Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Unacademy: YouTubers from India Who Built a $3B Startup in the US

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

In this episode, we talk to Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini, the founders of Unacademy — a $3B edtech giant that started as a simple YouTube channel. They share how they scaled to 100+ channels, built an AI-powered English learning app disrupting the industry, and grew without spending on ads. We dive into the highs and lows: layoffs, panic attacks, going public, and what it really takes to build a billion-dollar startup in the age of AI.Links: Follow my Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com⁠Companies & Products: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Started as a YouTube channel and now the largest educational company in India valued at around $3 billion. We had like 1,000 educators creating. Are you replacing some teachers with AI? You should not think that you are the only one who can do it. You are preparing for you. I do it. Pio, right? And you're still losing money. Men usually don't talk about it, but the 50% of whatever crying has happened happened in that face was having a panic attack once a month.

That was quite terrible. We were losing $150 million a year. Have you ever had this conversation like let's just, you know, shut down the company, it's not working. You know, we just need a big win also again. Maybe we should build a dueling of competitor and it just worked. Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. I have two most amazing guests today. I've been trying to get you on this podcast because what you've built is just amazing.

Started as a YouTube channel and now the largest educational company in India valued at around $3 billion. All right. Let's talk about this. Can you walk me through this journey of like, hey, I'm going to start this YouTube channel to actually building a company on top of it? So thanks for inviting us to the podcast. I think I was in college and Roman and I went to tuition together. It's coaching for examinations. In India, test prep is a big market.

So we used to go to this coaching center together. And then I went to Mumbai and he went to Delhi. And then I think it was the third year of college where Khan Academy was super big. I was always tweaking around stuff. I started coding when I was 12. I was blogging when I was 17. So my parents got a $200 check from Google Adsense when I was 17. So they thought I'm doing some fraud or something like that.

So I think it's been a interesting judge. where we have been content creators first and then product people. And third year of college launched a channel called an academy. This is back in 2010, started creating content, etc. And then went on to do other stuff. I started a company that I sold when I was 23. But the channel was always growing. And at some point, Roman, who was a medical doctor and he was the one good in academics, I used to just somehow pass my subjects. So he started creating content. And those got millions of views. And then we decided that we'll create an academy, which is like a YouTube for education. And we had seen Twitch was recently acquired by Amazon. So the thesis was that there is

unbundling of YouTube happening. And if Twitch can be so valuable, and that's how an academy started. So you thought it's going to be like a separate platform just for educational content, not like a test prep. In the beginning, that was the idea. We eventually moved to test prep. But the initial thesis was we want to build our own YouTube. I was a computer engineer, he was a medical doctor preparing for UPSC and we had never thought of teaching. So the thesis was can we get the smartest people to teach online because they will never teach offline. They're too busy with their lives. And the way his videos responded, our thesis became, can we get more smart people to just teach? And what will happen with time is, is what happened to entertainment that for every topic

you'll have top 100 teachers and their videos will be watched by millions of people, etc. So it did play out the way we imagined, but the product was different. The product we eventually, that does 100 million in revenue for us, which we are going to do an IPO in the next two years. That's a very different product, but it started up like. Okay, let's talk about Air Learn. First of all, congratulations, six months, number five. I don't know, I haven't checked today, but like two weeks ago was number five educational app in the U.S. and I remember we talked about you starting this app.

Fascinating. Tell me why English, why you went into this niche and why do you think it's different where like AI can replace some of the tutors. So again, going back to when we started the company, the company was started because we wanted to do online education. And then post-COVID because there were headwinds for the core business, online business.

We had to open offline. But, and that's a good business, we have a few CEOs of that business, etc. Our core insight and our core motivation is to still make sure that online education changes the world. And we are like, what is that one category where, you know, AI can create a lot of impact? And we realized we saw Duolingo. I've been a fan of their product for five, six years. In literally every podcast that I have done in the last five years, I've spoken about that,

I'm a big fan of Duolingo. So at some point, I was like, you know, maybe we should build a Duolingo competitor. because I've used the product so much. I had a hundred plus day streak on Duolingo, but I could not speak the language. So it's very good in certain areas. But I knew I'm a product guy. I've been building products since 12.

So I knew, oh, what if they could tweak this? What if they could tweak that? So we built Aerlearn with a lot of tweaks, with a different pedagogy. And at this point, every third review is like, this is better than Duolingo. Duolingo is over gamified. So it will teach you, like if you learn Spanish, it will start. with it's called Manzana or Water is called Agwar. But it would not tell you grammar.

It would not tell you the difference between masculine noun or feminine noun or when to use what. So we are like, let's try creating a new app with the stuff that we hate about Duolingo. And it just worked. I mean, our D30 retention is awesome. We have done $2.5 million.

Now we are at a $2.5 million error in six months. So it just worked. And at some point, we are like, this is the next biggest thing that an academy can be. build and yeah. Do you think it's generally a good strategy in entrepreneurship to go and build a competitor to a huge company already?

If you are in your 20s, do zero to one because you are not too worried about the risk of failure, etc. But if you see how big industrialists think, they think about big markets, like how reliance would think in India or how the big CEOs would think, like, like, what? Why would Mark Zuckerberg launch threads as a Twitter competitor? Because he knows it works. Why would Jeff Bezos launch Prime Video? Because, see, when you are in your early 20s, you want to change the world and, you know, you want to do 0 to 1, et cetera.

And I'm not saying 0 to 1 should not be done at a later stage. But I'm saying at some point, and it happened with me, because you have achieved a certain success, you start, the fear of failure becomes high. So the need to do pure 0 to 1, which will take five years to figure something out, you can do sometimes that. But we did that in online education. And post-COVID, it just tanked to 50% of what it was in COVID. And that was a depressing phase. For three years, I remember not sleeping without melatonin or having panic attacks, etc. So 0 to 1 is hard because there were no examples.

That was a new product that had seen a journey like COVID for the first time. So it was hard. So I was like, we are very good at executing stuff. I will do zero to one also at some point in my life. But we are great product builders. We are great marketing people. We loved great design. So if there is a market in which Cumbent is doing a billion dollars in revenue,

can we create a product in that market? So I think if you would have asked me this question 10 years ago, I would be like, oh, I don't give a fuck about, you know, creating something that already exists. I don't care about big markets. I just want to change the world. Now we have seen a lot of ups and downs, especially post-COVID. And it was a very tough phase.

So we're also like, you know, we just need a big win also again. And yeah. No, I understand this. Interesting. Okay. And what was the best marketing tool that worked for the past six months for Airlearn? Day one, we made a rule, no paid marketing, zero paid marketing. The best marketing tool is a great product.

So we first improved retention, et cetera. Then the same YouTube playbook that we had used to crack an accad me, we did it because everybody is like, oh, you should hire 100 TikTok UGC creators and they should talk about your app. Oh, I thought this, I got a DejaVo movement because this is what we did in India with YouTube. And this came easy to us. I had the teams ready. So you did TikTok this time. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

And we are now doing 50 million views on TikTok a month. So through UTC. So they create content you posted on your TikTok? They post on their use. And they have incentives, etc. That's one thing that works. We did some influencer marketing, but dedicated influencer marketing, people who would give unbiased reviews about the app, who would say dual language is better than these

things, A Learn is better. And sponsored, they talk about that it's a promoted video, etc. And K-factor. So Nikita Beard is on Retainer with us. The focus is product-led growth with Nikita. And he's helping us improve our K-factor. What, like you're preparing for your IPO, right? And you're still losing money, right?

I was looking at, you did. No, I mean, we are almost operationally break-even. At one point, we were losing $150 million a year. This year, we are going to probably burn $20 million, but that's also for CAPEX, for centers, etc. We'll be operationally very close to break-even. And we have $150 million in the bank. So like a full-year profitability, maybe next year.

But now we, I mean, we used to worry about the core business burning a lot of money two years ago. Now there is no survival risk. Now it's just because it's an offline business with 40 offline centers, it just takes its own time to make those businesses profited. So enough, maybe if you're burning 20 million this year, even if I continue that burn, we have a runway of seven years. But every year we are reducing our burn by half. Hopefully next year we'll be profitable. By laying off people. So.

By laying off, we laid off a lot of people post-COVID because we didn't know that the online business is going to tank so much. So we did a lot of layoffs then. But that's one part of it. And that was tough because, you know, you had thousands of people. Of course. But it's mostly operational efficiency. I mean, it's like we have done an MBA for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now we know how to run a business better and it's marketing efficiency, it's sales efficiency.

It's building a culture in the art that everybody is obsessed about, EBITDA. And an offline center, when you, like we are just two years old in offline. So it takes three to five years of compounding for the same center to generate more cash. You don't have to change the cost structure at all. So the same center can go to X without even spending anything on that. So it takes three to five years of compounding over. there. Have you ever had a moment when you were losing $150 million a year, like waking up in the night, like, what the hell is going on? How did you feel back then? We had, I told you, I mean,

there were times where I was having a panic attack once a month. It was, it was tough. Yeah, it was quite terrible. Especially like you had careers, right? You were thinking maybe I could have had this normal life. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about him, but I wouldn't personally trade what we went through for anything. I knew what we were signing up for. It's not like it was Sidon. I mean, we definitely did know. That, like, I didn't know it will be like that up and like this much down at like Mount

Everest and Mariana trends. But I mean, men usually don't talk about it or, but I have rarely cried in my life. But the 50% of whatever crying has happened happened in that phase. Because it's just so tough that you're waking up. You wanted to build an online business. now you have to build offline. And I love the business. It's good.

It's helping a lot of people. But that shift, that mindset shift. And then suddenly everyone who used to tell you spend more money in marketing. I mean, at the end of the day, I was the CEO, I'll take the blame. But, you know, all your shareholders also shift perspective within six months. Yeah. They're like, why is the burn so high? So again, I'm not blaming them.

At the end, it was my responsibility. What about you, Roman? Were you like, have you ever had this conversation? Like, let's just, you know, shut down the company. It's not working. No, no, never. Like, we had our moments. Like, it was difficult to sleep.

I also was on melatonin for a lot of time. You have to. We started smoking during that time. So it's still like. Never smoked them until the age of 32. And then you start a company and all things happened. It was really tough, but it was never about wrapping it up. It was about, okay, you have a fiduciary duty, you have a responsibility.

We are not going to give up. We knew we were not. There's no way you will give up. Figure out a way, become profitable, launch other products like Air Learn. Yeah. Well, at the end of the day, people want to learn and there's never going to change. What do you think about AI? Are you replacing some teachers with AI?

So what will happen is that, for example, language learning, where somebody is not so obsessed that I want to learn from this particular teacher, unlike test prep. Let's say Romans videos used to get million plus views each video because he was a medical doctor and he had cracked these examinations himself. So that becomes hope. That becomes that, you know, I want to study from this educator. But in categories like language learning or in categories like high school or middle school, the celebrity value of a teacher, you don't need like a big celebrity teacher, but you

need more personalized attention. So I think AI will just disrupt that. In fact, I would say that I don't know how it will look or what the UI or the UX will be, but there will be an AI tutor who will essentially be teaching us everything. I hope ALEAN becomes that. That's our goal. We want to start with language learning and do things. But we still don't know how it will look like. it still hallucinates even today, even the best models. Because the more context it has, in fact, when Sam Altman had come to India, the same question I asked him, the problem is it starts hallucinating more, the more context it has. So for example, if you have been learning maths for one year, and it knows that these are the

bad areas, but the context is now, let's say, of 10 million tokens. So it starts hallucinating. Interesting. But have you tried, like, H-JAN, for example, for one of your teachers? Oh no, my belief is that in our core business, teachers are here to stay. That's my belief. What will happen is that if a class is happening, let's say you are teaching an English class, for real-time doubt, you can have an LLM respond to queries, etc.

So that the flow of the entire class is not interrupted. But in test prep, I don't think teachers will be replaced. It will become a supplementary product. So I used to use a lot of Wikipedia and all that, so that I have completely stopped now. So a lot of learners, instead of going to a book opening it and figuring out that if you want to read about a small topic, you'll just do a chat GPT. So it's a very, very, very good supplementary product. So you don't believe in replacing. But for language learning, for school education.

If you want to tomorrow learn how to code apps in AI, you don't need a celebrity teacher. You need somebody who will sit with you and tell you that, oh my, I'm not even able to run the app on my environment. How do you fix the environment on my MacBook or whatever? So I think for a lot of use cases, an AI tutor will just change the world as we know it. But not for YouTube teaching. Not for test prep. Not for test prep. Because test prep is not technically education.

Test prep is like how Peter Thiel puts it. It's a competition. It's a tournament. So when you are preparing for it, like if it's cricket or badminton or baseball, the players want ex-coaches to train them, coaches who have been successful and that's for themselves. The mindset as well and everything. It's a discipline as a product.

You really need someone to discipline you on a day-to-day basis. Let's go back to the beginning of Unacademy. So you had two separate channels, right? On medical things and on coding, right? Yes. That I understand it. So when was this shift like, I no longer want a great content myself. I'm going to start hiring people.

So I think it's a huge mindset shift for a lot of creators. Because my journey was like, no, I'm not. can do it like me. He has to be me. Now I understand it's not the truth. But when did you feel it like, hey, we can start hiring? So for us, I think when we, even before we started the company, we knew that it's not going to be just a YouTube channel. I knew very early. I think I was in six or seven standard. I was 12 years old where I told my dad that I want to start a company called Doors because Bill Gates has launched Windows. So I think, and he was a doctor, he was, he thought I'm crazy and he sent me to a psychologist that he has gone crazy and he doesn't want to be a doctor.

So I think the journey has been interested. We knew way early that YouTube is a stepping stone and not the end goal. Interesting. Roman, how did that feel for you? Like you had this stable career. You passed all the examinations at first attempt and then suddenly you're just going to a completely different thing. So like I had new God of like for more than half of my life. We always stayed in touch on and off.

Like, it was very difficult for me to create content initially, 2011, 2012, because of so much softwares involved editing and we didn't have any help. So he had launched an app where it was very easy to create content using that. So it was kind of democratizing content creation. So I tried that and I was hooked on it and we were using that to push content. I did that for one to two years on YouTube. we were in top 20 top 30 YouTube channels in India at that time. Oh, by using that app?

Yeah. Did it optimize or what did it do? It was what TikTok did to creating entertainment content? We had done that for education. So you need like three, four softwares, you need an editing software. You need a screen recorder. You need a pan tablet. Like it required a lot of investments and a learning curve.

Yeah. You'll make a five to ten hour learning curve. And a lot of people don't have that kind of time. So we had created an educator app which democratized. creating content, you can just put your whatever content is there and you can do a voiceover. There was no face, so it was like Khan Academy style videos. That's how it blew up earlier. That's so cool.

We were like I was a massive content created in 2014-15 and I was 22, 23. But I had to realize on Kora also both of us. He had become number one by then. And so this app also allowed you to hire new people because you already had the formula, right? Did you see a decline in viewership once you replaced yourself on the channel? Yes. There were times I would call him at 3 a.m. That views a monthly targets are not being achieved.

So can you make videos? So we used to do that a lot. That was always a backup plan. But at some point, we had like 1,000 educators creating. Wow. And at some point, some teachers started becoming big than him. That's when the power of the platform used to. So the secret to replace in yourself on YouTube channel is, first of all,

standardizing everything, like the formulas that works? But this was not YouTube. This was on our own platform. Oh, that was already your, but did you upload that content on YouTube as well? No. No. In the beginning, we did.

Okay. When we moved, when we changed the business model, then we did. You changed to test prep, right? And your marketing strategy became, I remember you showing me this app where you managed like 30 plus channels or it was more? How many was it? It was more than 100 YouTube channels. Okay, 100 YouTube channels.

So you did this switch after you changed the business. model. I mean, if I were to go back into time machine, I would not have killed that product. It was one of our best products because today, we are angel investors in this app called Siko, which is similar to what we imagine in 2015. And that's one of the fastest growing products in India right now. They have gone to 60 million revenue in one year because now in India, subscriptions through UPI auto pay are taking off. At that time, subscriptions were not big. I think we were too early with that product. Internet adoption and auto pay were a huge pain.

So that startup was basically Netflix for educational content. Yes. You can say like $2 a month subscription. With a $2 a month subscription, that SICO product is at $60 million. And that was, I keep telling the founder that this is an Academy 1.0 from 2015. That's amazing. Fascinating. Okay.

So you switched to this strategy where you just started to start YouTube channels. do you know or do you remember how much it costs to run one YouTube channel so in India like because we had democratized like initially the educators were decent like you can pay them thousand dollars a month and you can hire like another thousand dollars you can hire two three people so it's quite economical to run a YouTube channel but the problem comes then when they become big you have to 10x or 100x their salaries so you have to keep churning out like how do they do it in Hollywood it's the news channel exactly if an anchor comes to big so you need to have a sort of like a creator academy where you're always creating

some celebrity so even i can say and maybe you can correct me if i'm wrong the top 40 percent of educators in india became big on the free platform of an academy the unacademy one point of because they became super big and those are still some of the top educators and since essentially everyone else copied our product yeah we are proud to say that we were the ones who sort of took online education ahead. They would never have become content creators to begin with. Yeah, and you gave them the platform. They would never have become.

The team. How does it work from the IP perspective? Because I know I've read somewhere that starting 2024, you do not allow people create content a cyber platform. Is that true? But that only happened in 2004. Prior to that, they would just leave, take the audience with them. Yes.

Exactly. This is the problem. And now you basically sign a content. that if you guys work for us, I guess we're X number of months, you can't really... So they had figured out some loopholes. They were like, oh, I'm just going to do vlogging on my other channel. But the same audience also loves to see. Yeah, you follow the face. So is it still a strategy with YouTube channels right now? Can you talk about like marketing for Unacademy today?

Is it still heavily YouTube or you think paid marketing? What is your focus? So YouTube is definitely top of the funnel as needed. We do a lot of events on YouTube, wherein we invite all our educators, learners on one platform. Sort of like Apple's flagship event, we do it two to three times a year. It's like a massive event, a lot of Hollywood celebrities, topers, our own learners, our online educators, offline educators team. They're all like Indian craters.

A lot of people gather in one place and we celebrate education at an academy. So we have started that like we have done. We just recently conducted it like a month ago. That's amazing. Apart from that, obviously, very well-calculated performance marketing is also there. Now we have pivoted to offline because that's what learners wanted after COVID. Always they wanted to go back. So we have like.

So not pivot. We have an online business. Online is still the main business. But we had to because learners demanded that they wanted to study offline as well. So now we have an offline vertical as well. So these are the major ways we acquire learners right now. Do you know for like I've seen some of your channels some videos get like 200 300 views a lot less than they used to do these videos still make sense like you do you track

analytics on every single video like hey here we lost money here we didn't or it's just an overall branding thing so what happens is that we have 600 educators and out of them hundred are upstarts they are new educators so if we only get educators who get educators who get 100,000 views, that's too expensive for us. So we hire these interns, we have an internship program, etc. We'll pay an educator $500 a month, which is huge in India to begin with. And then they start with 300, 400 views and then eventually get to. But I'm surprised because in most online categories, we are either number one, number two,

or number three between physics while and some other competitors. As we were discussing, you needed a constant supply of educators. So what got up said that you need to give them platform, let them have some breathing space. They might start with 500 views. That might be their first video. And then it will go to 5,000 and 50,000 from there. When do you cut the educator off? Like they've done it for X amount of months, no views.

When do you say like, hey, it's not working? I think it's rarely performance-based because they are the ones who leave us. We try to retain that. So I don't think if the teacher is good, they're going to get less views. either the content is bad that in that case if they're not teaching well you know we give them three warnings or whatever or they are not disciplined

it's rarely a case that if somebody was doing 100,000 views now they are doing 50,000 we just motivate them we just ping them because in education the long term value of a creator unlike entertainment which is like a six year or seven years where you see the peak in education it compounds very well

In education, if you have been creating content for 15 years, then your brand is even bigger. Because more people know you, they've grown with you. And it's a hopium business. People want the hope that, oh, this teacher has been teaching for 15 years. And that teacher has produced ranks. So it's rarely performance. It's either their teaching quality is not good or has reduced or it's discipline or physics fellow approaching our educators.

So it's somebody, some competition poaching our educators. Got it. But you come up with topics for them, right? For those teachers. Or they come up with topics. Yeah, we have a team. Yeah, that's why. Okay, now I get it.

To wrap up the YouTube topic, what would be your advice for creators like me, for example, who's been on YouTube for 10 years? They're like, I love this, but I also want to slow down on some particular topics. What would you advise, like hiring more people to run a channel, starting another channel? I think for most of the,

the creators, they're really happy with the, if you just want to sustain it as a lifestyle business and you don't really want to burden yourself. For 70 to 80% creators, they don't need to do anything actually. You can just create whatever you want to create like four videos a week, two videos a week. I just talked to a lot of creators and like, I've done that's more 10 years. I want to retire, but that's my source of income. Like, so you need to plan well in a head. You can't like, if you want to replace yourself, I think you can put a lot of faces, especially I'm see you are like doing that on your channel. No, we started multiple, after a meeting, after a meeting, we just started multiple channels.

And oh my God, thank you for that. And I saw what you have done and you were asking about how to contract them so that they get locked in and all that. So you have to be curious about it. If you want to replace yourself, you should not think that you are the only one who can do it. Yeah, I think that's the number one thing because a lot of creators are just me. You should not have that much ego, I guess. I had been there done that. So, and if you can pivot to some business.

where you can sell some product i think that can be really really good it can be a course it can be a physical product it can be a d2c brand so i think depending on what kind of distribution you have if you can separate your revenue stream from your views uh as you rightly pointed out she has the only income source whatever and it's very difficult to retire now for her because she has to continue doing that because it will get boring after five years 10 years depending on the person It's very, very difficult to churn out content regularly 52 weeks a year. It's quite difficult. So if you can separate revenue stream from either you can become a prolific angel investor.

In your case, you'll be meeting a lot of founders. So depending on the kind of distribution a YouTuber have, I think they can pivot to separating their source of income and the use. Let's talk about what's going to happen in five years. Are you going to move to the U.S.? because now U.S. is your permanent focus, I guess. I think we love living in India, but we are going to be in US for, let's say, a couple of weeks every quarter. But who knows?

I mean, at some point. But, you know, our network is there. Our friends are there, et cetera. And like you are visiting New York, we also come, packed back-to-back schedule. And then sometime for Central Park or sometime to maybe visit a jazz club in the night. But that's about it. And in five years, you know, at tech has always been a services business. even Rosetta Stone in US, which was the precursor to Duolingo,

which was an offline traditional company. And across the world, across the globe, at tech is a services business. I mean, I remember that Kossela Impact Fund had, like this is back in the day in 2016, they had sent us a mail that they are investing. But last minute, Winoth Kossla said no, that tech will never make money. We met him last year and we told him that. So he was... What did he say?

Because he's like, we're going to replace all the teams. all the doctors. I heard him speaking about that. So he was surprised that our core business was able to make $100 million. So, but he had a good view that historically at tech had not made money. In fact, what we did in India, an academy, physics, Fala, these are the companies that changed the game for the world. We made a tech interesting. So my view is that it will become a product business from a services business. If we're there.

What will happen is that. that whether it's language learning, whether it's test prep, maybe supplemental test prep to begin with, or whether it's school education, you would not need your next-door teacher, again, services business, for homework help. So homework help is the biggest market there ever is, because parents are busy with their jobs. So usually what happens in India and other parts, I don't know about US, is the parents would send somebody to the next-door neighbor who would do tuition classes. again, one to four, one to eight matches, but again, a services business. So I think that will change a lot. Interesting.

It will become a product business specifically for IT tech. But it is very tough to imagine what will happen to the rest of the world with AI. It's very tough. I mean, I don't think our human mind can comprehend. For example, I definitely think that in five years, robots will be cooking 30% of the food in the world. off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamaba's history.

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sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Please. Like, I need a robot in my house. I can't. Just manage the whole household anymore. Yeah. Yeah.

So, or we'll see more vertical use cases of robotics like that, what is called Rumba? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. More vertical use cases of that. And then, you know, we already have self-driving cars and... Crazy. San Francisco, a lot of my friends, they just switched to Waymo, just because it's so much more convenient. I heard it's 27% market share in San Francisco now.

Yeah. And if it continues... that pace, it's going to replace 200,000 drivers in the US. And the speed of innovation is so fast. You saw what happened with Ghibli images or whatever it's called. Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, let's wrap up with this thing.

Can you give advice to anyone who's starting a company for the first time in 2025? What should their mindset be, pivots, I don't know, AI. Let's talk about that, Roman. I think keep the team really lean. A lot of things can be automated. I have met a lot of AI founders, more than 20 of them. Most of them are single digit team. Figure out what the customers really, really want.

And try to think a little futuristic. I think a lot of things that you are building now might not be relevant after two, three years. The kind of pace is. Two, three weeks sometimes. You're building a product. Open air releases something. You're like, ah, baby. I'll just add one thing to it because of the phase that we went through.

earlier I used to think market is the most important thing. It's still super important, but now I think business model is the most important thing. If your business model doesn't have retention, if your business model is a utilization business, you're still going to succeed. I mean, there is still one or two airlines which make money, but it's going to be a tough journey. That's why why Com like Y Cominator somebody was saying 80% of their investments are B2B SaaS. Yeah. Because the business model is so good.

retention. Or Doe Dash or Zomato in India or Zepto because the frequency and the retention is so high. So if you're building an internet business or a tech business, retention is super duper important. Yeah. Love it. Thank you guys so much. This was really inspiring.

I hope everyone who's building something in education watches this because this is a lot of knowledge. Thank you so much for doing this. And thanks for inviting. Thank you. Thank you. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump.

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