The Pomp Podcast - #604: The Future of Online Education with Gagan Biyani

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Gagan Biyani is the co-founder and CEO of Maven, a new platform for cohort-based courses. He was a co-founder of Udemy, a large online education company, and was co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company. In this conversation, we discuss online education, cohort-based courses, building a startup, importance of focus, scaling platforms, Bitcoin & Crypto course, and what students want from online education.  ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global teams. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes, and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Sign up for Remote today and receive 50% off your first employee for the first three months. Check out remote.com/pomp and enter promo code POMP to get started. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Gagan Biani is the co-founder and CEO of Maven, a new platform for cohort-based courses. He was a co-founder of Udemy, a large online education company, and was also the co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery business. In this conversation, we discuss online education, cohort-based courses building a startup the importance of focus scaling platforms the bitcoin and crypto course and what students want from online education i really enjoyed this conversation from gagan and i hope you do as well before we get into this episode though i want to

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Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of POMP Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Goggin here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for having me, Pomp. I'm so excited.

Absolutely. Let's just jump right into online education. I feel like over the last couple of years, people are waking up to the fact that they want to learn, they want to be better educated on either specific topics or just general knowledge. But maybe the path of going to a traditional university, taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt may not be the path for everyone. Doesn't mean that it can't be helpful, just being said, it's probably not for every single person. And you've been in the online education space for a long time. So kind of just talk to us about like what you've seen and how this industry has evolved over the last few years. Yeah. It's so funny because online education was like a black mark on a startup's

resume. If you were talking about it back when we started in 2009, when we started Udemy, people basically said, oh, online education, I don't invest in that or online education, huh? I even had a quote from Paul Graham that he called it a tar pit or a pit hole. I can't remember which one, but the point is like back in 2009, people didn't believe that learning on the internet was a thing. And here we are in 2021. And I'm amazed, amazed at how optimistic people are about learning over the internet. And the average person I interact with today is looking at the internet as like this vast source of knowledge. You know, everything from being able to Google or Wikipedia or YouTube basic knowledge to taking advanced online courses like cohort-based courses,

people are opening up to the idea that these courses might actually be better than the courses that they took in college. And that inflection point is coming because both colleges and sort of mainstream education are losing their appeal with rising costs, and as online learning is increasing in its quality. And that's a big shift that's happened recently. So that's why we're so excited about cohort-based courses, because they represent a major change and major improvement in the quality of the online learning experience. One of the things that's fascinating is this idea that so many people were previously aware of online education, but they kind of stayed away from an investment standpoint. Was that because there was a lack of belief that like it was

effective? Do you think it maybe was, they didn't think they could make money investing in those types of businesses, maybe kind of a mix and any insight into maybe what was driving, you know, folks from kind of avoiding the space previously? The internet in 2009 and the VC landscape was so different. Today, if you come to someone with a crazy idea about a new market that people haven't thought of investing in, in the past, like let's say you started, you came in with a pet food company, right. Or you came in with a company, I don't know about like selling, selling, selling plant plant advice, right. People are much more open-minded that there might be the next big thing on the internet might be in a sector or industry that they did not expect. Whereas back

in 2009, there were a much narrower and clear sets of areas in which people felt like they could make money. And they mostly stayed in their lanes. The majority of investors had three to five categories they were looking at, and that's what they invested in. So not to say that there weren't investors who were looking more broadly, but the majority of investors weren't. So that's the major change. It's not just online learning. It's digital health care. It's fitness. It's entertainment broadly. And it's owned content. Owned content was never something VCs would invest in in the past. It's non-platform businesses. There's such a wide... And then, of course, crypto. Like, what a crazy, wild idea that came out of nowhere over the last decade, right? So

you have a number of these new sectors and investors have sort of changed their thought process. There's also just like 10x more investors and more money going into startups because there's so much better returns. And so I think that's a large part of it. And online education in specifics got hot over the last decade because we showed that there's money there. I mean, Udemy is going to, you know, Udemy is a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of millions of dollars in transactional volume and revenue. And nobody believed that was possible. But now that Udemy, Coursera, Udacity, Masterclass, Kajabi, Teachable, all these companies are putting up billion dollar numbers, either in valuation or in revenue or gross market merchandise value. I think a lot

of investors are like, wow, okay, this is a big trend. And now if I don't invest in it, I probably am missing out on whatever the next set of opportunities are going to be in this market. For sure. And one of the things obviously that you've kind of iterated on and improved over time is this model that is now called a cohort-based course. Maybe describe a little bit about the difference between cohort-based versus the other models and why you're so bullish on this being a highly effective way for education

to be kind of shared on the internet. So I think since time immemorial, there have been two ways to learn. There's been the autodidactic way. I am going to go and learn on my own, right? I'm gonna read books. i'm gonna have a textbook uh or i'm gonna like go and do research uh usually it has to do with reading until about roughly the like mid you know 20th century when it started to become video based

so you could buy dvds and then of course the big online learning revolution was hey you could just watch videos on the internet and you could pay maybe 10 50 dollars and learn a subject and that was a huge revolution for autodidactic learning. Historically, though, autodidactic learning has always been a small percentage of the spend in learning. And actually, the bigger spend in learning has almost always been in the other format, which is cohort-based courses. So if you think about any professional education you've ever been in, any seminar you've attended, even conferences, and then, of course, universities in any K-12 school, they're all cohort-based. And the difference is that you don't learn entirely on your own. You have a requirement and expectation to do homework or projects or, you know, learn and read material in advance. But there is structure to your learning. Someone has gone through and curated an experience that has a start and end date and everyone learns at the same time together.

So in a seminar, people start in the morning, they end in the afternoon, and you're all in the same group. At a school, you have the same class from September all the way until August. Sorry, September until May. And so cohort-based courses have always been a thing, but they haven't been a big thing on the internet until Zoom and Slack came around, right? And so now that Zoom and Slack are big, the internet's now ready to take the mantle of cohort-based courses and apply the same thing that we applied to video-based courses or to

autodidactic learning. We're now doing it to learning that's more advanced, learning that has more structure to it where the instructor is taking you from point A to point B. So when you start thinking through how to build a company for this, right? I'm an investor in Maven, the company you run today, and I've got one of the courses on the platform. But how did you go from the insight of, okay, the world is changing. There's now new tools available. People might want to learn in this kind of old model, but in a new venue on the internet to actually, let's start a company around this. And we think that we can build a product and raise capital and kind of commercialize it to some degree. There's so many ways to come up with a

startup idea. I'm going to tell you my philosophy and it works for me because I'm a, you know, I'm my own type of entrepreneur. And I think it works for a majority of entrepreneurs, but there are other ways. I don't start companies with the idea that I want to start a company. That's just not how I get inspiration. I'm not excited to make a lot of money or build a really big organization that like, you know, look at me, I'm on Forbes. Like that's just not my mentality going in. I'm happy to be that type of entrepreneur and I'm not going to complain about the benefits, But that's not my focus. My focus is I like to live my daily life and to start to think about what's next in the context of what would I like to do for fun and what would I like to do to have an impact on the world? and almost always that involves joining companies, starting projects. This creative phase

is highly focused not on, oh, I need to build a company because I think that wraps my ego too much in the goal. And instead, it's a process of just learning and trying to figure out what's interesting. And so I spent 12 months and this time, this is my third time starting a startup, probably like seventh or 10th company, but third startup. And this time I actually did it in a really structured way. I told myself my fiance was going to business school at Oxford. And I basically said, she starts in September and ends in the following September. So it was 12 months. And I'm going to give myself 12 months to figure out what I want to do next. And I had no idea what that was going to be. I looked into politics. I looked into conservation in Africa. I looked

into writing a book. And then I started writing on the internet. And it was kind of around that time where I was like, wow, the way that I keep learning how to write a book and writing on the internet is taking online courses. I took Tucker Max's course about writing a book. And then I took David Perel's course on writing online. And that's when the insight came to me. It was like, oh my God, this is huge. What an opportunity. The types of courses I'm taking today that are fully digital are completely different from the video-based courses we were creating on Udemy. Like back in 2009, when I wanted to learn about education or learn about startups, I went online and read a lot and I watched a lot of YouTube videos. And so I noticed a new pattern happening in my

autodidactic self, right? Which was, hey, I'm learning through video-based courses. I'm interacting with people. I'm going on Zoom. I'm doing exercises and then bring them to my group of peers. And that's sort of when I started to get interested in the idea that cohort-based courses could be a business. Then I started diving deeper into cohort-based courses and just sort of went down the rabbit hole. And I explored all sorts of different options. I thought about just launching the course myself. And I did a few of those as test runs to learn more about the market. I also went and worked with businesses that were already building cohort-based courses and sort of consulted or advised for them. So I worked with, you know,

a guy in the EU who was building a cohort-based course for entrepreneurs. I worked with a company in the States that was building cohort-based courses. And at this point, I hadn't even named the category. I just sort of knew that these were something in education that involves Zoom. Let's call it that. Then at some point, you know, sorry. Right. Yeah. So, and once you kind of said, okay, like this is a new thing, what do you do from there? Right. So then I get to the point where I'm like, oh, this is a new thing. What are the ways I could tackle this market? And I just let myself think about them. And one day it hits me, the right model for this market is a platform-based

approach because of the way the internet is, because of the way the things are. And this is like a choice of business model. I think there are usually three to five options for how you can go. And I really believe in being ruthless about picking the right option because the option is going to decide everything for the future. And so we could have been a creator of core-based courses. I could have been a publisher. I could have decided to be a marketplace where we're going to sell core-based courses on behalf of instructors. And eventually I could have just built software. We decided this platform approach was going to be the right one. Um, and then I went and started to test that out and raise money for it and build it.

What's fascinating to me about, um, kind of the path that you took is, uh, one word that I kind of just want to think of you, I think of is focus, right? Uh, the, the thing that, uh, people internally know that maybe people actually don't know is for a long time, you didn't even have a name for the company, right? It was just, I think you even had raised money at one point, uh, from investors and still didn't have an official name for the business. And so maybe talk through just like the trade-offs of like, how did you evaluate? What should you focus on? What maybe isn't as important? And then kind of how you divide up your time and attention across the multitude of things that you could pursue in the early stages where resources are light and there's just a lot of work

to do? In my mind, startups have a very clear pattern of how they are built. And I strictly follow that pattern and focus all my attention in any given stage within that pattern of what is the highest value thing or the most important thing I need to accomplish in order to get to the next stage. So in the ideation stage, you just heard me talk about, my goal is just to figure out like, what do I want to do next and to leave it really broad. So that stage needs to be highly actually goal agnostic, essentially, and just a creative phase. So there's a creative phase. That's the first phase in a startup. The second phase is you have a vision or an inkling of an idea, and you have to test whether or not that idea has any sort of legs and has what I would call

product market fit, but you're kind of product market fit as multiple stages. So the first stage is just, um, do I think that this has a chance of having product market fit? And that's the stage that you met me, that we met each other in, which was, I thought core based courses were going to be big. I'd already seen a bunch of courses be successful, but I didn't know for sure whether or not we could build a platform. And I didn't know the risks or costs associated with that. And so I was pretty ruthlessly focused on just proving that out. And so for the first six months, you know, our team was almost all business people. There weren't a lot of engineers on the team because I didn't think the risk was whether

or not we could build a great product. I thought the risk was whether or not we could sell the product. And so I spent all my time trying to work with people like you, and you were kind enough to be one of our, you were kind of to be our first instructor and have also been our most successful instructor. But I learned a lot from working with you and with Lee Jin and Lenny Ruchitsky and Saha Lavingia, our first four instructors. And through that process, I started to say, oh, OK, this has an option. And this is and we started to refine. Right. We learned that, for example, four week courses might be a little too long.

Maybe we should shorten them a little bit so we can do one or two week courses. And they're just as effective. And actually, students like them more. We learned how to interact with an instructor like you, like you've done a great job bringing on Colton, right? Having a partner is a big thing. So we know now that having a partner is an important part of this whole process and we need to make sure there's room for that. So we figured out our revenue share during that time. So this discovery period was all about narrowing it on product market fit. And then we said, okay, we've got this thing. We think it's going to work. We're going to start introducing it to the world. And that's when we launched the name and the website.

And now we're in this phase of, okay, we've proven that with a few people, we can definitely get courses off the ground and make them really successful. So we've done over a million dollars of course sales. They're really growing, and it looks like that's going to be a big opportunity. But how do we then make this accessible to a wider variety of people? Because we think the vision of Maven is that there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of potential instructors out there and not just 10. And so we can't handhold everyone. So now we're in the phase of just proving that we have a product and an offering that can meet the next phase,

which is, can we prove that a lot of instructors love Maven? And we're starting to prove that. So you can see that I'm very phase driven in my approach and focus on whatever the highest risk potential thing that could kill the business. And what's the highest benefit that could make the business successful and everything else is just noise. Yeah. It's fascinating because I think people who have an academic understanding or maybe have never built a company before or invested in them usually think of entrepreneurs as risk takers, right? People who seek out risk, they enjoy it, they thrive on it. But in reality, what exactly you're highlighting here is they actually are risk mitigators, right? They think

of all of the risks and they work to try to remove that risk from the business because it increases the odds of success. And if you can kind of do it effectively over and over and over again, you end up building a pretty big business, pretty successful business. And so it's fascinating to just kind of hear you articulate that in the way that you did. For me, I think what's so fascinating about this entire experience, right? I mean, we've done over 400 students, I think now through the cohort-based sessions, and there's this element of information transfer, right? So information that we've put together and kind of vetted and made sure it's high quality, it's effective, It really delivers on the promise that people are looking for when they come.

But also, there's an element of the community. And I've been shocked, I think, from my perspective, how many people at the end tell us, look, one of the most important parts of this or one of the most enjoyable parts of it was actually the other people I went through the course with. And so for you, you've got this really interesting experience where you saw those single player online courses before. So I take it and I don't really have that community aspect. Do you also see that across other courses on the platform where folks say that the community aspect is kind of a core thing? Or

is that something that maybe is specific to Bitcoin and kind of the crypto industry? It's universal. People buy cohort-based courses for the promise of the outcomes. They're always outcome-focused. Like, I want to get a job in crypto. I'm going to take Pomp's crypto course, I want to learn more about this subject, I'm going to take, you know, this person's course, they almost always leave with a feeling of community. And so if you read the feedback before and after, it's so different, because people don't realize how valuable it is to just meet like 100 other people who are into this thing that they're into. And also the knock on effects of that are super valuable, right? So think about college, right? A lot of people,

like the NPS for college is shockingly high, net promoter score for college. People actually still really love college. And if you read why people love college, very few people will talk about the education. Almost everyone will say, yeah, those were the best learning experiences of my life in terms of like growing up and mostly in terms of people they met. And so, you know, course-based courses, course-based courses provide that same level of magic. They have this magic of like, you're going into breakout rooms, you're meeting people of the same interest, they have similar backgrounds. And, you know, as we get better and better at building these courses, we're going to get better at matching people with their friends. And we're going to get better at

making sure that that experience is truly special of the community that they find. And I think people are going to continue to take these courses not for just the educational aspect, which you can get in a book or on a Wikipedia article sometimes, but actually for the accountability, the rigor that it forces you to have, as well as the community. Yeah. And I guess part of this is, you know, I would ask you, how are you scaling a marketplace? You've used the word platform a few times. So maybe talk a little bit just about the product and how you see building that, right? Early on, you said that you had a lot of more business folks, because you felt that was a risk of could you actually onboard the instructors and kind of use them to want to do this. But it

sounds like now you've really focused on the software and building out the product. So just talk a little bit, you know, marketplace platform or how you think about that and how you scale it. Yeah. To be fair, we're still at the point where business folks is a main way that we deliver value to instructors. So our main value right now is if you've never taught a cohort-based course before, it is way harder than it sounds. You have to figure out how to build a community. You have to figure out great content. And if you're charging like a thousand bucks, you know, the quality of what you have to deliver is much higher than what you've ever done. So if you're good at podcasting or conference talks, this is a totally different ballgame. There's another level

of density and there's another level of community building that just don't exist in traditional talks that you give when you aren't getting paid for them. And so what Maven does primarily is we teach people how to build cohort-based courses. And that is like a huge value add. As we're growing, what we're realizing is eventually people are going to know how to teach cohort-based courses and we need to make those core-based courses better. And so the model that we pursue or where we're headed is building software that makes Maven indispensable as a product that makes your course better.

So we just talked about community, right? I think eventually Maven should be able to solve the community problem for you. Right now, we solve it by teaching you or we actually taught Colton how to build a community and helped onboard him and help him think through it. But eventually, actually, we can match people for you We can help students teach each other on the platform and therefore allow the instructor

to have a course that's broader than what they are. And so we're moving towards a world where Maven will be a platform on which if you build your course, your course will be so much better that it's worth building it on Maven. And we aren't necessarily a marketplace because we think that the goal of Maven is to enable the best instructors. and we can't enable the best instructors if we bring all the demand because it changes your business model. So if you look at Udemy, Udemy doesn't enable the best instructors. Udemy enables the best students because Udemy is a marketing machine. And the thing that Udemy does super,

super well is we bring at Udemy, we bring students to courses, but the instructors at the top end who can bring their own students, they don't want to teach on Udemy because of that problem. And so Maven's goal is to take less of a percentage, be more of an enabler than a creator, and let the creators build their own courses and just make you as successful as humanly possible. Yeah, it's very interesting as, you know, I've done a couple of these now, learning, you know, why are people coming? And I thought it was going to be for the education, for the information. I walk away, hey, I didn't know something, now I know it, kind of check that box, that was worth it. But what I found was, and you said earlier, it's like an outcome-based thing, right? They're coming for not just the education. In my case, they're coming because they want to get a job in the industry. So you have to meet a certain quality bar and you need to be able to go ahead and then kind of hand them off or help them, right? If that's what they're coming for. But I don't know if it'd be possible for a platform to bring those types of folks to me. It's almost like a very specialized audience, a very specialized customer base. And so I'm much better suited to do that than a platform is. But the platform is much better suited to empower me with all the tools and operational excellence than I could do on my own. Right. Yeah. I mean, just to play this back to you, I think the thing that makes you so impressive as a creator is just how willing you are to partner offload, sort of like work with others to make your own world bigger. And what I found at Maven is that there are, and with creators in general, is there's a real value in the multiplicative approach of having partners in different things.

So like at Maven, as an example, it would be insane if we were going to like run Maven without partnering with things like Zoom, we partner with Slack, right? We use a lot of other, and then of course we partner with investors, right? We have A16Z, we have you, you know, investing in our company. And so we really believe in this multiplicative approach to success. And you've just done a great job because you brought in Colton and you incentivized him. And I think that was like the smartest move I've seen anyone make. We're actually going to try and replicate it to say, hey, if I have someone else who is on my team helping me build this and I give him the responsibility and just let him

run with it. And then I focus on what I'm good at, which is teaching and obviously audience building. Those are your two main strengths. I mean, you're an incredible teacher. I watched, you know, a lot of your first week, you know, your first lectures, and I'm sure that you've improved since then even more, but you were just a natural. And I think that's what Maven does. Maven provides you this, like, it's just one of many tools that you should have in your

tool set as a creator. And yeah, I'm pretty proud of the way that you've, that it's worked out with you. And I hope we can have more creators who think of it in the way that you do, because I think you've, you know, you run your course, you've been the most successful creator on the platform, in part because of your willingness to partner with Colton. And then, of course, with us as well, I think. Yeah. And, you know, for those that don't know this about me, I'm a huge believer in this idea of like single threaded leadership. Right. And it's just for me, I got a million things going on. If I literally spent all day trying to do all of them by myself, I would get nothing done. Instead, by essentially finding somebody who is not only competent, is ambitious, and is successful in their own right, and saying to them, listen, you're going to be responsible for this specific body of work, and you're going to reap the benefits if it's successful, and you're also going to be to blame if it's not, it provides that focus. It provides that kind of accountability and responsibility. And so it's something that over the years I've just learned and kind of replicated over and over again. And I also have a point of, I think, when somebody is responsible for something, they want it to be high quality, right? you're much more likely to kind of skimp on quality. If it's the 14th most important thing you're doing, it doesn't seem like you need to focus on quality as much as the number one most

important thing you're doing. And so when you have somebody who that's their dedicated job or kind of focus, you just actually get higher quality as well. So it's like higher quality feeds back into more success, more success leads to, you know, greater focus, greater focus leads back into kind of higher quality. And so it's this like very nice, you know, kind of self-reinforcing mechanism that so far has worked really well. And maybe it's been a big part of that. Colton's been a big part of that. We'll just keep going. Amazing. Yeah, we're so excited. And I think that the future of what you're doing is such a big opportunity, right? I mean, imagine if there's hundreds or thousands of instructors like you out there. And I think eventually there'll be

hundreds of thousands of people who are taking their time to teach the new generation, the next generation of leaders what they know. And you are just so much better equipped to teach people crypto than any professor at any university, right? I mean, I put you up there as better than literally almost anyone. And that's crazy that you in your current life could never be a university professor, but you can be an instructor on Maven. You can be an instructor on the internet via podcasting and things. And so I'm really excited about finding more people like you who want to build their brand and their knowledge and teach people what currently is not really knowledge that is available out there. What you teach in your course is pretty unique. Can't find it anywhere

else. Speaking of hundreds of thousands of instructors, before we get to the rapid fire questions, just fast forward, maybe 10, 15, 20 years from now, how do you see Maven kind of evolving? And what does this look like in kind of the steady state once you've been able to really build out the team, build out the platform, and get a pretty big number of instructors on the platform? Maven's goal is to be the university of the future. You know, we really believe that there's an opportunity right now to reset the online, the education system broadly through the internet, through the online learning angle. And so we think that over the next decade, we are going to inspire and empower the largest faculty in the world. We want to build the largest

faculty of the best instructors in the world. And we think that those people look a lot more like you and Li Jin, then they do look like someone who spent seven years getting a PhD and then is getting tenure at some mid-range university. And so over time, what does this mean? Well, it means that as we have more and more courses, eventually we can provide more and more outcomes. So what if you are taking a course on crypto and you also have a course on recruiting, and then you also have a course on the creator economy? Well, if you combine these three things, you can now work for a crypto-focused creator economy company as a recruiter, right? And so you can imagine all sorts of different, like, opportunities where if you're on Maven and you're

learning, you can learn from, you know, Anthony Popliano about one thing. You can learn from Legion about another thing. You can learn from Lenny Ruchitsky on product management or learn from someone on recruiting. And all these things combined can become a much better education than what you can get anywhere else in the world. And so our goal is to empower creators to become those professors of the future so that eventually there's literally thousands or hundreds of thousands of options for people to learn that are far more effective and more engaging and higher quality than what they have today in the current system. What's been the most surprising and maybe the most fun thing since you started going down this

path till today? The most surprising thing is just how hard a cohort-based course is to build and run. I'm amazed every time at Wes Kao, my co-founder. She always is like, this is hard, this is challenging. And I think I've been just amazed at watching Wes come up with ways to make it easier for people. And so we're getting better and better every couple of months at just making it easier so that if you are thinking about running a core-based course, you can go through like our three to six week program and you'll be three to six months ahead of what you would be, or maybe even two years ahead of what you would be without it. The most fun thing, honestly, is team building. I like, you know, yesterday my executive assistant posted on Instagram

a post that she had been waiting on for a couple of months and she just talked about how she found she feels like she found home uh being at Maven and honestly that like that made me tear up I really was just amazed at the it's just so fun to be uh an important part of people's lives um so team building to me isn't just team building within Maven uh you know within the company but another anecdote is, you know, we have an instructor, Sahil Bloom, who bought his first house using proceeds from his Maven course. And so just like the impact we can have on people, the team being a broader group than just the impact on my employees, but also the impact on our instructors. And then, of course, the impact on students. Like you had a student recently who

got a job in crypto. You've had many of them now at this point who got jobs in crypto as a result of taking your course, the impact is just, it's hard to beat. Yeah. That's a great answer. Before I let you go, I usually ask everyone the same three questions. You'll get to ask me one at the end. What's the most important book you think you've ever read? The most important book I've ever read. I think that the most important book is not, it's not going to fit what most people think. But it's a book is a tragedy of great power politics by John Mearsheimer. Okay. Why, why that book? And I don't even agree with everything he says. Uh, but the reason it's the most important book is because it opened my eyes to a form of thinking, um, first principles

thinking in a more of a show than a tell way. So this book is just so incredibly well-written and clear, that it introduced me to the idea of writing and thinking from a first principles way and explaining the world in a certain way. And it also explained to me the downside of that, which is that Mears-Scherber kind of misses a lot of the nuances of how great power politics actually works. But it was such a study for me. And I spent a lot of years of my life thinking about politics and how it works at that level because of this book. That's a great answer. Second question is from our friends over at Eight Sleep. I now finally am sleeping on the Eight Sleep bed and they sleep five or six hours. I just turn it freezing cold and I sleep like

eight or nine hours to the point where if I'm ever not home, if I'm traveling or something, I can't wait to get back because I know I'm going to get a better night of sleep. and it's been completely life-changing for me. What's your sleep schedule, especially as you've kind of started the business and started to grow it now? I'm absolutely a nine hour asleep guy. So I get nine hours of sleep 90% of the nights.

I pretty much always throw in the towel around 10 or 11. I go to bed. I also crank down the temperature. I don't have an eight sleep yet because I'm kind of in transition, but I do plan on buying one. Nice. And I, I sleep eight to nine hours every night and I wake up and I, I almost always have my mornings blocked off, not just so that I can work, but also so that I can sleep if I end up

sleeping really late. Yeah. That being able to get nine hours, like 90% of the time, that's fantastic. So you are a, you're an A plus student for that question compared to most people. Next one's more fun aliens are you a believer or a non-believer i'm a believer yeah i think i think it's hard it's hard it's hard to imagine i haven't spent enough time doing actual math on it but it's hard to imagine with the size of the universe that there aren't aliens out there i think the thing that people might miss though that i personally i haven't again haven't done the math on but is that aliens are out there, but time and space is a two-part thing. And so the question is not just where are the aliens, but when are they? And I don't know if it's clear that they are going to

overlap with us in the way, in the time and space because of the fact that it's two-factor and not one factor. I literally, that's exactly what I think is that they exist, but we'll never come in contact with them because they're probably too far away or different timing. So I definitely agree. You could ask me one question to finish up. What do you got for me? Tell me about the biggest downside to moving to Miami. What do you miss the most? it's always going to be people like you just wherever you live somewhere uh you make a bunch of friends i've got uh a number of friends that i'm very close with that are still in new york um you know they've come down here to visit we've obviously gone back and seen them uh but that's

really it uh you know and it's kind of a weird like downside because uh just as you can't spend as much time with certain people uh it opens up the opportunity to spend more time with other people. Um, and so you gotta kind of, uh, take that balance of, uh, if you have high quality friends and, you know, wherever you were and in, let's say Miami, uh, it's okay. Uh, but that's probably the biggest downside. It's just, you get used to hanging out with certain friends and enjoy it. And then if you move, uh, they're not there anymore. Right. And so you can FaceTime and do all that. It's just not the same. Yeah. I, I have the same feeling about any place that I've lived in. So I can totally relate to that. Well, Pom, thanks so much for having me on.

I really enjoyed this. Absolutely. Where can we send people to find you on Twitter and find out more about Maven? Maven is easy. It's maven.com. M-A-V-E-N. Very proud of having gotten that domain. And I'm also very easy because my name is very unique. So I'm assuming it'll be in the show title, et cetera, but it's Gagan Vianney on Twitter and it's Gagan Vianney.com. If you want to join my newsletter again on the website, Gagan Vianney, Maven, pretty easy. That is very simple. So I highly suggest people go follow you on Twitter too. You got some great, great tweets. So keep that up as well. And we will definitely do this again in the future as you guys keep going. Sounds good. Thanks, Pop. Really appreciate it.