Episode 3: Ankur Nagpal, founder and CEO of Teachable
Play • 33 mins

Ankur Nagpal is the founder and CEO of Teachable, the online platform that enables people to sell individual online courses in subjects as varied as programming to cake decorating. A leader in the creator economy, he started the company in 2014, and after raising over $12.5 million in funding, there are now more than 100,000 digital instructors who have reportedly earned over $500 million on his platform. To learn more go to https://www.bvp.com/atlas/this-is-series-a 

Takeaways:

  • How American thrives on global entrepreneurship: “I do not think I could have built what I built in any other country in the world. And to that, I am very grateful to America, very grateful to my parents for whom my dad saw this as the manifestation of his dreams. In an alternate reality, he would have liked to be here and started a company,” shares Ankur. “For now, America is still getting talented immigrants, but for the first time there's a bit of an existential risk. And I think it's really important for America to not truly blow this in the next 10 years. The competitive advantage this nation has is that it becomes a magnet for the smartest people everywhere to move here. And I really think that's something that America should realize is a privilege, and do whatever they can to maintain it. Because I do think the immigrant experience here is deteriorating. In a truly globalized world, I do think countries will compete for talent and thus far it has not, that has not been a factor, but thinking the next 10 years, I do think there's a very real existential risk that this country could lose that.” 
  • Bundling education with software to provide customer solutions: “Five years ago, we had this insight that no one actually cares about our software—what they want is a solution in a lot of cases,” Ankur shared. “They want not just the tool, they want also the knowledge. So we started bundling education with software. That was one of our first inflection points and our first realizations. Our conversion rate went up before we started selling, not just Teachable, but Teachable plus training on, ‘How do you build an audience? How do you create a course?’ Even now, our most effective marketing funnels all have to do with, ‘Hey, if you buy Teachable, you also get training on how to set up a business, how to build an audience, how to market your course.’ So we've definitely done that part of things.”
  • The “business of one” in the future: “I'm a huge, huge believer in a rising class of basically every individual sort of being a business, and it doesn't have to be perfectly one-to-one, where you can recruit the odd person there,” Ankur said. “Historically, sort of everyone got absorbed into the full-time job economy. I do think in the future, there's going to be a lot more individual businesses, whether you think of them as creators, freelancers, or people with multiple streams of income. I'm a big, big believer in the business of one, and I think Teachable definitely plays into that.”
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