extreme, but the purpose of that community is something entirely different and in that context that makes sense for them to go through that pain. For us, it was very interesting because this was the first weekend, the weekend that just went by. People were up until 3 o'clock, 4 o’clock, and then came back for presentations at 10 am. And I'm pretty sure whoever went through that community experience and stayed up and worked through with the team and so on, and so forth, they're going to remember these five people for a long time. It has nothing to do with what we do, essentially what Stoa does, but everything to do with how that team decided to work together and pushed through for 24 hours. Yeah, I went on a rant there. But just to summarize, it is as much about what you choose to do, what you choose not to do and how you create the sense of belonging. It is also about drama. So communities which are very plain, linear, “Oh, let's come together every Saturday and have some fantastic conversation.” They will disintegrate at some point, there needs to be some drama. There needs to be some conflict, there need to be some experiences that make sure that the community experience is not linear, but more rhythmic. And every community will go through a patch where engagement seems to be dropping off and the community manager will be like, am I doing something wrong? And like what can I do to make it right? So at Stoa, we have understood that there are cycles. So there will be patches where the community won't engage and if you actually try to drive engagement, it actually backfires because people are not in that mind space, something might be happening at work, maybe it is the month-end or Diwali or Christmas or something might be happening. Sometimes it's okay to let it be and not try to overdo things.

00:45:36

Harish: Yeah, you must have found me smiling multiple times. Because there were so many things that you mentioned which resonated a lot with what we talked about as well. Actually, in our pitch to some of these owners and founders and people who are trying to build a culture in the company, we actually tell them that this is a solved problem. Look at mass religion. Look at politicians who have always managed to influence people without actually being in the same room. So the importance of these rituals and another thing that we've been doing for about 2.5 years is something called CTQ Compounds, where we actually help people build reading habits. So people sign up for a six-month program and we've done 20 cohorts already. It's a shared experience for them. They read together, there is a common article that is shared with them. They read they engage with it. There are like you said there are rules set well in advance in terms of what is allowed, what is not allowed. And then there is a CTQ Compounds Forever group where members of all different cohorts are: FutureStack, Daily Reader where they all can interact, Sunday reads. We do something where we share some bonus reads, what people have written and all that. So I could see all that you have talked about, especially the fact about not trying to over-engineer engagement as well, extremely important. So yeah, thanks. That was really a validation of all that we've been seeing and doing ourselves. So a follow-up question on what you've been doing. So is this a culmination or if not a culmination, a manifestation of what you have done in the previous companies that have helped you put together Stoa School?

00:47:31

Aditya: Yes, not just me. I would say it is a sum total of the first 10 people at Stoa in terms of what was our primary interest and what we were trying to do and so on and so forth. So, for example, Raj and Sharman who are the other co-founders at Stoa were building Nova Semita ISA based coding boot camp and they have been building communities on Flickr and whatnot since class 10. They ran the Astronomy Society of Goa, astrophysics, and astrophotography. They have always been community builders right from when they were in school. Yeah, I was always fascinated by bringing people together and I think everybody, the first 10 people at Stoa were all educators before they sort of decided to be on the business side of things. The thing about education is people keep speaking about impact. There's no better place than education to actually see the impact because everybody creates impact even let's say in software like a big organization. Just that a lot of times the impact is not visible. We were always driven by seeing the impact, even before we launched Stoa, we went through 6-9 months of experimentation. I was trying to create a community of teenagers and like around emotional intelligence, emotional well being and so on and so forth. Raj and Sharmad were doing Nova Semita, Shelton who is now leading our community was building Nova Semita’s community. Then when we started working together, we first tried to reach out to YouTubers and folks who had any audience to reach out to them and say we understand what learning communities are and we understand the dynamics of a learning community, then we will help you create community. That experiment did not work out because it was not primarily the other person's motivation to build a learning community and we were frustrated because we are working on their timelines and so on. So all of that sum total, for example, earlier, Raj had set up an offline alternate learning centre in Goa where kids would come and handle college stuff. Then parents will propose JEE and this and that, why are you doing alternate stuff and the kids would drop out. So we were primarily in K-12 space and what we realized there is, even the kids were having a fantastic time with us. The decision-makers were other people. It's like the teachers and parents etc. And then when we went through these six months of experimentation offering other people to build their learning community, what we realized is any community that has a specific outcome defined has a much better chance of success. If it is about career transitions, people are already serious. If it is about building their own business, people are already serious. People have agency and that is how we moved into the adult learning space. Here people have agency, they have strong motivation to do something that they decide to pursue. And then what was interesting to us was I had an MBA, Raj didn’t have an MBA. That conversation was like what would happen if I were to design a program for Raj, what that program looks like? And that is how the curriculum sort of shaped up over the last nine months. Largely we have built-in public, most people know what happened in the last nine months.

00:51:03

Harish: Right. And how has that experience been, especially since, you know, it was in the middle of the pandemic, how did that have any impact or role in how things have shaped up?

00:51:15

Aditya: No, totally. One part is business education and as I said earlier also, better decision making in their personal and professional life. What the pandemic really did was force people to build new relationships, which was a blessing for us because we came at the right time. Like if our launch happened, let's in 2019, I'm not really sure. And we're very honest with this. I mean, even the pandemic has impacted our lives negatively for most of us. As a business, at least it worked for us because people were anyway stuck at home and they were looking for building new relationships. And so the first 25 people who joined the Stoa community, were all rebels in that sense and they were restless sitting at home and so on and so forth. I guess a lot of us also struggled through personal crises. Not just on the health front, but breakups and just feeling confused and all of that added to what happened at Stoa. Now as let's say, the first wave sort of went away. Then the question for us also as a business was, is this really sustainable? What will happen when the people get out of home, will they have time to spend on learning, will they continue to spend time on learning? So we made certain changes to the program to address that gap. But largely now we have built a very strong conviction that people are able to meet new people and they're able to learn new things and they're able to sort of accelerate their journey through these 24 weeks. Whatever they want to achieve, Stoa is here to stay. In that sense, a lot of times, if you go to all these investment meetings, the question is how will you win the market? So, I generally think that education is not a winner take all market in that sense, like always finding very interesting niche people, an under-appreciated talent who is much more ambitious, which is looking for something better. Stoa becomes that honest broker. I actually picked this term, I think Paul Graham tweeted on one of the subjects written by some piano trainer or something like that. I think the rules that were really playing here are being that honest broker. And not just bringing like hiring partners and let's say investors together with entrepreneurs and people looking for better jobs, but we are actually giving them a sort of commandment or values that will stay for them to succeed as an entrepreneur as early-stage startup folks. For example, one of the things we keep often repeating is, life in general and business, in general, is positive-sum games. It is so rare because, in our education system, we have always been told that education is a zero-sum game, like only 1500 people go to IIM ABC and everyone else is not good. So from that mindset to say that you know even, I mean you will be competing with someone which is fair game, but you should play for that success as well. So for example, even in our community, we have people who are building educational businesses and they are learning from our cohort-based model which is totally fine. We actually said no to someone in cohort one because we felt that this person will copy what we're doing. Then we really sat down and said do we really care? If this person succeeds we will, we can still claim that success for ourselves because you know this person will be a Stoa fellow. How does it matter if they copy? And since then our approach has changed, we said if you want to learn, come here, feel free to copy what we are doing. And it also sort of makes your business inherently better. Like we have come around, at least I personally have come around to that viewpoint that instead of just holding back and saying, oh this is my secret sauce or whatever. You'll see this over the next two three months, we're probably going to just put out like here is our curriculum, here is the way we sort of do things, here is how we are looking at growing our business, just going to put out there because ultimately it comes down to execution and there are just so many moving parts to delivering a great educational experience. In that sense, if you look at Elon Musk, he wrote down his 10-year path building a company, anybody could have copied that. Volkswagen could have copied that, GM could have copied that, but the thing is unless you are passionate about solving that problem. You can start with a lot of enthu, anybody can start a Stoa-like program with a lot of passion, we are passionate about this community building. For example, we often hear about the American dream and like you know, bootstrapping your way to success and hard work always pays off and so on and so forth. What is an Indian dream? And I think that's a very interesting question for an institution like Stoa to answer. What is an Indian dream today? Is it to build your own business, or is it to build a services business? Is it to build for the world, build in India? Not just from an entrepreneur's point of view, but also from people who don't want to be entrepreneurs but are looking for exciting challenges. And once you sort of look from that meta angle right and you keep going back to that thought process, I think what happens on a tactical day-to-day basis also becomes much easier. Decision making becomes much easier because you are going after something so big like what really matters is whether you are customer-obsessed and customer-centric. Rather than what everyone else is doing and who is raising how much and things of that sort. You start to see through things and really try to find what is at the core of your business. And what is interesting about Stoa is we are in the business, we're thinking about business and almost everything that we sort of talk about on a daily basis, we are forced to reflect back on a daily business. So yesterday I wrote a prompt on emotional intelligence as a leader. I wrote that prompt and as I was writing it and you know I was reviewing it and editing it, I was already self-reflecting. Then I think one of our team members posted on our company WhatsApp group and said this is such a nice prompt. And to me it was like, is this a comment? Which is fair right, you also lose your shit sometimes in the moment. You also react impulsively and so on and so forth. But at the same time we are teaching people about, if not us, whoever is coming as a faculty, is teaching people about emotional intelligence and how to stay calm in situations of conflict and crisis. That is something very interesting about the last nine months, right? Like you're not only teaching and talking about something, but you're simultaneously practising it. I would any day learn about coding from the AWS team or somebody who's building crazy products. I would learn from them because as I learn let's say six months with them, they are also learning something about building products and so on and so forth. And if they are vulnerable enough to share that with me, my affiliation or my affinity towards coding will be much stronger because I can see the purpose, I can see how someone else is doing it. So in that context, the last nine months have been very interesting.

00:59:08

Harish: Right. So if you think about where Stoa is today and what are the potential futures? I'm a big fan of not thinking of one future because forecasting is not the thing, you need to think of futures rather than one future. Right? So is there a future where you're going to stand for the whole alternative bit for education, not just MBA but you from homeschooling to no schooling? And do you see yourself as the equivalent of a Peter Thiel in the US, who gave this leadership for anyone who is going to drop out and all of that?

00:59:48

Aditya: We still haven't seen any success anywhere close to what Peter Thiel has seen. But in terms of the future, especially when it comes to education, we are very opinionated. And I also mentioned that you know, we went through all that alternative schooling. In general, our sense is, if you have to imagine the future of education, the fundamental problem is it has been an overly regulated space. For example, if I have to start at a B school to start offering degrees, I need somebody with a PhD and the question to ask is why? Or if you look at schooling, it's like oh you need B. Ed or M.Ed, but why? And how can we get the best of people to teach but not limit their financial outcomes to teaching? I think that has been the fundamental problem with education that the best people who could be teaching don't want to teach because it doesn't pay well. I think if we fundamentally solve that problem and we might solve it within a very narrow sense of business education, but in general this homeschooling, no schooling, micro schooling, there are all these variants. It would be really interesting just breaking down the boundaries between academia and career. Whether it is K12, whether it is college, adult learning or upskilling, how can you really make it an open door kind of thing, where people come, maybe teach kids for two months or one month and then go back. This is how you do your sabbatical, you come from let's say or begin to see like you know big companies like Microsoft or TCS. You go back to the classroom, you share what you have to share with the kids, and then you go back right. There are these community managers who essentially then take care of making sure that there's a consistency of experience and so on and so forth. So in that sense, these community builders then become the centrepiece. So you're essentially separating out the responsibility of teaching from actually making sure that somebody has a great educational experience. Just splitting that responsibility. I'm not sure if it happens today but when I was in primary school, we just had one teacher for everything and they may not have subject expertise to teach everything but they were able to build amazing consistency, build relationships with every student in the class because it was just one teacher. Incidentally, that model doesn't work because then you are essentially compromising on the subject model. Then you have other models in high school which we had was there was a different teacher for each subject, there is still a class teacher, but the class teacher was also subject teacher versus let's say, a community manager with all these teachers who are teaching, who teaches, what is their motivation for teaching and are they bringing practical life experience to teaching, and then are really learning what matters? So a lot of my MBA curriculum, in hindsight, felt it was useless. Is the curriculum responsive to what is happening in the world? Are they living relevant to what is happening in the world? We see this tweet that we should be teaching financial literacy to teachers, children should learn entrepreneurship. But what all will you teach? Ultimately the community manager or somebody needs to be responsible for understanding what is relevant, what needs to be taught, what is not needed from what was being taught? Who is teaching? Who is speaking in that way, being responsive and so on and so forth? And this is already happening maybe outside of school right now. I think it's a very interesting model where you work with the teacher for 5-6 sessions and they can teach anything, the most random stuff, which is interesting to children. But yeah, I mean that's the future of education in my sense where curricula are responsive, and who teaches is very fluid in that sense. Like people have an open door with the industry.

01:03:59

Harish: Yeah, there are still a lot more topics to talk about. This probably is going to be part of our many conversations, Aditya. I'm going to conclude this and in the end, we usually have this short section where we ask for the guests' hot takes on the future relevance of some things. So you've covered a lot of things. But what do you think is the future relevance of online cohort-based learning courses in India?

01:04:31

Aditya: Sure. I think they will become institutions in themselves. Like these will become household brand names. They will have value in the marriage market. There's no reason why a StoaShaadi.com or 10kdesignersshaadi.com can't exist or NewtonShaadi.com. I think that will be when these brands become household names. Then this sector as a whole would have truly arrived.

01:05:00

Harish: Right, okay. What is the future relevance of B schools in India? The traditional B schools.

01:05:04

Aditya: I think the top 15, 20, 25 schools will continue to thrive and will continue to attract the best talent, but the long tail of crappy B schools will go out of business. They will be taken over by all this online education.

01:05:19

Harish: Right. And finally, what is the future relevance of tech product startup companies in India?

01:05:30

Aditya: For example, if you look at SaaS, I think the next 10 years is going to be amazing for Indian SaaS companies. In fact, if there was an ETF or Index Fund that took a bet on Indian SaaS companies, I would happily invest by as much as whatever liquidity I have. Like, I have a very strong feeling that this sector will take off now, where I think things could be better is just the talent, productivity and so on and so forth. Like we still have very bloated organisations when it comes to products like Instagram, if a 20% team could do, I'm guessing probably in India will still need like 100% team to pull it off in terms of productivity in terms of our product thinking in terms of just having that product culture, we have a long way to go, but irrespective of that, I think our tech product companies will go along with.

01:06:26

Harish: All right. Thanks. Thanks a lot. This was a fantastic one-hour long conversation but I had to put an end to this. But I think we can go on. There are a lot of topics that, you know, I can pick your brains on and have an engaging conversation. Thanks a lot for this, Aditya.

01:06:42

Aditya: Thank you for having me, Harish. It was wonderful just putting some structure to everything that keeps hanging in the brain. Good chat.

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