00:40:05 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
It's it's enterprise sales in some sense. [00:40:07] S0: Can I take that? [00:40:09] S1: So because of how things happen in this way... So by July, things were kind of looking more rosy for us. And people were saying, okay. UK was the first country to open up. And UK around the same time, my hunch proved out right because UK in June and July then opened up a new graduate route, the post study work visa, which said that if somebody's coming in and entering the country right now, they can go ahead and work for two years after they graduate and three years of their PhD. And that just opened the floodgates for us because we had built out this entire supply over the last four to five months. And now we could go ahead and say that UK university supply And now we had built up the supply. And that is when our business scaled very, very quickly. And to to give you a... Give you some perspective, even towards the latter half of last year, we were helping about 100 students a single month. In comparison, by the way, when I met you, we were doing about 15 students a month in 2017 or 12 to 15 students a month. So So we're doing 100 students a month by the end of last year. Today we do about close to 1,500 to 1,600 students a single month. So our scale is massively, massively.
00:41:20 · Anirudh A Damani
[00:41:20] S0: Massively, massively changed. And we were talking about it before, right? Because unlike other EdTech platform which obviously, you know, because of the complete shutdown, almost all like a new hockey stick kind of a growth. You know, for you, you really had to figure figure your way out because it, you know, how do you, like you said, how how do you figure out and and estimate what a government is going to do and then then ensure you've got all the back end supply ready to go at the same time?
00:41:47 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
[00:41:47] S1: Wasn't an easy one, I think, in in hindsight, just keeping our ears close to the ground in terms of... It it... It's a multi dimensional business. It's sort of two two sided marketplace. It's a, like, multi sided marketplace in some sense. So just keeping your ears close to the ground. So for example, now we have realized this kind of pull that thought that we need to build a much more supply as well, supply intelligence. So now we have offices in both The UK and Canada as well. Mhmm. We ensure that on the supply side, it's like a make my trip or o y o. So to ensure that you have ears close to the ground on the consumer side, which is a student, ensure that you have ears close to the ground on the supplier side, ensure that you are essentially working with peers in the ecosystem as well the government. So we ended up, I won't name on this show on the DamaniTalks show, but I'll tell you privately, but we essentially had to get a letter from somebody higher up in the public world of UK and using that letter, we essentially went out and told universities that, hey, we have a letter from this person. Can you please let me in? And that's how a lot of those things happened to begin with. [00:42:51] S0: I mean, you have to scrape. You have to go, you have to do all of all of those things, man, to make it work. So it's a hats off to you truly. [00:42:59] S1: No. Thank you.
00:42:59 · Akshay Chaturvedi, Anirudh A Damani
[00:42:59] S1: No. Thank you. [00:42:59] S0: But, you know, I I I do want to mention something, you know, you've... While all of this is going on, right, it's very interesting to keep reading your LinkedIn profile. By the way, you've got one of the longest... There should be an award for the longest LinkedIn profile available. [00:43:12] S1: Have cut it down, Anirudh. I, about 1.5 back, somebody gave the same not so sweet compliment and I had to cut it down. This is a trimmed down version. [00:43:21] S0: Oh, wow. But but, you know, what what I'm saying is that you've you've actually been involved in other activities, right? Because it's it's like, I, I maybe sometimes find myself guilty about the fact that I, I had so many more ideas to be more socially involved, right? In other causes. I might have written checks here and there, but I'm not really been able to essentially get involved, right? But you were part of the PM's, you know, Committee Form for the #India2022 Policy Building, right? And you did that in 2017 while you were building a startup, and you literally were at the start of building your startup, right? And you, I mean, how would you manage all of these things? I mean, are entrepreneurs out here listening to you, wondering like, you know, startup KPMG, committee, helping other people out, traveling, doing all of these other things. While building a... I mean, while building a startup almost 100 x in the last... I know that growth in the last three years.
00:44:20 · Akshay Chaturvedi
[00:44:20] S1: And so to be super honest, not as fancy as it looks. I spent all of three days in that month and then about another three or four days about couple of months later. What it gave me was access to a set of folks who I wouldn't have had access to otherwise. In that month, by the way. Correct. So I was thinking I was this guy, Anirudh, I hadn't grown up to essentially say that I already know where my round will come from, what this VC will come in and write my first check. So I was actually this guy a couple of years back who had to... Once an entrepreneur would finish his talk, I would... Or her talk, I would run up to them, tell them that, hey. I'm Akshay. Please take my business card. I am this small company. I'm trying to do this. I've I've done that about 100 times in my life, and I've not been tired. So this was a part of that to a very quick degree. And I got a chance to, I think, just meet a great set of people who, by spending all of 72 hours, who continue to be a great part of my life. I became great friends with Vishal, who's already a mentor to some degree. But we got close during this phase. And from 2017 to now, he's been a great mentor. I spent time with VSS who has continued to be a mentor and a lot of other folks as well. I would have never had access to somebody like Shreedhar Shoe without this event. But I was sitting next to him and Fernando Sama and Mr. And a bunch of these industry luminaries discussing random things. To me, random, but to them essentially very nation building. And I was trying... I was trying to contribute to the from my experiences of having largely run ISB for Anir as a director of the student board Yeah. And give those inputs. But I think for me, largely, it was about opening up my network around that time. And I did manage to get about 12 lakh rupees from that event, which contributed to 2 crores, eight rounds.
00:46:18 · Anirudh A Damani
[00:46:18] S0: And, you know, before I get into this funding conversation, I do want to take this question. It's a question from the audience. Jacob Matthew asked the question like, he said, loving the talk, quick question, talking about networking, what strategy did you use to build such a strong network especially during your early stages in the in your career?