"Education is about addiction, not content."
This provocative insight from Anshuman Singh challenges the very foundation of modern education. He argues that the secret to effective learning isn't just delivering the best lectures or materials, but creating a highly engaging, motivating, and supportive ecosystem that gets students "addicted" to the process of self-improvement, leading to incredible real-world outcomes.
Anshuman Singh is the Co-founder of Scaler, an ed-tech platform valued at over $700 million. A former engineer and tech lead at Facebook , he helped build and scale foundational products like Facebook Chat and Messenger. Frustrated by the massive gap between academic knowledge and real-world industry skills he witnessed while hiring, Anshuman is now on a mission to forge over 1 million world-class engineers. To date, Scaler has raised over $76.5 million in funding to fuel its global ambitions.
Key Insights from the Conversation:
- From Content to Community: The journey from InterviewBit to Scaler was driven by the realization that content is a commodity. The real, defensible moat is a structured, high-touch ecosystem that provides live interaction, peer learning, and constant support.
- Mentorship as the Core Differentiator: The pivot to a paid, intensive program was based on the data-backed insight that personalized guidance from experienced industry mentors was the single biggest accelerator for student success.
- Engineering 'Addiction' for Education: Scaler’s product is not just a learning platform; it’s an engagement engine. It uses gamification, daily streaks, and community dynamics to keep students spending an average of 186 minutes per day learning.
- The Power of the Prepaid Model: Anshuman explains why they deliberately moved away from an Income-Sharing Agreement (ISA) model to a fully prepaid one. This attracted more motivated and committed professionals, leading to significantly better outcomes and a 2.7x average salary increase for graduates.
- Building a Brand on Tangible Outcomes: Scaler's growth and ability to raise capital are built on trust generated by delivering tangible, life-changing results for its students, creating a powerful referral engine that now accounts for over 30% of new enrollments.
YouTube Chapters
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:51] - How a Global Programming Competition Got Me Into Facebook
[04:32] - Why I Chose High-Risk, High-Growth Facebook Over Google
[14:22] - The Inside Story of Building Facebook Chat & Messenger From Scratch
[20:26] - The "Why": Leaving Facebook to Fix India's Broken Tech Education
[25:06] - Phase 1: Building a Free Tool (InterviewBit) & Our First Business Model
[33:25] - The "Aha!" Moment: Discovering the Real Secret to Effective Learning
[40:15] - The "Online Stanford" Playbook: How We Re-engineered Education
[55:18] - Why We Killed Our 'Pay After Placement' Model & Pivoted to Prepaid
[1:08:03] - Scaler Today: The Path to $100M ARR & Replacing Universities
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