Akshara Subramanian: Welcome to a brand new episode of The Blox Podcast, where we talk to business leaders across the world about their journeys with the A.I. and technology. Our guest for today is Abhay Saboo, the CEO and co-founder of CoLearn - an Indonesian EdTech platform, whose mission is to equip Indonesian students with lessons and skills needed to compete at a global level. Abhay is a Harvard Business School grad who was selected as an Asia 21 Young Leader and previously co-founded Viva Health, a healthcare startup focused on enabling Indonesian clinics to deliver quality healthcare to over 2 million consumers in Indonesia. Today, Abhay will be in conversation with Ashwini Asokan, the CEO and founder of blox.ai - the A.I. platform that's enabling the next generation of businesses to become A.I. Natives. Welcome Abhay and Ashwini, I'm so glad to have you both here. Abhay Saboo: Thanks Akshara. Akshara Subramanian: So Abhay, let's talk about your journey founding CoLearn. What was the vision when you started and what is the vision now? Abhay Saboo: Yeah, so education has always been a passion of mine. I started teaching, tutoring when I was in middle school, continued that through high school and college. I got into healthcare somehow after college. But within, between my first and second year of B-School, when I had the opportunity to go work for an internship and to think about what I wanted to do in my second year, I was looking at building an education business. Things didn't pan out because that was in India and I wanted to come back to Indonesia. I started my first business in healthcare, ran that for a few years, handed that over to professional management. And as soon as I had the opportunity to think about my next step, it was very obvious to me that my heart lies with education, primarily because you don't have to wait till you are older to give back. Every single day that you come into work, you can do something which makes you feel very good about yourself, that you're doing something that helps younger, the younger generation with their future and you're impacting people's entire trajectory in life. So that was the beginning of my personal passion. CoLearn itself, we actually started off as an offline business in Indonesia. The idea there was, what we saw is, everyone in Indonesia, all the startups at the time that were coming up in the early 2010-2020, most of those startups were focused on getting Indonesians to spend money. And what we saw, whether it's eCommerce, whether it's ride hailing, the question we were asking ourselves is "How will Indonesians actually earn more money?" And the answer, obviously, for us was education. As we looked at education, we looked at, you know, do we go into tertiary education? Do we get into vocational education? And it became very clear that the problem in Indonesia started off in the earlier years. So when you look at college, the problem is in high school. And when you look at high school, the problem is in middle school and all the way down to elementary. So that's why we decided to go with an offline model, because we felt that, that was the best way to approach younger kids, especially in Grades K - 6. So we started off with an offline model, teaching kids coding, math and English, and also helping them with homework, all under one roof. So that was the genesis of our offline business. And over time, what we realized, "Yes, offline is great. It's great as a business as well as well as impacting kids." But there's a limit to scale. And that's where we said, "hey, Indonesia has 40,000 tutoring centers across the country. There's an opportunity." Most of those, only 10-20% of them are organized, 80-90% of them were unorganized, mom and pops. And there was a massive opportunity to standardize the quality of education that these tutoring centers were offering. And so we were looking at more, think of it as an oil-for-tutoring-center type model, where we could standardize the quality of education. So we ventured into that, did that for about 65 tutoring centers. And just as we were in the middle of that transition from offline to offline-online, that's when COVID hit. And we had to ask ourselves the question, "What does the future look like for after-school tutoring and what will it look like after COVID?" We took the view of saying that things would be permanently and drastically different, especially for our business, because while kids would need an environment to hang out with friends, to meet with teachers, we saw that during COVID as well, mental health issues for a lot of children were on the rise. But what we saw is post-COVID we saw a world where kids would go back and they would be learning in an offline environment. A lot of those needs that we spoke about earlier, they would be met. At the same time, awareness would increase that, "Hey, there's no point of spending another 3 hours after school going for offline after-school tutoring when it's just so much more convenient, you come home, you don't have to change your clothes again. You can be sitting on your desk and you can be learning from the best tutors across the country at a very good price point. So for those reasons, we took the view that world that was going to be completely different and we decided to shut down our offline centers. We decided to shut down our offline-online model because we wanted to go all in, into the online model and we did not want to be distracted. So that was, that's how we started CoLearn in its online avatar. As we were thinking about what exactly we want to do, we sort of saw 3 models which grew and a large part, our investors also help us think through this, we saw that there was the recorded content play, there was live classes and A.I. powered homework help. These were the 3 real models which were scaling in EdTech and we took the view that the future was going to be much more towards live, not reported. And of course, A.I. powered help just made a lot of sense for various reasons. So we decided to focus on those 2 things, especially considering, you know, when a lot of the other EdTech businesses in Asia were starting, they were focused on, it was in the middle of 2010-2015, at a time when 4G was not around. In 2020, when 4G was around, with COVID accelerating the adoption of Wi-Fi, we just said we would go all in, into live. Ashwini Asokan: Abhay, you know, even just a couple of days ago, we were chatting about all the things Indonesia and just the culture surrounding education in India as being so distinct and different. And I think, you know, we say similar things about education in India, education in China, right? There are some very distinct characteristics about different geographies. Tell us a little bit about how that has shaped your journey at CoLearn? What are the specifics and the geo-specific cultural and socio-economic kind of impact on some of the decisions that you've made with CoLearn and how you're actually building that business out? Abhay Saboo: Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, Indonesia stands out very differently because, you know, while all of us recognize that different countries may have things that are unique about them, Indonesia being the world's fourth largest country, you would expect a little bit more similarity between Indonesia and the other large countries, at least. And that's where I think Indonesia is completely separate. So after China, India, the United States, Indonesia is the world's fourth largest education system, but unlike India and China, where you have tiger parents. Parents who, if a kid comes home and gets a B on a report card on Math, that is not going to make kids very happy or parents very happy. In Indonesia, most parents are not even checking report cards. And a lot of it has to do with culturally how the country's been. And I think the country's been super blessed. So there's various factors that have led to this. But certainly the perception towards education in Indonesia is very different. If I were to summarize, in countries like India, China, Vietnam, education is an investment, whereas in Indonesia, education oftentimes is seen as an expense. Ashwini Asokan: That's interesting, and I think I recall the thing about, that really blew me away when you said this yesterday, which was you know, Indonesian parents when kids come home, know the top two things they want from them, you said was just the kids and the number one thing was kids being happy, right? Which is debatable in many other places when you're looking at it specifically in the context of education. I want to bring that back to your app here, a little bit, Abhay, right? Like, tell us about CoLearn itself. What is this app? What is the product and how are you actually engaging with your student user community here? Abhay Saboo: Yeah, so the way we think about it is a kid spends time in school and then they spend time doing school related work outside of school, and our app addresses both of those experiences. So if you think about what happens in school, oftentimes these kids, they don't have access to the best teachers. Indonesia being one of the countries, which is, you know, it is one of the largest countries, I said, but it is in the bottom 10% of achievement when it comes to math, science, reading and due to historic reasons, this is sort of perpetuated over time. And what that's meant is that the quality of the teaching workforce is also very low. Most teachers are not qualified to teach. Most teachers don't want to teach. It is one of the most low paying jobs in the country. And so as a result, things are in a negative spiral. Ashwini Asokan: Wow. Abhay Saboo: And how we address that is through our live classes where kids can actually learn concepts and where they can have access to the best teachers from across the country, no matter whether they're from a large city or a second or third tier cities across the country. In fact, oftentimes what we find is that some of the best Indonesian teachers may not even be in Indonesia, they may be in Singapore or Taiwan or other countries. And that's the beauty of online where we can get them on a platform like ours. Many of the teachers don't even want to be, they don't want to be, it's the best teachers that we find, in fact for our platform, are not people who are naturally thinking about teaching. They may have, as I talked about my background, they may have done some tutoring in their background. But for them, they were pursuing, probably a career path in one of the larger tech companies until we came along and offered them a career path. So that's the first part, is giving kids access to live classes, to our platform and the best teachers. The second part is the out of school experience. And that's where kids currently, they spend 2-3 hours after school going to an offline center. They spend about a half an hour to an hour on transport, getting to an offline place. They wait there for their class to start, which often starts late. They go in, unlike India and China, where kids are learning concepts, kids in Indonesia, they're there to ask questions and answers because their own parents at home cannot help them. Their teachers are not helping them. And so they go to a tutoring center and they wait for their turn to get their questions answered. So it's a highly inefficient process. And that whole, what we saw is that whole 3 or 4 hours can easily be replaced with technology where kids can simply, sitting from their home, they can take a picture of a question and they can they can get a step-by-step video explanation, which is created by some of the best tutors in the country. So it's as good as being in front of the best tutors, but at a fraction of the time and cost. Ashwini Asokan: You know, there's so many parts to that story. Like, I feel like on one hand I heard about teachers and opportunities and the teaching experience and obviously I heard about the student experience, right? And then there's all this work you're doing in terms of actually figuring out what kind of content has to make it to the app, right and what works, what doesn't work. Tell us about what keeps these students coming back and tell us about what keeps these teachers seeking out these opportunities on CoLearn and the willingness, like what keeps them coming back? Abhay Saboo: Yeah, I mean, I think for both pieces, looking at them a bit separately, right, the first is this, A.I. powered homework help side of things. So I think what keeps people coming back is when they have homework from their school and when they're stuck with questions that are rather difficult for them or they're not entirely sure whether they're going down the right path, that's what keeps them coming back is assignments from school, preparing for tests. So it's more, but it's more of a painkiller. But what we do see is that over time, motivation in these kids does build up. So what we do see is, the more and more questions you ask, the more and more comfortable you get. Your motivation level increases. As your motivation level increases and you get small wins, your confidence increases and that becomes a positive loop for them. So that's what creates this loop of coming back to the platform. On the other side for the teachers, you're asking why they would consider something like this and why they would want to teach on a platform like this. I think it's a very human instinct to want to give back, to do something positive for other people. And if you can earn a good income while you were helping other people, it's a very easy thing for people to understand. Only thing is, again, so far there was not a career path for most teachers in the country. If you wanted to teach, it was because of what's happened, it's one of the most low paying jobs. It was looked down by their parents. And a lot of what we are doing is helping them convince their families that they can actually have a career path here with us. Ashwini Asokan: Wow. Wow. I feel like, again, it keeps coming down back to that story of behavioral change, right? Using tech and using the content as a way of changing fundamentally student behavior as well as teacher behavior. Given that you're kind of going after very non-traditional teachers here as well, right? Not your traditional teachers that come through a particular kind of a, lineage or history there. But also this behavioral change on the parent side. It just seems to me like a story of fundamentally changing behavior, a bottoms up, as an ecosystem, right? And I'm only thinking about EdTech in India right now. This is like exploding, right? Like you have so many companies in the EdTech space. There's offline, there's online, there's exam prep, there's teaching specific subjects. There's so many different models. And I understand for you that Indonesia as a country, as an entire group of people itself is fundamentally different. But how is your business different? Like, we clearly know that the business stands out in the way that you're approaching building it. It's not a kind of, you know, going behind the same set of things you're seeing in many other places across the globe right now. So as an app, would you say, you know, your goal right now is to really just build that community of people, fundamentally change the behavior? Like where in this space are you guys, like, really going in the near term versus the long term? Abhay Saboo: I mean, so you're absolutely right, we are, it is a big problem that we're tackling and most people in technology, they would tell you don't try to fundamentally change behavior, right? Feed into something which is already there and build on it. Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury, right? Because we have no choice. There are certain things that we can tap into, kids in Indonesia have gone offline tutoring, so they are used to the idea of someone helping them. But they have fundamentally, they have not gotten the motivation or they've not been able to build their confidence over time. So it will take a very different approach. And you can't simply copy paste from any other country and just say that it would work here. I think the foundation of doing all of that, the way we think about it is, as with most great education brands, it has to be based, built on trust and for students in Indonesia, what trust means is CoLearn has to be a safe place for them to learn. A place where we are not just motivating them, but also they feel like they can make mistakes here. One, in fact, one of the things that we always tell kids is that famous saying, I don't know where I've heard it, but sweat in practice so you don't have to bleed in war. We tell them that this is the place for you to make those mistakes. So building that trust they want, helps them also become motivated and more confident and continue to come back. And we think that once you have those things, that's when you can then talk about behavioral change, about, for example, hey, don't study last minute. Prepare in advance. Push yourself to not just think about college in a very narrow context. Push yourself to think about competition in a very global context. But what we are seeing is, especially with our paid students, that we are seeing that change happen and that change is all about, you know behavioral change, is all about habits and habits are all about consistency. So it's not about just driving this change once in a while, but it's making sure that they get repeated exposure to a positive environment. Ashwini Asokan: That's really interesting that you point out about habits and stuff and how you keep them coming back, over and above the question and answer solving things for them to be able to get answers and for them to, like, find out. Tell us a little bit about the learning environment and the paid side of things. Like what are people paying for? What are these students paying for and what are they willing to pay for? That's an interesting question as well, I think, in the context of the geography. Abhay Saboo: I think what they're paying for is a positive learning environment. You know in school, if you are doing well, you are not considered cool. In fact, we are students this explicitly. We've asked them, is it cool to be studious or to be doing well? The answers are very quick. It's not even, there's no ambiguity in their mind. It's not a maybe. It's for sure it is not cool. And so what they're seeking for is an environment where when they actually want to do well, they're celebrated and the teachers who are there encourage them, motivate them. But not just the teachers, it's also the peers that they're there with. They are encouraging the same kind of positive habit and just making sure that loop continues. Ashwini Asokan: Wow. That's the first time, to be honest with you. This is the first time, I've heard a lot of stories in EdTech focused on learning and coding and, you know, new skills and new areas to learn and then continuing that journey from school onwards elsewhere and making up for even teaching skills in some or resources, I guess. But this is a story, it's a very interesting thing. You're literally framing it in the context of trust, right? Like going to school is, of course, everybody goes to school. But the difference between the traditional school systems that are there today versus the digital spaces, which seem all about encouraging, learning, encouraging, hanging out with those, encouraging, being more vocal and being rewarded for actually learning. It's really interesting that those two things are standing out at two opposite ends of the spectrum there, digital versus offline. And on that note, since I did mention digital, tell us about the technology. Tell us about you guys are technology-heavy, technology-first and that whole transition from, I guess, offline to online must have been intense. That's a huge kind of change in some ways from a moral perspective. Just tell us about all things technology, all things digital at CoLearn. Abhay Saboo: Yeah, it was definitely an intense change for us, especially going from being offline players and believing, we used to firmly believe, you know, it's funny how the human mind works. You can convince yourself anything is right. And we had convinced ourselves that all these folks, technology was just something temporary. Eventually, people would come back and want to go offline and we convinced ourselves, we provided ourselves with all the data points. We wanted to make sure that our thesis was right. But what we realized is, when we decided to say, when COVID came, we had no other choice. We had to go online. And once that happened, we had to quickly adapt. It was something new for us. Most of the people that were working with us, none of them had a product background. None of them had a tech background. One of the things that was most helpful for us in that transition is recognizing what we didn't have. We were two co-founders, myself and Marc, and we quickly recognized that if this company is to survive and if this company is to grow, we need to have a third co-founder and we need to have tech DNA in place. And that's one of the most pivotal things that we did, is making sure that we went from 2 co-founders to 3. And that's really what made sure that we were able to go down this path of tech transformation and ultimately this A.I. transformation journey. So it started there. I think where we are now, how we think about technology and how we got to this point, first of all, there are certain things that we saw where it does make absolute sense to automate. So it made no sense for us. Also because of just limitations. We had a supply limitation. Kids were used to this idea of having a tutor answer their questions. But there's very few good tutors and there's very few tutors around. And then on top of that, there's very few good tutors. So you had to look for an answer in technology and that's what we did. But what we also realized is A.I. can solve for that. And it's done a great job for us. It's made sure when we were able to answer maybe a few 100 questions in a day, now we are able to answer a few 100,000 questions in a day. Thanks to technology and thanks to that A.I. transformation, which has largely happened thanks to you, Ashwini and the team at MSD. So that was critical. But what we also realized is that there are some parts where people are just not willing to pay if it's purely, if you just automate everything. So I think you have to have a healthy combination of automation and things like the human touch and personalization and interaction. So we're still finding the right balance. Where we are now is mostly our homework help is done through A.I. Our live classes are mostly interactive and we have very basic technology integration there, although we do see a future where A.I. Will be integrated into each part of our funnel, all the way from homework help at the top of the funnel, to making live classes more interactive, to also helping us focus in on the right set of customers so that we don't annoy people who have no use for the product. We use our team's time well. Well, so we do see all of that happening. But what's the right balance is we're still figuring out. Ashwini Asokan: Yeah, I mean, again, since we work together, one of the things that I think we've been really surprised about is just how it has been baked into the very foundation of your company, like the entry funnel into CoLearn is, you know, kids being able to take pictures of what math questions, chemistry questions, physics questions and be able to find answers. And we've got blox working there. But then the question for you, I guess, so they're taking those pictures and they're getting answers. And those answers are what? Can you tell us a little bit more about that flow and how that works? Abhay Saboo: Yeah, so they I mean, fundamentally, again, back to the problem statement right, they're spending all these hours in school and they're not getting the help that they need, then they go to an offline tutoring center where they try to look for help. Oftentimes it's time consuming, it's expensive, it's inconvenient. And most importantly, they are prone to get wrong answers, even from an offline tutor who is spending time with them. Even if they get the right answers, the explanation and how you get to that answer may very often not be clear. And so that's the pain point that we're trying to address. Given the supply constrained environment like Indonesia, it just made a lot more sense to see how can we automate some of this. So what happens is, a kid can look for, hey can take a picture of a question. We have a video repository that we've created over time. So we worked with a few 100 tutors in the country. We worked with the best tutors in the country, from the best colleges. And we made sure that we trained them on how to deliver step by step explanations for different problems. We then, we started off with math. We've now entered physics and chemistry. So they created these videos. We also check those videos for accuracy, we checked them for audio-visual. We make sure that even the tone that the teacher is talking with is a positive and encouraging tone for the kids. So we do all of this, and once you have a high quality repository, then we use artificial intelligence to make sure that the picture that's being submitted by the student, the question that's being submitted by them is matched to the right video explanation. Ashwini Asokan: Sure. And the path ahead, I know that A.I. is like you guys are thinking about it everywhere, right across personalization, how to create really, really personalized learning experiences, community, social. There's so many aspects that you're thinking about, given you're solving the problem of trust. Let's just I think that just changes everything completely, I think, bottoms up. How do you think about that? Using A.I. to solve for trust? Abhay Saboo: I think A.I. drives trust because frankly, sometimes A.I. drives the opposite of trust. You know, where we saw that is in China, right? So what we saw in China is, they they went to the point where one TA could handle a few hundred students powered by A.I. and the willingness to pay, just dropped. Ashwini Asokan: Well, and not surprisingly. But wow. OK. Abhay Saboo: So, what Chinese students want, because China is fully capable of this, right? But what they decided then, what some of these companies decided is that people really want the human touch now. And I'm just using willingness to pay there as a proxy for trust, right? But although I think where you can, where A.I. can drive trust is by giving them the right answer. If they're looking for something, you give them the right answer that drives trust, right? Ashwini Asokan: Yeah. And then I think that story continues, right? I think the part about the trust is that people are coming online because they're not getting the kind of support offline. And if you're suddenly saying that the space online is going to be personalized for you, right? So I'm looking at a set of questions and you're just noticing that I'm looking at a particular set of questions this week or this month. And if you are able to use that to understand what each and every person is coming to your app for, at any given point of time, you can literally curate almost like a body of knowledge around that subject for that month or for that person, right? And the personalized learning space starts to emerge, which is next to like, it's nonexistent in the offline spaces, even in India, right? Like everybody solving for the mainstream masses. No one’s solving for one-on-one. And there is that fact. So you want to bring that story in? Abhay Saboo: I think so. And I think probably where A.I. builds trust is when you save people time, right. And you know what? You've personalized it. But personalization basically means you make me much more efficient and either I can spend the same amount of time learning more or I can learn what I used to in a lesser amount of time, all the time. And that's what builds trust. So, yeah, sure. OK, I'll just get into the answer. So, A.I. builds trust in our context, first of all, right at the top of the funnel, as students come in, when they ask the question, if they are able to get the answer to the question that they're looking for. That's the first point of trust being built between the student and the platform enabled by A.I. But we think that, that continues throughout their journey because as you personalize the product and as their experience is personalized and as they're able to save time, either they are able to do more work in the amount of time that they used to or they're just able to get done quicker. So in either case, for them being more efficient, saving time and being able to use that to do something else, that may mean spending time with family, but that may also mean learning another subject. So I think freeing up time also is something that we think would build trust through personalization. Ashwini Asokan: Yeah, wonderful. All right, Abhay tell us about your vision. I think you're just getting started on your journey. And I feel like, again, transformation seems to be the theme of all things CoLearn, like you're transforming teacher journeys, you're transforming student journeys, you're transforming behavior in a country where education works a certain way. You're transforming from offline to online. It feels like that's a lot of, kind of, challenges that you guys are taking on. And I feel like, you know, at the end of the day, you know what they say about founders, everything comes down to mission. And that certainly seems like a massive mission. But tell me a little bit about three years out, five years out, like, what's your vision? Abhay Saboo: I think we're going to be tackling the same problem that we are tackling now, because it is a pretty big problem. It is, we've narrowed down the problem statement where it's not an education problem in this country. We feel it is a mindset problem and we've started to tackle that. But we, like you correctly mentioned, we've only started to chip away at it. And it will take easily the next 3-5 years to have a real dent on such a problem, especially at scale. So we don't see the problem statement changing much. We don't see the way in which we are approaching this changing much. Probably one of the things that we do see changing a lot is how we integrate A.I. into each part of the roadmap and how we personalize the experience for each student so that the journey is very much their own. That's probably the one one biggest change that we see when we look at more mid to long term. Everything else, though, I think it'll be more about doing what we started doing now, doing it in a more scalable way and doing it better. Ashwini Asokan: So tell us the scale of the business. How many people are on the platform, how many hours like, tell us, give me some numbers so we can get a sense of how big CoLearn is. Abhay Saboo: Yeah. So we have right now about three and a half million students, two and a half million on our app, another million plus that are using WhatsApp. That number is growing every day between 10,000 and 50,000 students per day. And we don't see that slowing down any time soon. Indonesia, again, has 50 million K-12 students. And each year, obviously, the number of students that comes into the platform will continue to go up. Of course, this is a number of students that are actually registered. On the active side, so we have about a month, a million monthly active users currently, and we see an opportunity for that number to grow as well. So where we see ourselves going in the next 3-5 years, we see ourselves going to about and maybe we haven't thought that long term in terms of numbers, but we have thought by the end of this year we hope to get to closer to 10 million students. And then go from there. Currently, these students are asking for say, anywhere between 200,000, all the way to a 1000,000 questions in a single day. And that number we expect to scale not just as the number of students on the platform goes up, but as the number of questions that they ask. Increasing. And again, like we said earlier, that will be based a lot on the trust that they have in the platform, that the platform can give them the right answers. And so that, those numbers we expect to increase as well. Currently about per day, almost 5000 hours of videos that are being watched. And again, over time, we see that going up significantly as well. Ashwini Asokan: Well, I'm just going to have to ask, when are you expanding to other countries. You guys are clearly, and obviously it's the beginning of that journey for you guys, you're just getting started. But it feels like if it's working so well in Indonesia, there's obviously a story of expansion there somewhere. Like what's the story there? Abhay Saboo: What we actually think that there's a lot more work that needs to be done before we can say that things are working well. We are getting started on this journey. There are certain things that are working well, but there's other things that we need to make sure we improve and fix and iterate on. And so we think for the next 2-3 years, our focus is going to be purely on Indonesia. Because this is a large enough market and this is the fourth largest market in the world. GDP per capita, which is twice that of countries like India and Vietnam. So, yeah, for now, it's Indonesia. But having said that, there are other countries in the world which have a motivation problem, which have a mindset problem. So Indonesia is not alone. Ashwini Asokan: Awesome, awesome. So never say no. Akshara Subramanian: All right, thank you so much for being part of the podcast Abhay. I think this is such a great story for companies across the globe that are looking to heavily invest in tech and tackle their own industry's most complex problems. So thank you so much. I think we learned a lot today and we're really rooting for CoLearn's journey ahead and our partnership with you. And we really we're looking forward to seeing where this goes. Abhay Saboo: Thanks Akshara, for the opportunity. Akshara Subramanian: Thank you for more episodes on why retailers need to be innovative and understand how companies are using digital transformation to grow, head over to The Blox Podcast to get your monthly dose. Until then, buh-bye.