Adesuwa Omoruan is dubbed the "queen of selfies" by her siblings. She confesses to taking more selfies than regulars photographs. When Adesuwa Omoruan was a child, she never thought or imagined herself becoming a broadcaster; it was the last thing she ever thought of becoming. As far as she was concerned, the lifestyle of reporters was not up to par with the kind of life she wanted, as the young dreamer that she was at the time. She wanted a life that was rich and full of the best life could offer, although she wasn't seeking a life that was necessarily flamboyant. "I just felt that journalist were not paid enough... My idea of a journalist wasn't just working at that time. Sometimes they looked very stressed, very few of them had cars... Growing up, I had this picture of what I wanted to be in life..." She had wanted to become a banker! As a child, she had taken trips to the bank with her mother on several occasions to cash-in her moth
How A Millennial Entrepreneur Built A Learning Platform With A $134m Valuation- Forbes Original Content
Want to get paid to teach an online course in cake decorating, feng shui or how to fly a drone? Increasingly, instructors are turning to Teachable, a New York-based startup run by Ankur Nagpal, 29. Most of Teachable’s teacher-customers pay $99 a month to use the company’s software platform, where they can upload videos, communicate with students and collect course fees.
Founded in 2014, Teachable is growing fast. Last year it processed $90 million in course fees and banked $7.5 million in revenue. This year Nagpal says it’s on track to more than double those numbers, and he expects to be profitable by the end of 2018. “Right now, we’re close to a $13 million revenue run rate,” he says. Today he announced a $4 million funding round at a $134 million valuation, bringing Teachable’s total capital invested to $12.5 million. The firm has 64 employees.
At a time when people can learn almost anything from a YouTube video, Nagpal says many students prefer to pay for courses. “What they’re buying is the transformation--the outcome promised by the course,” he says. One of the most popular courses on the Teachable platform right now teaches would-be steel drummers how to play an instrument called the handpan. “The students are buying the idea that they’ll successfully play the handpan,” he says.
Other offerings are more serious. The School of the New York Times is a Teachable client. Its offerings include a five-course series in online marketing for $1,450, taught by staffers from the paper’s T Brand Studio, which works with brands on content marketing. Students who complete the series get a certificate from the school.
A native of Bombay who grew up in Oman and moved to the U.S. to study computer science and economics at U.C. Berkeley, Nagpal launched his first business in his dorm room during his sophomore year. He built Facebook apps like personality quizzes (“I did not sell the data to anyone who ran Trump research firms”) and apps to play games like Pac-Man and Tetris. At the venture's peak, it brought in $50,000 a day in advertising revenue, but by 2012, Facebook had changed its algorithms to de-prioritize apps and Nagpal had tired of San Francisco. “Just everything felt technology-related there,” he says, “even though I worked in technology.”
He moved to New York, which he says he finds more stimulating, and started teaching marketing courses at coding boot camp General Assembly, “mostly because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.” He took a shot at teaching his marketing course online through a platform called Udemy, which didn’t charge for software but took a 50% cut of course revenue. Also, Nagpal’s course, like all classes on the Udemy platform, carried the Udemy brand.
As an experiment, in 2013 Nagpal built his own teaching platform and picked a random name, Fedora. “We joked that the name was pulled out of a hat,” he says. “I did not want to spend time working on a name when I didn’t know whether the company would last for more than six months.” But Fedora caught on, and Nagpal headed back to the Bay Area to find investors. He raised a seed round of $1 million in July 2014 at an $8 million valuation and in 2015 he changed the company's name to the more obvious Teachable.
Udemy is still a competitor, as are other platforms like Academy of Mine and Thinkific. But Teachable keeps signing up new customers. Its most popular course right now, says Nagpal: feng shui. A Malaysian entrepreneur, Joey Yap, offers the course in both the U.S. and Asia. It caters not just to folks who want to learn how to master the ancient Chinese practice of spacial arranging but to those who want to become feng shui teachers themselves, and ideally, from Nagpal’s perspective, set up their own Teachable sites.
This content first appeared on Forbes.com by Susan Adams.
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