Mentor-driven learning online
Great Learning, an online education site, is focused on an optimal combination of process, technology and people
Online education site Great Learning’s Mohan Lakhamraju was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug early on in life. A computer engineer from Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai, in the early 1990s when his peers were acquiring degrees from colleges in the United States, Lakhamraju dropped out of his doctorate at Berkeley, California, to be part of a start-up that was eventually bought over and subsumed into Hewlett Packard.
But his start-up experience opened his eyes to how little he knew about business. So, at 26, he headed off to Stanford Business School to bone up on his business skills. Thereafter, he joined a venture capital firm in the US and subsequently, Tiger Global’s India office in Mumbai, with a focus on the education space.
Following the 2008-09 financial crisis, Lakhamraju resigned from Tiger and set up a small energy management business school in Gurugram called Institute of Energy Management. His entrepreneurial streak remained, albeit taking shape more as an educator than as a typical businessman.
Soon after, Lakhamraju came across the Great Lakes Institutes of Management founded by Bala V Balachandran, a US resident and professor who had been involved in the setting up of Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. In 2010, he merged his energy management school into a broader management space and became vice-chairman of the merged
entity, the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Gurugram.
But what rankled was that he could cater to so few students at Great Lakes. His own lower middle-income upbringing had exposed Lakhamraju to the lack of affordable quality education in India. That’s when he and his two co-founders hit upon the idea of starting Great Lear- ning. As opposed to the exclusive Great Lakes campuses, the Great Learning site was meant to be as inclusive as possible.
Lakhamraju had also noticed that massive open online course provider Coursera — founder Andrew Ng was his classmate at Berkeley — was already beginning to get some traction in India.
By August 2013 — a bit ahead of most others in the space (upgrad went live in 2015 and Simplilearn in 2010) — the Great Learning site was up and running in a hybrid model where students came in for classes a
few days and did the rest online, making it one of the early birds in the blended space.
Lakhamraju says that Great Learning, an optimal combination of process, technology and people, followed three defining principles to promote learning. One, it worked on the assumption that students are not selfmotivated enough to learn and finish courses on their own. “Very few have the kind of drive one assumes in such learning,” he says.
Hence, mentors who guide students through the programme are a major part of the Great Learning offering. At present, the company has 2,500 mentors and claims to have a 91 per cent completion rate. Feedback from students is taken constantly and seriously.
Great Learning also focuses on the job readiness of students as it believes that most learners are “not there just for the sake of learning” but to further their job prospects.
During the pandemic, almost 1,000 learners reported a career advancement within their organisation or a new job after completing their course.
The pandemic and the consequent burgeoning of online education helped Great Learning to consolidate its position. It now has an annual run rate of $100 million (about ~700 crore) with 45,000 paid users (a one-year online course typically costs ~2 lakh a year) and around a million users overall.
Great Learning also hired almost 700 employees in 2020, taking the total staff in its two locations — Bengaluru and Gurugram — to 1,200. It estimates that the potential global user size could be in the range of 150 million, while the target segment in India could be about 40 million users.
So far, the enterprise has been bootstrapped, but the company is now looking to raise $50-60 million to fund its expansion, which includes a greater penetration in the US market. Recently, cricketer Virat Kohli invested an undisclosed amount in it and also became its brand ambassador.
Former Mckinsey consultant Pramath Sinha, founder of Harappa Education and a higher education expert, says that like others in the space, Great Learning has its own distinct strengths and areas of focus. “The players have pretty distinct value propositions and target segments, although there are some overlaps,” he says.
So, for Great Learning and others, the action is just hotting up. Whether they become big fish in a small pond or small fish in a big one is to be seen.
Recently, Virat Kohli invested an undisclosed amount in it and also became its brand ambassador