Also released as part of the Sequoia Moonshot podcast

https://www.sequoiacap.com/india/build/unacademy-to-create-iconic-products-set-iconic-goals/

Gaurav: So, I think my top favourite topics are essentially how do teams do high growth, and how does blitzscaling happen, and [what happens] if you keep that as the top of the priority. In one of the sessions of The Guild, by Mike [Moritz] where we talked about a lot of stuff related to culture with him, we asked a lot of questions, but essentially, he said that winning is the culture. So, I think this is something that we have been able to retain at Unacademy.

Whatever your targets are – and essentially, doing things differently from a product point of view and from the marketing point of view. Because essentially, your startup will just boil down to you building the right products and doing great marketing around it, and how do you build iconic products and how do you do great marketing.

On bootstrap games and startup games

Bhavin is one of our board members, he just recently raised his first round of funding, but since the age of 18 to now, he’s 40, he is playing the bootstrap game and he is doing a great job at it. But he knew his game well, and whatever principles he had, he was following them.

For us, it became very clear that we want to play the high-risk, high-reward game and we don’t want to get stuck in the ‘small game syndrome’. And this is the leadership culture that most leaders will inculcate at Unacademy also. Once we decide the goal, for example, if we have to do a pivot, then the question is not about – who will give us pain? What will a particular investor say? Then the question is just about “let’s strategize’ and align everyone”. So, most people look at the effort that it takes to align everyone and sometimes give up there. We just sit on the drawing board, and say, “This is what we have to do. This is the outcome, we have decided this. Now just let’s figure out a way to align the board. Let’s figure out a way to align the team members, etc.” So, because we don’t have the effort minimization framework but a regret minimization framework, and we just ask ourselves, “Will we regret doing this?” For example, if I would not have pivoted to the subscription model, I would have always regretted not knowing what would have happened. And that’s why we did it.

So, these are the two things, knowing what game you play and just internalising that. Because if you are confused whether you want to play this game or that game, then it’s going to be a tough journey because then the decisions will not be so easy. In fact, our pivots were not so difficult because the question was, “Where we want to go? Will this help us get there faster or will that?” And that is how the decisions became easy. The decision was not about being good, the decision was always that either Unacademy will be great, or it will be an utter failure. We will not be a ‘good company’, either it has to be a great company or it has to be a failure.

On raising / building with 4 years of runway

“You can’t do many pivots or you can’t do so many experiments and you can’t live in this chaos if you have the sword of money running out hanging over your head.” So, if you have to do something very different, for example, I don’t think I could have innovated with 18 months of runway.