Vamsi Krishna of Vedantu: Scaling Personalized Live Tutoring in India

This episode is co-hosted by GGV's investment colleague Madhu Yalarmathi.

In this episode, we have Vamsi Krishna, CEO & Co-Founder of Vedantu. Vedantu is India's leading online tutoring company that enables students to learn LIVE with some of India's best-curated teachers. The name Vedantu is formed by two Sanskrit words Veda (Knowledge) + Tantu (Network), signifying a 'Knowledge Network' where any student can tap into and learn from a teacher, anytime-anywhere.

In our conversations, Vamsi shared his experience in moving into online after building a successful offline tutoring center, getting his early users and his definition of an "EdTech" company. Before starting Vedantu, he has been a teacher for 13 years and founded a test prep company Lakshya, which was sold to a listed education company in 2012. You can watch Vamsi's TedTalk in which he made the argument against the standard curriculum.

03:14
Trained as an engineer, how did you become a teacher?

05:03 In your TED Talk, you argued that standard curriculums and standard delivery mechanisms won't work. Share with us more on that.

08:40
Back in early 2012, when you started the company, it was way before JIO and 4G came out in India. Internet users were growing but not as fast as the rest of the world.

13:24

How did you gain the confidence that the right way to build your second startup should be online education?

16:18
What are the scalability aspect of the business model to make it easier for new students to get acclimated to the online learning environment?

21:13

Many of your early users took a leap of faith and moved towards a fully online institution to prepare for the most important exam in their educational life. How did you get them to do that? How are you going about it now?

29:02

As an EdTech company, what do you look for from your tech team?

37:50

It's not hard to imagine that given the large talent pool of Indian teachers here, that the business could exponentially expand beyond India at some point in the future. Share with us how you think about that.

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