Victor Chima and Boina Babu are the founders of LearnCrunch, business partners, and former co-workers at Spotify. LearnCrunch is a live cohort-based interactive learning platform that helps tech professionals learn business-critical skills they can apply on the job to increase their impact. Both Boina and Victor are continuous learners, working in data and other industries to build the best learning experience for tech professionals. In this episode of Unlearn, Boina and Victor discuss upskilling with Barry O’Reilly, sharing the importance of learning and why companies need to actively facilitate it on the job.
LearnCrunch: Origins
Victor shares how LearnCrunch came to be. After realizing he felt the most fulfilled helping other people grow on the job, he ventured into management to continue doing it at a larger scale. Empowering people was something he was good at and loved doing, so he considered how to maximize this skill and passion. Over drinks, Victor and Boina commiserated over the difficulty of transferring knowledge from one person to another, and thus MentorColor was born. This platform allowed them to connect professionals with mentors from top companies. But that only solved part of the problem, Victor says. The resources for learning were accessible, but that didn’t make the learning experience magically easy. The next challenge was knowing what resources to use, where to find them, and which ones to trust. “We decided to help people get through the noise and focus on the things that actually matter,” Victor explains.
Building MentorColor
Barry asks Victor and Boina to share some things they unlearned while transitioning from Spotify to MentorColor, and then to LearnCrunch. “For a lot of the things we did at MentorColor, we had already done them at Spotify,” Victor replies. One such thing involved hiring. When it comes to getting access to opportunities and knowledge, people are often penalized by being in the “wrong” geography. This is something Victor is intimately familiar with, being from Nigeria, so he made it a point to attract as much talent as he could from around the world.
Making the Leap
Everything remains a side project until you start giving it 100% of your focus, Victor says. MentorColor was a side project, but LearnCrunch is their obsession. What they do in a month at LearnCrunch was a year’s worth of work at MentoColor. “We thought to ourselves, ‘We either get serious with this or not; we can’t know if it's working the way we want it to work unless we're giving it everything that we can,’” he shares.
No Man is an Island
“We wouldn’t have a platform if we didn’t have the relationships we do,” Victor remarks. He sees LearnCrunch as a two-way street; everyone is there to support each other, to align interests and solve a problem together. Victor talks about the importance of learning. “How do you create an environment where we can ensure that people get the learning outcomes they want?” Companies tend to solve this problem by hiring new people; they don’t facilitate learning, so the current talent pool just keeps working based on the knowledge they had previously. Then, the companies complain about a lack of talent. “What about upscaling those that are there? Sometimes, they need [the company’s] support to do it because they're very focused on execution.”
Looking Ahead
What’s exciting to look forward to is that it’s a new market, Boina says.”We’re working on something that is big enough to be passionate about, to be focused on.” He is very motivated by the fact that they will be connecting people to awesome instructors like Barry and impacting their lives in monumental ways.
Read full show notes at BarryO'Reilly.com
Resources
LearnCrunch
MentorColor
Victor Chima on LinkedIn
Boina Babu on LinkedIn
