The folks staffing India's edtechs are changing.

It isn’t just people who were cut, but categories.

Monday, 10 April 2023

I had a radical thought when I started to write this edition. What if we turned India’s vast
tuition system on its head? What if, instead of going to maths, science, or computer
science tuition, we sent our kids to history, geography, civics bootcamps—all the stuff in
school for which you mug up to pass tests. Where are the edtechs dedicated to teaching
the Battle of Panipat with animations and personalized assessments…? Oh wait.
Still, if political winds do shift again, and plentiful VC money makes its way back to the
sector, we can perhaps hope for edtechs who are willing to experiment. Have a fresh take.
Take a new risk. Tackle a new subject, with the enthusiasm they once showed for “1:1
coding”.
The chances are slim right now. That’s because edtech’s hiring freeze-turned large-scale
sacking isn’t over yet. Unacademy reportedly let go of “350 roles” this week, an
approximate 12% of their total staff. Erstwhile major recruiters like Byju’s and Vedantu
have also trimmed down and are running leaner operations. With the exception of
Physicswallah, which has quickly eclipsed other edtechs both in terms of revenue and
popularity, B2C edtech seems to have neither the will nor the strength to regenerate the
roles they’re losing.

At Unacademy, new hires have gone down from 722 in January 2022 to a low of 150 in
March 2023, according to LinkedIn’s insights
“It’s all defensive hiring. The talent acquisition teams that came to us for candidates are
themselves out of a job,” Ankur Agarwal tells me over the phone. Agarwal is the founder
of a Noida-based human resources (HR) firm called Lakshhr that helped edtechs hire in
massive numbers during the boom in 2021.
In May 2022, Ed Set Go tackled the issue of edtech’s big chop, and who were the first ones
to go. The entry-level frontline (across sales, customer service, and operations) was
dropped quickly in favour of digital marketers who could convert online leads (but boy,
did that change!). Almost a year later, the picture is still pretty grim. More crucially, some
roles may never come back to edtech, unless things change drastically.

Machines vs inventions
A useful way to think about edtechs is their evolution(?) from inventions to machines. As
inventions, they were allowed to experiment with different technologies and business
models. The novelty of using tech to solve learning or teaching problems was still… novel.
The possibilities for scaling were unmatched. The price points, for quality education, were
unbelievable. We may not have invented new ways of learning—it was still a digital
lecture—but we had hit upon something new.
I would argue that these fledgling inventions were coaxed into becoming big machines
partly by how much money they raised. Everyone was in a hurry to see the big edtech
flagship industry come out of India—Byju Raveendran even made it a personal goal—and
churn out machine after successful machine. And you needed lots of staff to turn all the
cogs.
But yeah, this kind of stuff is surely gone now.

[Ad on Reddit]
What got lost in the mad rush was the invention, and the inventors. And because no one’s
building anything new, the need for creators, designers and even product managers has
been slashed by approximately 70%, according to Agarwal.
Agarwal and I are catching up almost a year after our last chat and both of us agree that
the roles now left behind in B2C edtech are mostly ones that keep the sputtering machines
running: sales people, category heads, content developers, engineers. Definitely essential
work, but no one’s looking around for a chief innovation officer. It’s all rinse, repeat.
“It’s not just online sales. In places like PW (Physicswallah) or Aakash, you’re hiring
people who can do both online and offline sales,” says Agarwal. These salespeople may be
calling parents one day and pitching to principals the next.
There are also concerns around what courses will survive the big “AI hit”. Edtechs that
offer a number of Python courses, for instance, may see their demand dwindle if coding
in Python just isn’t relevant anymore.
What do you do then with a team whose sole purpose was to create and sell these courses?

All the leaves are brown.

As we talk, Agarwal struggles to find some green shoots to talk about in the edtech hiring
process. What he does share are emerging patterns:
1. B2B sales, for edtechs like UpGrad, Simplilearn are consistent. An
unpredictable economy, a lack of skills, or just cheaper MBA certificate options
may be fueling the growth of these higher ed platforms. These professional courses
are also being sold as a package to companies for employee skill
development. Within B2B sales too, a subsection of senior, enterprises sales people
will fare better, according to Agarwal. “They will start hiring people who have
experience in selling to institutions. People who were part of sales teams of legacy
enterprise products or publishers,” he says. Once you’ve signed a multi-year
contract, you need people who can, for instance, make sure to collect payments
from colleges and maintain good relationships with them.
 2. The study abroad segment, where companies like LEAP and LeverageEdu play,
is hiring a new set of digital marketers and operations folks. Clearly, the demand
for foreign degrees has shot through the roof as the pandemic has waned, and
there’s no hiring stress here, claims Agarwal.
3. Companies want to hold onto senior sales and operations executives,
but the junior guys are gone. They’ve either turned into a sea of floating talent,
looking for the next innovative start-up to snap them up, or they’ve gone back to
traditional companies.
When we do see new green shoots in edtech, there may be a return to form. Newer
companies, who’re building tools with AI’s footprint in mind, or indeed companies that
want to get beyond the maths-science tuition problem, might attract fresh talent to the
sector.
Let’s hope they’re allowed to stay innovative for as long as possible.
With AIs wide open
A lot of you wrote to me after the last edition about the race to build India’s first generative
AI edtech. Thank you all so much for that! I’m compiling the responses into a tweet thread
that I’ll share soon.
One response specifically caught my eye:

Nirmal Patel is an education entrepreneur based in Gujarat. Patel experimented with

GPT-4 to teach a polynomial sum, and took a counterintuitive approach. Patel wasn’t

I asked GPT to tell me wrong ways to solve the problem and it was not able to reproduce
any wrong ways. Then I gave it one of the wrong answers, and asked how to go from
question to wrong answer and it kept failing... so I felt that it lacks data on how people
make mistakes.

interested in generating only the right answer for (2y+5)*(2y+5).

Here’s a Google doc on the different ways in which students get (2y+5)*(2y+5) wrong,
which is a fascinating topic for a whole other edition. But clearing misconceptions are
actually a key pathway to learning. Especially with maths, where you could carry
misconceptions across grades, and keep making the same mistakes. Educational
Initiatives is another edtech that has focused strongly on highlighting misconceptions
through their suite of classroom assessment tools.
Patel’s experiment comes at an interesting time, especially when mega-orgs like Khan
Academy are sort of betting their futures on AI tutors. We’ve written about how Khan
Academy was given early access to GPT-4 and created the impressive Khanmigo tutor,
which can do anything from solve maths problems to argue with you about democracy in
ancient Greece.
In a recent interview with Axios, founder Sal Khan even claims that he’d be surprised if
“anyone has worked harder on this than we have” on extracting value from GPT-4. As an
example, he says there’s a “secret sauce” that…
…in a math problem… can detect not just whether a student got an answer right or
wrong, but also where they may have gone astray in their reasoning.
Hmmm. This contradicts Patel’s experience partially, because GPT-4 isn’t yet exposed to
“wrong ways” to solve the problem, or more broadly, misconceptions. Here’s what Patel
wrote back to me:
GPT is not as powerful as it seems if you go deeper in areas where it has not seen any
data. There is no database of common misconceptions in maths, so GPT might keep
giving correct answers but not go beyond that... which makes it less personalised than
people think.
Is Khanmigo’s secret sauce that it’s introducing misconceptions into GPT-4’s universe of
correct answers? Or, maybe we should be asking why one of the biggest edtech non-profits
on the planet has a corporate-y “secret sauce” and isn’t building its solutions in the open.

Let me know if you’ve figured it out.