Pradeep Poonia on His Fight Against Whitehat Jr, Withdrawal of the Lawsuit & Impact on Edtech Space

Pradeep Poonia is a software developer, who was sued by WhiteHat Jr for Rs 20 crore ($2.7 million) for defamation and copyright infringement. He is the guy who created the YouTube channel called ‘WhiteHat Sr’ and started questioning WhiteHat Jr’s marketing tactics and business model when no one was listening. After speaking out against WhiteHat Jr, his 16 videos, two YouTube channels, two Reddit accounts, one Twitter handle, three articles on LinkedIn and Quora accounts were either removed or temporarily disabled.

In this video, Pradeep Poonia talks about his journey in fighting the Rs 20 crore ($2.7 million) lawsuit filed by WhiteHat Jr and Karan Bajaj against him, how it bought a positive change, India’s edtech space and his plans for the future.

WhiteHat Jr withdraws the lawsuit against Pradeep: It came as a surprise to Pradeep and his team but he is glad that some sense prevailed in the end and WhiteHat Jr decided to withdraw the lawsuit. He is also grateful to everyone who supported him in his journey, especially everyone on Reddit, Telegram and LinkedIn.

Impact of Pradeep’s fight against WhiteHat Jr: At the time when Pradeep was the only one criticizing WhiteHat Jr and didn’t have a lot of support but now a lot of people are not just supporting him but also coming out and sharing their own stories and feedback on WhiteHat Jr’s business and marketing practices openly. The company has also stopped using FOMO to drive growth, due to which their sales have also gone down significantly.

Benefits of Pradeep speaking out against WhiteHat Jr: Initially, the company was aggressively quashing dissenting views and taking down posts and accounts across social media platforms. Now, however, parents, students and even their employees are able to openly share their views without the fear of their account being suspended.

Talking about India’s edtech space: The pandemic has been a perfect opportunity for edtech startups to grow rapidly and because they have been so focused on growth that a number of problems have cropped up like in the case of Vedantu, their own sales team had been taking advantage of the ‘any time refund’ policy to get more people to sign up to grow the numbers and claiming the refund later. This means their growth isn’t what it looks like from the outside and that is the case with most edtech startups that are too focused on growth at all costs.

Possible solutions to edtech problems: Some suggestions from Pradeep include opening a dialogue with all the involved stakeholders like parents, students, entrepreneurs, teachers and startups to better understand the needs of each other. He also believes that it is time for the government to step in and create their own edtech platforms that can help reach the sections of society that are not served by these startups and also there needs to be a balanced approach when regulating the industry in order to leave room for innovation while keeping things in check.

Focus on the solution, not the problem: More and more edtech startups are trying to get into the coaching market but the problem is that we still have more students that want to get into premier colleges like IITs and IIMs but there aren’t enough good colleges. So, rather than preparing everyone for IITs and IIMs, it’s time to create better schools and colleges.

What’s next for Pradeep Poonia: While Pradeep is still preparing for his UPSC exams, he is also working on some ideas on how to teach computer science concepts to kids in a more effective manner. Now that he is free of the lawsuit, he will be focusing on a bunch of ideas that come his way.