Choose Your Co founders Wisely Advise Founders Of Emeritus

Serving a critical need of skill enhancement of professionals is Emeritus, a leading edtech startup that has given wings to the dreams of more than 2.5 lakh individuals globally, in domain areas like AI, data science and analytics, coding and digital marketing. In an interview to BW Education, Co-founders Chaitanya Kalipatnapu and Ashwin Damera describe the vision with which they started, their challenges and their startup journey. Excerpts: 

Can you tell me about your inspiration to start Emeritus?   

Chaitanya Kalipatnapu: I was fortunate to have received a good undergraduate education at BITS Pilani. Then I worked at INSEAD Business School in their executive education programme. I saw the impact that high-quality education could have on individuals and companies and how it could bring about transformation. After working at INSEAD for almost four years, I had the chance to do my MBA there. Entrepreneurship was clearly something that I wanted to do because of the education I received and the opportunity I saw. I packed my bags, got highly leveraged in terms of taking an educational loan and went to another country to pursue it. But at the same time, I wondered why the flip side couldn’t happen. Why can’t the university or an institution come to a place where the student or a learner is, rather than the other way around? That’s what led to the genesis of doing something in the education space and trying to come back to India to set this up. 

In the process, I met my co-founder, Ashwin. He was at the time exiting a travel group, wanting to do something again in the education space. We met through a common friend and both of us were brought to this need and pain point. We were beneficiaries of high-quality education and knew the kind of impact and transformation it could have. 

How can we cascade this kind of experience to more people? I think that was the point that brought us together; both of us felt very passionate about it in terms of doing something. That’s how we joined hands and started the journey. 

Ashwin Damera: This is my second venture. My first venture was in the travel space with a company called Travelguru. I sold it to Travelocity in 2009 and spent one year with them. After that, I was wondering what to do next with my life. Starting up new things is unpredictable; ­it can either go well or bad, with its own ups and downs. So, I wanted to do something that really touched people’s lives and had a real impact. In my mind, it was either education or healthcare. 

I started researching in both and that’s when I came across Chaitanya and we decided to start Emeritus. Initially, we called it Eruditus. And the idea was very simple – how do we make access to high-quality education available to everyone? Not everyone gets to go to prestigious institutions like IIT, IIM, ISB, Harvard, or MIT. So, how could we bring these institutions to the students? How do we make it accessible and affordable? That was the vision we had in 2010. Honestly, online education was not talked about much back then, but we still started with the idea and intent of making high-quality education accessible to all. 

What were some of the major challenges you had to overcome? 

CK: We felt the pain point and realised that there was an opportunity because there was a gap in the market in terms of high-quality institutions providing professional education programmes or upskilling/reskilling programmes. Two, there had been no digital enablement of this education, and this had been talked about since 2010. These were two things we took together. And quite early on, we converged on the mission of making high-quality education accessible and affordable. This has been the guiding principle from the start until now and is the litmus test we use for any new product or job we want to launch. 

We had hoped to get easily 40-50 people into the programme, making it an economic success and confirming our hypothesis, but we hardly got even 15 people. 

We went back to the drawing board and decided to be obsessive about the product market. We soon understood that high-quality education is extremely desirable but must be on the platform of a brand that can stand it. 

At that time, we were in an office and didn’t have any particular brand. And while on paper, what we proposed was very interesting, but companies were not interested in taking it up. We soon pivoted to put ourselves as a platform. That was the genesis of creating the business model. One philosophy we follow is how can we cannibalise ourselves rather than somebody else trying to do that. 

AD: Both travel and education have their challenges. However, our education venture has been a bigger and better one with fewer challenges. In 2010, our biggest challenge was to convince a top university to work with us. Today, we already have about 80 university partners, so signing new universities is not our biggest concern. Instead, we are focussed on adding more courses to our existing partners and driving enrolments profitably. Our emphasis has shifted towards profitable growth, while still achieving a growth rate of 40-45 per cent per year. 

When we started, we had to convince people about the benefits of online education, but today that is no longer necessary. However, the quality of online learning and outcomes is now a key consideration and is subject to increased scrutiny. This makes managing the learning experience all the more important. Another challenge we face is around the impact of emerging technologies like ChatGPT on education, which is an area that has not been explored much until now. 

As a more mature company, we face different challenges compared to our early startup days. For instance, hiring is no longer a significant challenge, unlike before when convincing someone to join us was not easy. 

Amongst all the other edtech players in the market, what is your value proposition? 

CK: Our learners are also quite global, with less than 20 per cent coming from India and 25-30 per cent from the US. Our geographical footprint is extremely diverse. Additionally, over 30 per cent of our enrolment comes from languages other than English, including Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic, with plans to launch in Southeast Asian languages as well. This global footprint is a distinctive feature of how Emeritus operates. To date, we have impacted over 300,000 learners in 200 countries from 80 institutes worldwide, which we believe is another distinctive factor. 

AD: Our business model is built around two main stakeholders: university partners and students. We act as a curated marketplace that connects these two groups to make online education happen. Our approach is different from an open marketplace like Amazon. Instead, we operate more like Netflix, where we curate the content that we offer to our students. 

When it comes to online education, quality matters. We want to ensure that our students receive high-quality education that meets their needs. There are a few key elements to achieve this. One, students need to have the opportunity to interact with their instructors face-to-face. It’s not enough to just receive a recorded lecture. Also, students need to interact with their peers to learn and grow. To achieve this, we create cohorts of students that learn together at the same pace. They work on the same project at the same time, giving them ample opportunity to exchange ideas and feedback. 

We also focus heavily on project-based learning, where students apply what they learn to real-world scenarios. By doing so, they gain practical experience that prepares them for the workforce. 

By focussing on these key elements of online education, we have helped to raise the bar for the industry. 

Is there a way to measure the learning impact and student engagement of your courses? 

CK: In terms of the learner service that we provide, we conduct the ‘Consumer Impact Survey’ after the programme, and second, at the end of the course as well. Globally, the data shows that 94 per cent of our learners said that the programme had a positive impact on their career and professional development, which is encouraging. The completion rates that we have are also between 85 to 90 per cent, which is higher than the 5 to 10 per cent completion rates we see in the books. This shows a strong motivation for people to pursue this kind of education. Additionally, over 90 per cent of the learners believe that the programme had a positive impact on their business and organisation. 

AD: When you sit in a classroom, what are the elements of high-quality education? You want to see your instructor face-to-face and have an interaction, not just be given one recorded lecture and told, “this is it”.  Also, peer interaction is important for the learning experience. 

Every course starts on a specific date, so even if there were 500 people in that course, you all learn together as a group of 500 as a cohort. Students work on the same project at the same time, so you can exchange ideas, talk to each other and give feedback. This is a very important part of learning, the social element of learning, where you can’t just sit and watch something like in a movie theatre and come away inspired. We put a lot of focus on project learning and these are the advantages that lead to learning outcomes. 

I’m very happy that we did that because, for many years, people believed that online education was a bad thing. Today, people have at least started to not ask that question anymore. However, some are still skeptical. 

Can you share your thoughts on the importance of finding the right co-founder and what is the secret to a successful entrepreneurial partnership? 

CK:  Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey filled with self-doubt, ups and downs and you need to have someone to work with whom you trust and share a common value system with. Can you imagine being on this journey with this person for the long haul? While you may scrutinise before partnering with someone, there is always an element of luck and a leap of faith involved. In that sense, finding the right co-founder is crucial. Looking back, I believe it was one of the best decisions I could have made. 

AD: Chaitanya and I are simpatico. We understand each other.   From day one, getting the right co-founder is essential. The right co-founder is not just about skill sets, it’s also a core value system. While you have two very different people, the core value system is crucial, especially for an education startup. You have to believe that education is the most important thing. You can’t be chasing valuation, scale and all of that but forget that it’s about education; it’s about the student. 

How do you see the role of online education evolving in India and the world? How are you expanding Emeritus? 

CK: The education market is over $7 billion plus in terms of its total value and digital enabled education is just 5 per cent of it. Compare it with any other sector, such as consumer goods, meat, automobile, etcetera, I think that digital penetration is extremely low. Which goes on to say that there’s a huge potential for digital or online to play a much bigger role in the context of education. 

 We have just launched a course on instructional design – again in terms of enabling people to get a better grasp of education in online space. Most of our courses are geared at helping professionals to upskill. 

AD: I believe that education will always be a combination of offline and online, as well as blended. There won’t be one dominant mode. In India, we have a demographic of 600 million people below the age of 25 who all need an education. Currently, there are about 40 million students in brick-and-mortar colleges. We need to increase the gross enrolment number to 40 per cent. To achieve this, we need to add 20 million new seats in colleges, but building brick and mortar institutes is not a feasible option. Online learning is a viable solution to this problem.  However, we must address the challenges such as measuring outcomes and avoiding misleading advertising and false promises of job guarantees. 

Emeritus Fact File

Global Reach: 

Serving more than 250,000 learners across 160 countries, with programmes offered in a variety of languages

Nature of programmes: 

Connects learners through global virtual classrooms, partnering with over 60 top universities to offer online and app-based learning in formats including courses, certificates, online degrees, boot camps, etc. 

Collaborations: 

IIM Lucknow Executive Education, IIM Calcutta Executive Education, ISB Executive Education, Harvard Business School (HBS), MIT Sloan, Columbia Business School, Kellogg Executive Education, Berkeley Executive Education, and Wharton Executive Education, amongst other leading institutes. 

The Emeritus Group has more than 1,400 employees globally and offices in Mumbai, New Delhi, Shanghai, Singapore, Palo Alto, Mexico City, New York, Boston, London, and Dubai. 

Funding: 

Following its USD 650 million Series E funding round in August 2021, the company is valued at $3.2 billion, and is backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Leeds Illuminate, Prosus Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Bertelsmann, Accel and SoftBank Vision Fund 

Impact of the Emeritus Programmes

Eighty-eight per cent of respondents have witnessed positive impact within 12 months of programme completion 

In a recent survey with learners in India, Emeritus has gathered insights to determine the exact nature of how professional programmes help learners. 

An overwhelming majority (81 per cent) of the respondents from the survey believe that the programme they took had a positive impact on their career and professional development. Knowledge enhancement and gaining better understanding of a new field that is relevant to their practise area were cited as the key drivers for taking up an upskilling programme. 

The professionals surveyed revealed they have seen a positive impact within 12 months of completing a programme, while many of the respondents believe that the programme they underwent helped them validate and fill knowledge gaps in their job. 

More than half (58 per cent) of respondents stated that the programme provided them with the necessary skills and training needed to advance their careers and helped them future-proof their careers. The Emeritus India Impact Survey also points to how learners have more options for career progression after completing an upskilling programme. 

The India Impact Survey was conducted in September 2022, with learners who have completed Emeritus professional education programmes through its partner schools before June 2022.

“Our learners are quite global, with less than 20 per cent coming from India and 25-30 per cent from the US. Our geographical footprint is extremely diverse,” Chaitanya Kalipatnapu.

“For many years, people believed that online education was a bad thing. Today, people have at least started to not ask that question anymore. However, some are still skeptical,”  Ashwin Damera.