00:25:23 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:25:23] S1: Sure. So when I had gone to Draper while I had gone on a scholarship, my flight tickets were very kindly paid off by from Snapdeal. And my accommodation was sponsored by Thai and through a referral by Kalra, sir, because I shadowed Deep Kalra for an entire day from breakfast to night. Again, a lot of hustle there. So thanks to kind of knowing these guys, and I I often say that I kind of publicly grew up in front of the Indian startup ecosystem, at least in the Delhi Indian startup ecosystem. Right? So so when when when everything was happening and leveraging its initial left around that time was a very dirty looking orange app, which would help students meet mentors who are like them, and mentors are giving them career advice. Students would... It would be free for the students. Mentors will get karma points for helping all the students. And these karma points could be redeemed at outlets like Levi's, Apple, Starbucks, all of that. So think of it as Credit one point o in some sense. But because my name is not Konalks, and I don't look anything like him, and nobody paid any heed to this idea. And people would ask me random yet important questions like, where the hell is Sunda? How do you monetize this? And I would go back to them, and I was a kid of the late two thousand, early two thousand tens. I would tell them let me get to 5,000,000 installs. At that point of time, we had 8,000 installs in the app. And just before entering the program. And so... And and and and and you've seen this phase. Right? 2016 is when the rain came in India, and you could feel the tremors in summer two thousand fifteen in the valley as well when people started to ask these more hard questions. And that is when I had I had spoken to Kunal, and I had a standing job offer from Snapdeal as part of the entire thing. And the larger play at that point of time was Samsung So by the way, tell this story with a lot of pride that I came back to Oakland. I had my Sovereign moment India. Oakland, we have an ecommerce company. But the other opportunity that I left around that time was to assist Adam Draper, who was James' son, with the... This Boost. Vc, which is this Bitcoin accelerator that he was putting forward. Wow. Bitcoin Bitcoin, Bitcoin, the life would have been very, very different.
00:27:45 · Akshay Chaturvedi
So I used to narrate this story with a lot of pride until last year, and now that narrative has slightly changed. So anyway, I came back working with Snapdeal for about less than a year. Huge fan of the founders, huge fan of a lot of folks I've worked with. But still had this so called... Also, realized that e commerce is not all glam that it looks from outside. It's a of fairly it's a mix of marketing plus sort of ops, seller management, and then also logistics. I remember it's time. So that experience of kind of being in a... At an e commerce company during a Diwali is absolutely fantastic. I used to remember.. That's that's an absolute obvious thing. So literally and this was like, you hadn't thought about this when I was coming here from SF. So anyway, but I still had this so called Valley hangover of sorts that, no, I want to run my own thing, but I want to work in a smaller startup. I had grown on the story of, who was a fifth employee at WhatsApp, and who was also an ISB alum. So I started to talk to a lot of founders who were at that series, a series B, series C level. And luckily, I had access, which is when I met the founders of babajob. I had a senior of mine who introduced me to them, Rishi Dogra, who used to be the CMO there. And I loved the problem. I just fell in love with the blue and gray colored job marketplace. And at that time, for a while, we were the largest supplier of drivers for both Uber and Ola in both Delhi and Bangalore. We were one of the largest suppliers for delivery folks for eCart, Go Java, all of these logistics where we're gonna excuse to support the larger ecommerce companies. But unit economics was a slight struggle. We were trying to... I I believe we were trying to solve things through tech that we could have solved through ops. We saw Quess Corp kind of come in and build a very ops first business right in front of us and kind of take a company all the way to $4,000 IPO. Even if it was a 2x, 3x multiple, not a very fancy 30, 40x multiple like startups right now are getting. But big fan of the founders. They built a beautiful company, beautiful culture. My boss Veer, who is one of the co founders of babajob and Uniconnect, be a investor in my business. But when babajob was wrapping up and getting sold to quicker, which is when I realized that I need to give my passion project a shot.
00:30:11 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
And in 2017, hence, Leverage started as [00:30:13] S0: a How downloads that happened over the two years since you started and then since How many? 70 when you... How many downloads or, like, how much traction had you gained in those two years when you were obviously just working on that on the side?
00:30:26 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:30:26] S1: Sure. So so, Anirudh, excitement I was doing multiple things and we were... I remember in the in the last six months, right before I started, there was more focus. I used to work with a friend of mine called Amisha, who was a senior UI person at Myntra. Now she's at H and M. And Level Road And those are fantastic days. So I had all of those things ready, and then we launched in January, and then I quit my job in March, and then we started the company in April. But we realized very quickly that while we were trying to build a career advice marketplace, nobody would pay for something which wasn't very tangible in nature. And we also realized that we need to focus on things. And when we talk about college admissions, we realized that in India, you get a college admission by the basis of a number that is printed on your forehead, be it in CAT or JEE or NEED or UPSC or whatever the the exam be. And test prep companies are essentially... Like today, they're fantastic companies like Unacademy and Byju's and Vedantu, a bunch of them were solving test prep already. And there were Akshay and FitG and the like of those that met Aakash Chaudhary in those earlier. Test prep company enabled And that time, I would say that study abroad was a very huge category. Hence, And we went into study abroad. And within that also related to multiple segments of the student. There was a student who was very privileged. She was applying to the top 50, 60 schools. There were boutique agencies which was serving the student. And then there was the rest of the market. So we realized that we'll have an iPhone and a strategy started from this, went all the way down. I won't go further than that. But today, we've essentially... I think it was very tough for... To kind of make people believe For the longest time in my space, for the first, I think, in my four and a half year journey, for the first two and a half years, I've just educated people about the market. I've just kind of kept telling them government UN report build a big market here. It's only about two years back when things started to get a hot tiger kind of funded a company in New Zealand and which went to The US Then a couple of other pension funders started to play in the space as well, which is when people realized, okay. This is a space which can grow like fire as well.
00:32:51 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
And very interestingly today, out of all the tech businesses in the world, the largest revenue multiple that a company holds in tech is a business in the study abroad space. [00:33:03] S0: Which is? [00:33:04] S1: A company called Applied Board. And just for design because what you're doing for the student in this category is so much more. You're essentially helping them crossover what is going to be the most pivotal part of their life. Like you rightly said, fifteen minutes back, when you went to ISB, that was a very pivotal point of time for your career. And that it is for essentially most of us, when we go in and offer higher education. So that and then essentially the ability to do so many things alongside with the student, be it with their visa, be it with their education loan, be it with their forex accommodation, and so on and so forth. And essentially, tomorrow, even selling like, there are couple of these small time agents in Gujarat who we partner with. They also sell to these students once they land up in the UQR in Canada. Wow. So it's a LTV. [00:33:50] S0: That's that is original. Keeps going on and on and on. [00:33:54] S1: You're catching them young. And then you're kind of making the fun in love with you and your service and then ensuring that they keep coming back to you again and again.
00:34:04 · Anirudh A Damani
[00:34:04] S0: You know, it's it's so the leverage, the leverage Edu, Edu journey and obviously, earlier it was called leverage and then became leverage Edu, right? Leverage. Very, very leverage, right? Yeah. Like, very interesting how the whole thing pivoted and how you've just adapted to the times, right? And we'll talk about, I mean, you've talked about how it went from, you know, a mentorship discovery platform to, you know, now completely owning that journey, right? Of getting a student who wants to go abroad, figuring out which university to go to based on their aptitude, etcetera, etcetera. But I think the real impetus would have probably come around COVID, right? Because that's when things got really, really interesting. Know, now people could not travel to The US. I mean, they had to really figure this thing out when everything went kaput in early twenty twenty. But for you, there must have been some scary moments, because suddenly, you know, there's a travel ban. People can't go to The US anyway, or can't go to anywhere else in the world, and neither can they come to India, like India also has their own, you know, incoming student population. What were you thinking when, you know, when on March 22, the PM says, you know what, India shutting its borders, India shutting itself for three months, you know, what was your reaction? Certainly. Were you out were you out there banging Thales as well?