Toddle - Superpower for teachers, by teachers

In today’s episode, we have Deepanshu Arora, co-founder of Toddle, In conversation with Rajat Agarwal, Managing director at Matrix Partners India. As part of this episode, we cover the learnings from Deepanshu’s journey of building a global EdTech platform, from what triggered the inception of the company and what it's like to sell to schools, to managing a team remotely and much more.

Salonie:

Hi and welcome to Matrix Moments, this is Salonie and on todays episode, we have Deepanshu Arora, co-founder of Toddle, a teachers first global EdTech platform. In conversation with Rajat Agarwal, Managing director at Matrix Partners India.

As part of this episode, we cover the learnings from Deepanshu’s journey of building a global EdTech platform, from what triggered the inception of the company and what its like to sell to schools, to managing a team remotely and much more. Tune – in.

Rajat:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Matrix Moments, this is Rajat here, MD and Ed-tech lead at Matrix India. Today we have a very special guest for our listeners, Deepanshu Arora, he’s the founder of an Ed-tech company called Toddle. We’re very proud and lucky to be seed investors in Toddle and today we will take you through the journey of how Deepanshu is building the company. But before you go further and begin, Deepanshu, I wanted to start with a quick observation. We all know that Ed-tech has really boomed over the last couple of years globally and India, it’s really taken off.

But have you noticed that most of the innovation has happened keeping students in mind? There are very few products that are out there which are built for teachers except perhaps there are a few which have them take an online class. Now if there are 85 million teachers globally and most of them still use old tools that are actually not built for them or for their specific use cases. Contrast this with developers they’re probably one fourth, one fifth the number of developers as teachers. But there are probably hundreds of SaaS companies, multiple unicorns that are trying to make developers more effective and efficient at what they do, but very, very few tools for teachers in general. And we can all argue or joke about who’s doing the more important job for society, right?

So with that context let’s welcome Deepanshu, founder of Toddle. They’re building some of the most beautiful tools for teachers that I’ve come across and targeting teachers all over the world. So, Deepanshu, thank you so much for being here. To kick things off can you tell us a little bit about your journey, you know, what attracted you to Ed-tech, you’re an engineer, you worked at McKinsey. And how did you come up with the idea of Toddle?

Deepanshu:

Thank you, Rajat, for having me over. Pleasure to talk to you about this. It’s interesting that we keep talking about this stuff offline all the time but to do a podcast on it it’s my first so I’ll try to be as good as I can on this one. So, I’ll start with my journey chronologically, studied at IIT Kanpur, like you said I’m an engineer by education. Then at IIT the most prestigious job that one could get was McKinsey, so I struggle really hard and then wanted to really get into McKinsey, made it there. When I landed at McKinsey realized that now I don’t really know what I want to do next because till that point of time my life was all about going for the most obvious choice.

Grew up in a small town in Bareilly in UP, the only thing that you thought about was, okay, I want to get to an IIT and that was really the goal. When I got to IIT the goal was, okay, I need to get into McKinsey because apparently the coolest people in campus go to McKinsey. But then once I landed at McKinsey didn’t really know what to do after that because there was no obvious goal or obvious ladder to climb there. So realized that I wasn’t really a great fit for consulting and spent about a year and a half, quit McKinsey pretty soon.

After that to think about how I want my life to be I took a sabbatical and spent about six months in Rwanda in Africa working for the Clinton Foundation. Traveled around the African continent, enjoyed that quite a bit and decided that I’m the kind of person who likes being really hands on and then decided that probably setting up my own company or doing a startup would be a great place. And thus came back to India, that’s what the first step was. Education was always an area of interest, so thought that let’s do something in education. So we first started with a company called WonderBoxx where we used to make hands on learning tools for children of ages 1-8 years, it was a subscription box model.

We were decently successful at it, not very successful. Had a minor exit there and then after that decided that we want to do something deeper in the education space and decided that the deepest thing that you can do in education is to actually set up your own schools because that’s when you really own a child’s education and learning journey end to end. And set up our first school which was a pre-school in Ahmadabad in India, it’s called Toddler’s Den. We have three centers, one in Ahmadabad, one in Bombay, and one in Hyderabad. And as a part of our schools we were looking to integrate technology really meaningfully.

We’ve always taken a very teachers’ first approach to technology integration with the belief that till the time technology isn’t solving for a teacher’s pain point everything else is kind of meaningless. So with that in mind we first adopted a few off the shelf solutions, were not very happy with those solutions primarily because to manage our own teaching and learning workflows we were using 4-5 different solutions. So a 21st century teacher does curriculum planning, she wants to document and track student learning journeys, she wants to communicate with families, has to do assessments and reports. So it’s a complicated job being a teacher in a 21st century school.

And we were using like 4-5 different tools for all of this and it was like very disconnected workflows, clunky solutions that we were working with and then as a team we thought isse achcha tou apne he kuch bana lete hain, and that’s how Toddle really started. It started as a passion project in our own school when we were building it out, we never really knew that we will be taking it to other schools as well. But then a couple of years back, I think this was December of 2018, we were hosting some workshops at our school where we had educators from different parts of the world participating. They had a look at the platform, they really liked it, they said guys, why don’t you build this in a way that our schools can also use your technology.

And that’s when we decided that, okay, let’s try and build this in a scalable way and see where it goes. So that’s how the journey of Toddle really started. We were solving for our own problem, we did not really have it in mind that we wanted to really build this into a company. I don’t know if you remember, Rajat, but I had reached out to you in April 2019 and I had called you up and I had said that, Rajat, I know that you guys will not be interested in this because it’s really small right now and I don’t know if Ed-tech is even an area of interest but can you recommend other investors to me who might be interested in having a look at this because we want to make it big. And then you said that we only will take a look at it. So that’s how it really started for us.

Rajat:

I remember when you were launching your second school in Bombay that’s when we first chatted, I think Kaustub had connected us or -- I’d known of you at McKinsey but I don’t think we chatted.

Deepanshu:

We didn’t overlap.

Rajat:

We didn’t overlap but then I remember my friends from Ahmadabad used to call me and say, yaar, get me an admission at Deepanshu’s school. It’s just been an amazing journey since then but yeah, I remember my first when we met in April to talk about Toddle, the product, I didn’t get it initially. It took me a while to actually get it that this could be something special. So, Deepanshu, how did you think about this -- people say that there’s so much happening on the students’ side of Ed-tech and you know you and I had a big debate back then as well, that do I build for teachers and why not build for the student’s side.

Deepanshu:

Yeah.

Rajat:

Because there was obviously lots of things that you could have done and there are lots of problems that are still out there to be solved. So how do you think about keeping yourself focused on teachers and especially with so much funding coming in in Ed-tech and all the madness around this how do you keep yourself sane?

Deepanshu:

I think for us focus -- see, like I said it started as a passion project for us and we were trying to solve for our own problem. When we started schools we also first became teachers like and we were spending time in the classrooms ourselves. You cannot imagine it, it’s difficult to imagine a person like me spending time with kindergarten students and trying to teach them but yeah, I did that for quite some time, and I was using technology as well in the class. And then realized that okay, this is a really broken experience. So, we wanted to make our own lives easier, we wanted to run better schools and that’s how it really started for us.

As we started getting deeper into it we realized that the problems that we’re facing as a school are actually faced by other schools as well and like you said in your introduction there are more than 80 million educators globally and probably the single largest group of professionals that exist. And if you look at the state of technology in any other profession be it engineering, design, even accountants, like they have much better technology tools available to them than what teachers do. And if you think about the role that teachers play in our society they’re really shaping the future generations.

So they deserve access to really high-quality tools and having been teachers ourselves still being teachers ourselves we think that if we’re able to help -- I always tell my team that we’re here to help teachers do better what they do best and I think if we’re able to have an impact on say a million teachers around the world, help them teach 20 percent better I think we would have had a very significant impact on the education ecosystem.

Rajat:

Yeah, that’s a very powerful thought. So, Deepanshu, how did you think about going global from day 1 and building a product company from India.

Deepanshu:

We have customers in more than a hundred countries, different parts of the world. And again I think I always think that serendipity plays a very big role in anything happening. So it happened for us that we ourselves were running IB Schools, these pre-schools that I’m mentioning are all affiliated to the International Baccalaureate primary years program and the workshop that I was mentioning where we had educators from different parts of the world it happened because those were international workshop. So we got exposure to that from day 1, IB itself being a very distributed framework globally immediately gave us access to a global market.

And what we have seen is that teachers are very well connected with each other on social media nowadays so once we were able to get in the first few set of teachers they were very vocal about it because they felt that okay, here is a team that is genuinely interested in solving for our problems and they then went all out to support us in all possible ways that they could. So I think the larger learning for me has been that once you have the first few customers who are ready to take a punt on you then do everything that you can to make sure that they really love you and if they fall in love with you then they will really become advocates and help you spread the word.

Rajat:

Yeah, makes sense. And are there any unique challenges you’ve faced from just building a global product from day 1 like from a support perspective or how does all that work?

Deepanshu:

So when we were getting into it we had not anticipated the kind of challenges that we will be coming across. And I think as an entrepreneur especially on day 1 you have to be a bit naïve as well about the future challenges that lie because if you start thinking about it on day 1 itself then you’ll probably never even take the plunge, right. Yeah, so it’s been challenging in the sense that there are hundred countries in which our customers currently are and we try and provide 24/7 support so we need to have our support team distributed geographically. An interesting thing, I think we would be one of the very few Indian companies that actually has an office in Columbia.

And the more interesting thing is that while all of us in India here are working remotely the Columbia team is actually working out of a really cool WeWork office space. They get together, they have parties, they keep sending us photos and it kind of makes us all jealous. So one of the challenges has been figuring out recruiting a global team and there also I think serendipity played a big role. One of the first hires that we made outside of our core team was this woman who was a curriculum co-coordinator at a school in Gurgaon. She used to come from Mexico and then she helped us build the Latin America team there and that’s how Columbia has kind of become a center for us.

But other than that I generally think that the quality of talent available in India right now when it comes to product, engineering, design I think it’s really top notch and this is probably the most interesting time to be building a truly global company out of India. So I think other than support we honestly haven’t really faced any significant challenges. I think building a global company today out of Bangalore is as hard or as easy as it would be out of San Francisco because talent is becoming more and more global, and we have like really high quality people here in India as well.

Rajat:

We should have a board meeting in Columbia next so please as soon as you can travel let’s look into that.

Deepanshu:

I also haven’t visited their office; I really want to go there.

Rajat:

But what about product localization, language, all of those would have been hurdles, right, along the journey?

Deepanshu:

So I think again not significant hurdles, these are pretty much solved problems right now, many companies around the world have done this. So, once we had a framework in place the first localization that we did was difficult and we made a lot of mistakes there and we took a very non scalable approach. But once we figured that okay, this is the way to do it after that it became pretty obvious.

Rajat:

Okay, got it. And, Deepanshu, the other school of thought typically you talk to anyone who is doing Ed-tech whether investing or working is that you should like selling to teachers and schools this has been a graveyard, right, and it’s been very hard. But your experience has been very different. So why has that been, what’s changing, I’m sure that will be wonderful to understand.

Deepanshu:

I think our own context of having run schools gave us a pretty deep perspective into what teachers and schools really need. And I think that if you’re building a product that truly solves a problem then any customer would be willing to sign up for it and I think schools are the same in that regard. Because we were building it in our own school we’d spent a significant amount of time building it out really interacting with teachers, parents, students, understanding what they needed from a platform. So, I think that depth in the solution really helped us, so that’s one.

The flip side of this argument that schools are not really the best customers to sell to is also that they’re very sticky. So once you’re able to get into a school you will probably be there for the next 15-20 years. I remember that one of the first conversations I had, and it was with a school in Switzerland the head of school told me that, my boy, our school has been around for a hundred years, will you be around for a hundred years. And if you are going to be then I will be interested in buying your product. But I think what has really helped us is the fact that we’re able to speak the same language, the fact that we have generally been teachers first in our approach and it’s not something just a motto, or a logo or a slogan for us, we genuinely believe in that.

So at the Toddle team except for design and engineering everyone else is an ex educator. So our entire sales team are ex educators, our entire support team ex educators, everyone in the team except for design and engineering is ex educators. And I think that really helps us speak the same language, people feel that okay, these guys are genuine and they’re truly trying to solve a problem that we’re facing.

Rajat:

And, Deepanshu, just taking that Switzerland example like these are IB schools globally. And you’re targeting IB plus maybe other international school different types of international schools. How much do these guys spend on technology and technology related services or for the teacher’s whatever tools that teachers could use?

Deepanshu:

So our target market which is to just comment on what you said our target market is progressive schools around the world and there are about a hundred thousand progressive schools around the world. And when I say progressive schools these are schools that don’t follow a textbook approach to teaching and learning. Here the teacher is at the center of the curriculum design process. So the teachers themselves would design their unit plans, they will design their lessons, they will bring in resources from 10-15 sources. They will do a lot of research on the internet to make sure that their students are getting the best possible learning experience.

So we are working with these schools and IB is a small subset of this progress and we want to work with more and more such schools around the world. Schools like these typically in my experience I have seen that they spend about 60-70,000 dollars per year on technology and this spend broadly gets divided into three parts. So the first is teaching and learning which is where Toddle falls in, the second is school management where you would have your admissions management tools, fee collection tools, bus management tools, so that’s the second broad category.

And the third category is just content tools where somebody like a Byju’s for example would fall under that category or Newsela, Epic, these companies would fall in that category. So those are the three broad categories of spend and the spend is usually split one third, one third, one third across these three categories.

Rajat:

And it’s largely fragmented, right, the spend, like there’s no one or two dominant players in general across all these hundred thousand schools?

Deepanshu:

Yeah, yeah, we haven’t really -- so within the IB space there is a dominant player that has been around for a long time but if you think of the progressive schools as one large global market then there are really no dominant players in the space right now. I hope that we’re able to become that.

Rajat:

That’s a real opportunity. And, yeah, that’s wonderful. So great product, teacher led company or teacher led processes and sales process, what has been super amazing for me to see is just been the pace of growth. You talked about we met about two years ago for this product, we would have funded you about one and a half years ago or so around that time. we’ve seen you grow incredibly over the last 18 months or so, kind of growth we’ve not seen at least in Indian SaaS companies and I guess you have like 4-5 salespeople. So at some point of time you’re going to hit probably 7 figure quotas for these salespeople. How does that happen as in can you talk about your go to market motion a little bit?

Deepanshu:

That’s a good question. I think two things here. So again going back to our teachers’ first philosophy what we have tried to do from day 1 is form a really active community around our product. So we create a lot of helpful content for teachers, we organize a lot of events, we create opportunities for teachers from around the world to meaningfully connect with each other and learn from each other. And there is really no agenda behind it like we’re not telling these teachers that when we’re connecting you there is any sort of obligation on your part to demo Toddle or have a look at Toddle.

We do all of that to help the teacher community and in return we have seen that they feel that okay, this is a genuine bunch of people trying to do good stuff, let’s also have a look at the work that they’re doing on the business front on the software front. So I think that like being true to our ethos there has really helped. The second thing that I feel is we didn’t realize the power of it in the very initial days but we have been very, very particular like we have over indexed on providing the highest quality support to our existing partner schools.

And what I have realized over the last year and a half is that you can almost take a growth approach to support as well. If you’re doing like amazing support especially in SaaS, then and especially in a context where your users are kind of connected with each other people will go out and say really good things about you. And support is not just about answering queries, it’s about listening to your customer’s feedback, acting on their feedback in a proactive manner, making adjustments in the product in a very rapid way. I think if you keep doing all of that then it really helps.

I keep telling my team all the time that in a SaaS business you can get everything wrong just don’t get two things wrong. You can’t get the product wrong, and you can’t get support wrong. If your sales is wrong, your marketing is wrong all of that is fine, just don’t get the product wrong, just don’t get support wrong and you will see compounding results coming from it over years.

Rajat:

And our NPS is also what, 70 plus from what I remember?

Deepanshu:

Yeah, so we started tracking our NPS about a year back and now we have put a process around that, we capture it every two weeks and it has consistently been upwards of 72 which is also meant that it really had zero churn so far.

Rajat:

Yeah. Now we’ll come back to that, that’s just incredible. You also did something very interesting in the onboarding journey, right, for all the teachers and we took a leaf out of Superhumans playbook. Has that been a successful strategy for you?

Deepanshu:

So I wouldn’t say we took a leaf out because Superhuman is a individual product while ours is an organizational product, so the nature of the customer is very different that way. But we like I said we’ve invested a lot in providing the best quality support and we have still a long way to go there. But the approach that we’ve really taken there is that can we facilitate formation of a micro community around Toddle within out partner school. And if we’re able to do that and Toddle becomes a part of their day-to-day language and then the adoption happens, people will start using it on a day to day basis and people will start realizing value out of it.

So one of the things that we did which I think has been fairly successful is that from each of our partner schools when we’re onboarding them we ask them to identify a few Toddle champions like one teacher at every grade level would become a Toddle champion. We would train those teachers on using the platform so it’s like train the trainers model. And then we provide these teachers with all the materials that they would need to train the other teachers, is a very high level of buy in achieved from these champions that we identify. We’re currently in a virtual world but going forward we would love to send out physical goodies to these people as well so that just to express our thankfulness and love for all of these champions across schools.

Rajat:

And last question is this growth piece. You talked about this community of teachers that you have and I remember you used to do a big conference which used to be physical now it’s all obviously virtual, how has that played a role and how you pulled that off. Can you describe that as well?

Deepanshu:

Yeah, so we never actually hosted it physically because we’re actually through and through a Covid company. Like you said December 2019 is when we received our funding and March ’20 is when Covid happened and everything really shut down. So when things shut down we quickly realized that all the professional development amongst teachers, teacher training is a very traditional space and it used to happen in a way that there would be one workshop being hosted say in Bangalore and then teachers come around Bangalore, whoever registers for that workshop would go there, spend 2-3 days there and come back.

And we realized that all of these professional development opportunities are now getting cancelled because people cannot really meet in person. So why don’t we put together something that will be meaningful for teachers but is virtual. And Covid started happening in March of ’20, we organized the first version of this conference in May of ’20 and we had like 20,000 teachers from around the world participating in it. And the best part of it was that because it was one of the first virtual conferences at least in the education space at that point of time.

And because we were kind of doing it for the first time we got support from all educators around the world like we reached out to Dr. Joe Bowler who is like really renowned, he is a professor at Stanford University. She said that, yes, I’ll be happy to participate and then reached out to Dr. Sugata Mitra who is again a Ted awardee, a very famous. So we were able to I think just because we were nimble and realized that there is a gap in the market right now and let’s try and address it we received a lot of love from our customers and since then we’ve realized that events can also be a very effective form of lead generation. So we now continue to do those events again and again.

Rajat:

Awesome. So coming to churn how has that happened? Actually you’ve talked about it a little bit but anything else that comes to mind, any learnings on how do you keep this as low. I’m sure this will show up at some point of time, it can’t be zero forever but --

Deepanshu:

I think goes back to the same thing, like focus on product, focus on support, listen to feedback from people and if there is significant amount of unhappiness happening anywhere then address it sooner rather than later. So both Misbah and I if we realize that there is any school that has even a hint of dissatisfaction with our platform Misbah or I would get on a call with them, Misbah is my co-founder. Like one of us would get on a call with that school to understand what it is. I think churn is a lagging indicator, you also need to look at the leading indicators which in our case happens to be engagement and we track that very proactively now.

Earlier we didn’t have the processes set in place to do it but now we’ve become very proactive about it and there is a literally a score card that we have defined for each school based on their NPS score, their engagement score or where the school is in terms of their journey. So based on that score card we arrive at an indicator, at a health metric per school and then we decide what the action needs to be taken. But I think, yeah, it’s really important for a SaaS company to focus very hard on that churn number.

Rajat:

Well, that’s incredible and I remember when the pandemic hit the first time at least I was quite shaken up and we know schools were shutting down all over, and it was the time when we didn’t know what’s going to happen. Through multiple waves you had zero churn, that’s just incredible especially in the school business.

Deepanshu:

Yeah, it’s been a big learning experience for us as well. But if you think about it schools need to continue running, right, and what we I think were again nimble with we didn’t realize it at that point of time that Covid -- so just when it started nobody really knew how long this was going to last for and there was this hesitation that should we change our product roadmap, should we not change our product roadmap. We had a plan in mind that okay, this is what we’re going to execute against. But then based on our collective gut feel and the news that we were hearing from different parts of the world we said that okay this is going to be here for long.

Before that Toddle was primarily an in-school teaching learning platform, we had nothing really for remote learning. And then we said that okay, we need to make this change and let’s keep whatever was decided on the side, let’s think this afresh and we completely changed our product roadmap. What earlier was planned in May ’20 actually now happened in May ’21 because of everything else that we had to do because of the pandemic. But I think in hindsight it was a good call to take.

Rajat:

And, Deepanshu, now you know we’ve talked about logo growth in terms of sales, we’ve talked about churn, even the other big metric to think about is net dollar retention or just cross sell, upsell. So how do you think about that for your business?

Deepanshu:

So in our business we actually do per user pricing because that’s the norm in the Ed-tech industry. I would have loved to do usage-based pricing but our customers don’t understand usage based pricing and they’re just used to per seat pricing. So we do per seat pricing and number of students in a school would broadly remain the same year on year because schools are usually stable. If a school has capacity of 500 students and the school would only have 500 students and would have a fixed number of teachers as well. So for us increase in average customer value happens by adding more products.

So earlier when we started we were just focused on the IB’s primary years’ program which was pre K to grade 5. Now we expanded into grade 6-10 eventually we’re going to expand to grades 11 and 12 as well. And then our goal over a period of time like going back to what I was saying earlier our mission is to help teachers do better what they do best. Over a period of time we want to build this eco system around teachers which helps them become better at their jobs and I think of that ecosystem in three different pieces. So one is creation and workflow tools which is what we have focused on so far. Second thing that we want to do is we want to connect these teachers around the world meaningfully with each other through our platform and the third thing that we eventually want to get into is teacher training or professional development which will get embedded within our platform.

So imagine that you’re a teacher who is creating a grade 5 lesson plan on the topic of migration. And we’ll be able to tell you that there are 20 other lesson plans on the topic, would you like to have a look at those or hey, there is this really cool video that this very experienced educator has designed about how to create good lesson plans, would you like to have a look at that. So the goal is to go really deep with teachers. I think as we add more and more depth to our product for us the revenue expansion per user will happen that way.

Rajat:

Yeah. Now that’s very interesting so from pure SaaS product this will move to some sort of a market network I guess over time.

Deepanshu:

Yeah.

Rajat:

With some bit of professional learning built in, some bit of this global community cross learning etcetra which is resources linked in which I guess also builds the mode for you, right, because if there is a lot of content and there’s something beyond just the day to day productivity tools that’s the real mode that you would learn.

Deepanshu:

Yeah.

Rajat:

So that’s great, Deepanshu. I guess we have a few more minutes, I think you did some really interesting work during the pandemic to manage your team as well. And overall I remember a few months back you sent me a culture document which we don’t see in most companies whether small or big and definitely not in small companies. So how are you thinking about just your human resource culture, a little bit about all of that?

Deepanshu:

So that culture document that I had sent to you has also undergone several revisions since then and I think that culture document had a lot, we have really now reduced it to just two things around our culture and the two things are, one, always be teachers first and that gets reflected in the product, in the way you do support, how you talk to people, all of that. And the second thing is build beautiful things like those are the two things I would say in which I would summarize what Toddle stands for. And those I think are things that we truly live by on a day-to-day basis so all the founders, everyone who has been a part of the team since day one and I think that’s how culture really gets permeated through actions.

I realized that the earlier document was just too complex and it had too many big ideas. I thought let’s scrap all that, let’s just focus on these two things. If we’re getting those two things right then everything else will fall in place. And coming to what you said about the pandemic another thing that we as people in the team truly stand for and this is something that I think Misbah brought in. So he used to work with Unilever earlier and Unilever had “doing well by doing good” as one of their core values. And that is something that Misbah spoke to us about and that is something that really resonated with us as individuals.

So we have like all of these professional development activities that we organize for teachers, all of that is free of cost. Whatever and there are a lot of schools who we give Toddle free for because they just can’t pay. There is a school in Hyderabad for example that charges it’s students a fee of 30,000 rupees per year, they’re trying to do meaningful work for their own community by setting up an IB school because that community is really underserved. Now you can’t expect that school to pay our usual fee so we decided that we’ll give it out for free.

And I think that spirit kind of got reflected with our approach towards the pandemic as well in India. So we were very, very generous with our team like people could take advance salaries for as long a period as they wanted, there are a couple of people who took advance salaries for as long as a timeframe of one and a half years. They have already been paid for the next one and a half years. We supported people in getting vaccinated to whatever extent we could be. We set up a central team in the office which was helping people in all the Covid logistics because as you remember it was very hard to find oxygen cylinders, basic medicines, did all of that.

As a team we also said that we are in a very privileged position and we need to do something for the community. So we raised about 2 million rupees, we raised 20 lakh rupees and that went to Hemkunt Foundation and Kailash Satyarthi Foundation who were doing meaningful work on the Covid warfront. So, yeah, we did all that. There were a few, I don’t know if you remember, but Lebanon had three blows coming in at the same time so their economy was already in a really bad shape. Then if you remember that blast happened and that video went really viral, third, Covid was already there.

So we as a team took a call that all schools in Lebanon will get Toddle free for howsoever long they want to use it. Whenever the situation is better, they can decide to pay us if they want or if they don’t want to pay even then it’s fine. So I think just going back to the philosophy of doing well by doing good that’s important for us and I think over a period of time it leads to good outcomes.

Rajat:

That’s incredible how mission focused you are and the whole team is. So, Deepanshu, you seem to be juggling a lot of things and you seem to be building a very solid business. What do you do to improve yourself or learn or how did you teach yourself to become a CEO?

Deepanshu:

I think it’s a continuous learning process, teach yourself to become a CEO. CEO anyway I think it sounds really heavy, right, it seems to carry a lot of weight with it but I read a lot and I don’t know if you have read his work a lot but I’m like really inspired by Naval Ravikant, I think he is one of the most prolific thinkers of our time right now. And he says in his book that life is a single player game or essentially that you run your own race and you should not be bothered about what is happening around you.

So from a personal perspective I try to define what is really important for me and I have literally written it down so I have said around the workfront there are two things that are two things that are important for me, I should be getting to work on interesting problems and I should be getting an opportunity to work on those problems with interesting people. As long as that is happening I’m happy, everything else is noise. On the personal front three things, one, I should be getting time to read every day because I have realized that if I don’t get that one hour to read every day I get really flustered and I feel that something is missing from my life.

I used to smoke earlier so it’s pretty much like if I’m not getting to read it’s like I haven’t gotten my drag today. That’s one thing, second thing now I’m a dad as you know, I became a father recently, it’s very important that I get to spend time with my daughter and play with her. And third thing it might not look it that way but I’m trying to focus on my personal health as well now.

Rajat:

That’s very visible with the gym equipment in the background.

Deepanshu:

The gym equipment is not mine, so my earlier room has now been converted into the nursery for the baby so I’ve now been moved into the storeroom. This is the storeroom where I’m sitting out of but I’m trying to focus on my personal health and I’ve seen that as long as those are the things that are happening for me then I’m broadly happy and then don’t really care about the noise that much.

Rajat:

Super. This is incredible, Deepanshu. Actually one last question, what do you worry about?

Deepanshu:

What do I worry about, that’s a good question. See, there is a business answer to it, right, as to what do I worry about on the business front but then those worries keep changing all the time. I think at a philosophical level because I read a lot and I read a lot of philosophy as well the worry is always that can I really find my way to being neutral about things, you know, being in that constant state of neutrality where if something really happy is happening I’m not getting too influenced by that, if something really bad is happening I’m not getting influenced by that. So I wouldn’t say worry but that’s what I’m trying to go to but it’s very hard. The whole religion of Buddhism is based on that.

Rajat:

But you’re not religious.

Deepanshu:

No, no, I’m not religious at all. I’ve read pretty much all religious scriptures just out of academic curiosity but, yeah, if I can’t rationalize something in my head then I can’t accept that.

Rajat:

Super, Deepanshu, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for taking the time today.

Deepanshu:

Thank you for having me over, this was great. I had a lot of fun.

Rajat:

We should jam more. Thank you. Thank you to all our listeners and viewers. Hopefully we’ll be back with more. Thank you for taking the time.

Deepanshu:

Thanks everyone. Thank you.

Salonie:

Thanks for tuning in. For more Matrix Moments episodes, you can head to www.matrixpartners.in/blog. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more updates.