'Most People Are MISSING The AI Revolution!' Gagan Biyani On Why Universities Are LAGGING Behind

25:49And that didn't last. Then I started another company, which raised, I think,$60 million. And we eventually had to shut it down. I basically burnt out myself. The company had a really, really successful two and a half years and then a really terrible, just complete crash over one and a half years. And so I would say that I still look at my career as more failure than success. but the good news about startups is you get paid for your successes and you don't pay for your failures financially. You pay emotionally dearly. And so it's all upside. So once you get upside, it's great. And that's probably the saving grace of these things.

26:33But yeah, those were tough moments. And even with Maven, we started off really hot and then we had to really cut the team down and rebuilt. And there were many years where we felt like, okay, like, is this thing going to be a real business? And we finally got to that point, but it took a lot of iteration. Yeah, it does. And I think that's part of probably why you love it, because it's not a straight line, right? And it's a journey, but it's also the thing that probably causes the most emotional toll and stress and all of those things. What do you, and I'm hogging up all the time, so jump in here, Pete, anytime.

27:16But what do you do to manage that stress? What have you learned over time that helps you? Yeah. Outside of work, I've always had a really good sort of system of what I do. And it changes over time with different life phases. But as I mentioned earlier, I have a great group of friends. I'm very lucky that my group of friends are not all in tech. And therefore, we do talk business. I have a few friends who I just had dinner with them last night, and we do talk about our careers, but there's no status orientation to our friendship. So if I have years where I'm not doing well, I have no question. In fact, I know that my friends will maybe like me more because I'm less stressed, I'm more chill, I'm a different person when I'm not running a company.

28:05And so the truth is actually my friendships are better. And that means that there is this feeling of psychological safety that your social network is not tied to your perception of success. And that's, to me, the biggest mistake I see founders make in the Valley is that they have private relationships that are status-oriented because they themselves become status-oriented. And I think this is true, by the way, not just for founders. I think this is probably true in many tech circles. And if you can't get past that, it's okay if you meet someone because you were both starting companies at the same time and you become friends, that's fine.

28:47But if you cannot get past that level, it's very, very lonely when you fail because you feel like your failure goes beyond just the company and the investors and the employees, which is already a ton of pressure, but it goes into your social life, which feels like so daunting and maybe your relationships. So I'd say that's like been a really special thing that I've been able to have, you know, and then on top of that, I enjoy myself outside of work. So I definitely, you know, work hard, play hard kind of person. I, you know, tomorrow night I will do, tomorrow I will do like like a full day shoot on a video.

29:26We're going to drop soon. I never, rarely ever do this, but once every couple of years, you want to do a launch video or something. So we're doing that tomorrow. And then that night, I'll fly and go visit my friends in LA for a couple of days. And I might have a call or two or do some work over the weekend. It's not like I won't. But as soon as that call is done, at least I get to go and spend time with my friends and enjoy myself and eat good food. And I think we're going to a jazz club. Like, I think stuff like that's just really important to have as, you know, on top of work. That sounds a lot more fun than what I'm going to do this weekend.

30:03Peter Clarke:I think that's good advice, though. I would say from a founder perspective, and I don't know, I mean, assuming you get outreach as well from other founders who are going through things. But just, you know, what it sounds like, too, and seems to make a lot of sense is having a group of friends who even if they are in the same industry, that there's that more than just a superficial relationship of, hey, let me tell you, you know, what you should be doing or how it's going. Or, you know, can you find the friends who say, hey, your company sucks, right? And maybe you should think about something else.

30:36Peter Clarke:But not in that context of, you know, it's a contest where I'm competing with my friend. I mean, I see that so much where it feels like, you know, even the CEO, founder networking groups often feel more like a contest, right? And it's like, that's got to be a hard place to be. You know, find some friends who can be transparent with you and ask you the questions. and even, yeah, to hanging on to the folks you knew from high school who then, you know, can be like, wow, you know, like, is that what you want to be doing? Or with no ill intent, right? Like trying to keep up with them. But anyway, I guess I'm just rambling.

31:13So like, what advice do you give founders, you know, as they're struggling through this

31:18Peter Clarke:as well? Yeah, I mean, I think on top of finding friends, find routines and things that make you happy. You know, now I do this with my wife, but even since I was working on Sprig and I had a little bit more, I could afford this basically because at Udemy, we were basically broke the entire time. So well, at Udemy, I would travel and stay on my friend's couch, right? So I'd go to LA or something and stay on a friend's couch. So I still had this. But now it's like, you know, I go up to Northern California and enjoy wine country for a night and book a room in a hotel and get a massage and like drink wine and eat great food.

31:52And like having a routine of things that sort of provide you with that recharge, I think is really powerful. I'd say the other thing is like I have always, when I am the most stressed, I have the best habits. So as my stress levels go up, my strictness around my habits goes up as well. And that's been a really, really good behavior in part because I learned from childhood, I had family members who had the opposite behavior of turning to the bottle or something when they are stressed. And I learned very quickly that the one thing you do not want to do when you are stressed is take it out on your own body or on yourself.

32:34And so now, funny enough, when I'm stressed, I eat cleaner, I work out more, I sort of take care of myself. And I think that's also really important. The final thing is to be aware of it. Because honestly, for most of my career, and even to this day, I'm not very good at being aware when I'm stressed. everything I'm telling you is a subconscious thing. I subconsciously start doing this and then I notice, oh shit. Right now on this podcast, I'm thinking, yeah, I've been really healthy lately. Luckily, my stress right now is really positive stress, but I am doing a lot. I'm pushing hard right now.

33:08And that is clearly related. I'm now, literally in this moment, I'm realizing that that is the case. Well, I'm glad we could help you. Luckily right now, I can say that it's like, I'll be honest, it's quite a lot of exciting things are happening in my life. So the stress is good, but good stress is still like fucking intense. It's still stress. Yeah. Stress isn't always bad. And I think that's where we had a, I'm not remembering her name right now off the top of my head, but we had a woman on the show who says our association with stress is part of the problem because we associate it with it always being bad.

33:48a negative. She's like, stress is also good because it pushes you to do better and more. And that's exciting, right? That's good for your body and your brain. And anywho, so stress is not always bad. It can propel you into other things. I mean, one of the things that I do right now to sort of maintain some balance is on Friday mornings, I play soccer every Friday. And the great thing about that is I'm a terrible soccer player. I learned as an adult. And most of the people I play with have been playing since they were kids. And so I really had to force myself to learn how to be effective on the field.

34:29And that's very stressful, actually. Yeah. Because I'm embarrassed if I miss a pass or if I miss a shot or whatever. And what's really interesting is often when I feel the positive stress of like, oh, I better make this shot. That's when I make the shot. And so I do agree with you that there is positive stress that can force you to sort of be at your best. And then I can also associate it has a shade of negative stress. And when it's negative stress, I'm worried about missing. It's like if you're worried about missing the shot, you're more likely to miss it. But if you're worried about making the shot, you're more likely to make it.

35:15That's a really interesting sort of dynamic there with how it relates to work. So I thought I'd share that anecdote. No, I think that that's so true. Well, I don't know.

35:24Peter Clarke:You didn't say pickleball. That's what I like. So, you know. Yeah, I like pickleball too. I have been playing pickleball recently, but I definitely don't view it as it's hard to get a lot of exercise unless you play singles. I think that's true. It's just not enough running for me and soccer is running. Pickleball is super fun, though. I love it. It is so fun. Yeah, so fun. Okay. I don't know if you will agree with this, Pete. I think you will because we tend to think alike. But I think that hiring is one of the founders or CEOs' most important jobs. And really focusing around building a great team is crucial and really is a big difference of whether you do it well or not, right?

36:14It's the team that you build. So I don't know, Pete, if you agree with that. And I want to know, Goggin, if you agree with that.

36:20Peter Clarke:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, I mean, a hundred percent. Uh, you know, I, I, I would say that every successful company had a founder who could recruit. Well, I can't say that every successful company, you know, didn't like that doesn't mean that it applies to everybody, but for sure you can say that all the ones that weren't successful had a founder that couldn't recruit. Well, um, I mean, we deal with that obviously a lot in the talent role at a venture capital firm. you know i think there's a strong desire oftentimes to just like boy i wish i could like completely outsource this and it's like well you can't it's just like you can do a whole lot of things to make that more efficient and effective as a job to make sure that you're solely focused on the clothes right the the fit and you know those key aspects of it like without that sort of overwhelming desire to like hire the best people i think a company will struggle Yeah, I completely agree.

37:16And I'll also say that the number one most important thing for a founder is to get product market fit. That's true. Well, you won't need to hire if you don't have that. Correct. And then I think the second most important job is to hire and manage a great team. I think that's right. Was that obvious to you from your learnings as a 13-year-old? yeah I think so I mean just again like I joke a lot I talk a lot about the negative but just be clear like we had a great team and there was no way that that camp could have succeeded without like incredible like camaraderie amongst the team together and like I said we're all friends to this day I think even then I knew that the team was super important and that That was kind of the key to the whole thing.

38:12Now, how you manage the team and what style that takes is different for different people. You were part of Netflix. My interpretation of Netflix was they explicitly said it's not a family. It's a team. And I definitely have that attitude. So I think there's a trope that's incorrect, which is like the company is a family. And we always look after each other no matter what. Like, yes, any person I've ever worked with who has given me their honest best, I'm there for if they ever have a real challenge. At the same time, I'm not going to keep them employed just because they're having a real challenge.

38:49And those are two separate things. So I do believe in hiring and recruiting and managing a great team. And I believe that the team is the operative word there. Yeah. Well, I'm a product market fit thing.

39:05Peter Clarke:Absolutely. I think if you don't have that, it's actually hard to recruit in the sense of like, you know, people have to be excited about what you're doing. Right. And so for sure, like getting to that point where then you can be that evangelist, that that's how you hire great people and actually close them and get excited about it because you've got something that people want to join. So I think a lot of founders also just underestimate, you know, sometimes it feels like they're like, wow, I mean, not all companies today, of course, you know, there's some that become instant household names, but for a lot of other founders, it's like, you know, they, they're almost surprised sometimes when a really great person is interested.

39:46Peter Clarke:It's just like, wait, you're interested. Like, so just even that, you know, imposter syndrome, I think that runs rampant in founders as well with, you know, they believe they built something amazing and at the same time are surprised that they can hire amazing people, which I think is a mental thing that, you know, you got to get past that. Did you have that, Gagan, at all? It doesn't strike me that you did. Yeah, that's a great question. Think that I was, yeah, I don't think I felt like, I don't think I felt like, oh, I cannot believe this person is coming to work with me for a long time. I think nowadays I feel it more.

40:21I think as a young founder, I was like, I'm going to go build the biggest thing ever. You know, this is incredible. I was sort of drinking my own Kool-Aid. And I think over time, I think I've come to appreciate just how competitive the job market really is and how good some of the people that I get to work with are. But you know, I also think that early, early on, we were not at Udemy recruiting people who were already proven. We were recruiting people who were figuring things out. Now, some of them have been wildly successful. I'm so amazed by many of the early Udemy team members and what they've accomplished.

40:59But I didn't really appreciate what I had at times. And also how much people can grow and change over time. I mean, it's not like the person I hired is the person who they are today. It's just that they had such good trajectories. And I think we were really good at finding those trajectories. and also and as long as you don't like you know as long as you admit when you're wrong or you know you fix your mistakes it was very very good like very lucky to be like pretty pretty hands-off like i let people do their thing and i think that's an example of something that allows those types of people to sort of be really successful but also honestly i don't think i appreciated how good they were until they just like over their careers, they just all were all so amazing.

41:45It's really, and now that I'm, I've seen that I have more awareness whenever someone who I think is really talented joins the team, I feel so lucky. Yeah. I know, but isn't it, I don't know. I just, I love, I love watching people grow. It's, it's so amazing what, you know, when, when you get those special people and then you see them five, 10 years later and you're like, look at all you, it's just cool. Anyways, we are running out of time and we have not really talked about Maven at all. So do you want to talk about Maven? Sure. Yeah. I mean, we didn't talk about any of the businesses actually.

42:22So yeah, I mean, Maven, I think, is actually a pretty relevant fit for your audience, which is that we believe that humans still have a place in modern learning and learning and development. I don't think that we're anywhere We're close to the point at which AI can sufficiently replace a live expert with niche expertise. And so what Maven has done is recruited some of the best experts in the world, like people who literally run product at OpenAI or are reporting to, you know, C-levels at Anthropic or who are, you know, building AI at Google, right? You have some of the top talent who are the first PM lead at Stripe.

43:07we recruit them, we incentivize them, and we have them teach the next generation of employees. And so if you're a senior leader who is a senior manager, let's say, at Netflix, and I don't know the number, but we certainly have hundreds of people at Netflix who have used Maven, you can go on Maven and you can take a course on everything from executive communication and influence from Wes Keo, who's just a fantastic leader and co-founder of Maven in that case. Or you can take a product sense course from Shreyas Doshi, or you can take a course on Cloud Code from James Gray. And we connect, we provide continuing education essentially for anyone who's looking to improve their skills over time, because we believe that But in a world that is constantly changing, you kind of need to do something every year or two to keep up with what's going on.

44:05And I mean, I feel like right now, you know, we all recognize that AI is this next, you know, revolution in tech. And for me, it feels much faster than some of the other ones. And, you know, I think if folks are not open to this and getting this, that they're going to just be behind. and I don't know. I mean, what are your thoughts? What should we all be doing? Yeah, the biggest thing that I think people are missing is they think they can solve the problem by just using the tools. Like, just give people access to the tools. They'll just figure it out. It's like most HR leaders have already tried that over the last couple of years and they know that like that has not worked.

44:49It doesn't work. You know, and then the other thing is individual contributors think to themselves, well, I'm reading about this stuff on Twitter or I'm on LinkedIn or I watch on YouTube and that also doesn't work. You know, I think that what you need is for most people, you need structured learning. Whether that structured learning is self-run, which I think can happen, people can self-create their own learning systems. Or we find it's like super efficient to just go and take a one-day course on CloudCode. Like you're just, you know, you could hack on CloudCode for three weeks or three months even, and you can compress all that knowledge into one day.

45:29And it's just way more efficient. Someone has curated this for you, and now all of a sudden, you're at the next level. And then you still have to spend the next three months improving and refining and applying it to your own use case. So the reality is that you can never get rid of the need for practice. The goal at Maven is just to get you to practice faster, gets you to the point of knowing what's possible and having a goal and really understanding the underlying systems of what you need to change in order to adopt AI. I think the biggest mistake people make with AI is not recognizing how much of a fundamental change it is.

46:10Maven's org structure is different today because of it. We have changed the way that we run pods. Our pods used to be PM, a designer, and four or five engineers. it's now half a PM, half a designer and two engineers. That's a totally different structure. And by the way, like then the designers are, we're actually asking ourselves if we need more engineers per designer than what we have. That's the same ratio, right? Two to half is the same as four to one. So these are all things that you have to ask yourself. So we actually have courses for leaders as well. Actually, Claire Vo is teaching one on EPD, engineering product design, how you redesign your engineering product design.

46:51leadership. There's courses on how to become a better super manager or how to be a people leader using AI-powered techniques by people who come from the top tier organizations rather than, you know, Udemy or Coursera. And I'll differentiate between both of our past companies, Jessica, here, which is like, you know, Udemy, you get a random person on the internet who knows the skill really well, might be a great teacher, but isn't at the cutting edge. And then at Coursera, you get someone who's a professor. And I think I very much believe that universities are going to be one of the laggards when it comes to AI.

47:24So they're not going to be on the cutting edge. So I think that's the big difference that we've created with Maven. And yeah, I think it's pretty exciting. I would say so. Okay. This is my last question for you. And it's a selfish question because I have a six-year-old. So he's going to be in first grade in public school here in Texas next year. And they are not, they don't know anything about AI. Like, I don't know. Like, what do you think about like education that's happening in our country right now, virtual? And this is a loaded question, but again, selfish. Yeah. I mean, I think I believe in the alpha school model.

48:03I was going to, I just was researching that. I was going to bring it up on the podcast if we had time. That's the shortest version of this answer, which is I, for a long time before, Before Alpha School became popular, I visited it five years ago, well before anyone really knew about it. And then I had been thinking about this for the last 10 years. I feel like there has been a dramatic degradation in the quality of sort of institutional learning, both at the K-12 level and at the university level. And I think the gap is much bigger than it used to be. And so I'm increasingly thinking of alternative education sources for my hopeful future children.

48:44And I tell my friends when they ask me about this, because I get asked this question. I was a public school kid. I love the idea of public school, but they really are not keeping up. And, you know, that is a serious problem for society, by the way. Like, this is not good. We are exacerbating an education gap that has already been a problem for 30 years. And AI is only going to make it worse because people like you are going to teach their kids how to use it. You'll figure it out. But the average parent who doesn't know and doesn't use it is not going to and is going to create a bigger, bigger divide because it does give you superpowers.

49:31I don't know about y 'all, but I'm amazed by what I can accomplish. Like it's next level. It's phenomenal. Yeah. Like, you know, we're thinking about all sorts of expansion things at Maven. And I don't need a chief of staff to go and do research on it. I don't even really need to talk to experts on it. In the early days, I go and do a bunch of research on AI. Then I call the experts, right? And that is a crazy shift. Like it's a crazy shift for me as a CEO. And I'm not even at the center of the bullseye here. The center of the bullseye is a six-year-old. The center of the bullseye is a designer or an engineer.

50:12And I see designer engineer, they're the ones who are really changing their behavior the most. And so, yeah, I think your kid, I would highly recommend looking into some of these alternative futures and figuring out how to integrate it into your, your, your, your. them. Yeah. Gosh, well, I'm so sad we're out of time. We always ask for a piece of inspiration or advice for the listeners for you to wrap up. So what do you want to leave us with today? You've already left us with so much, but I'm going to be greedy and ask for one more thing. I think that if you're just genuinely a curious and sort of learning-oriented person, this is one of the most exciting moments in your life.

50:56And I actually think this AI duverism is totally understating the AI optimism case. And the AI optimism case is we can all do more. We can all get more stuff done. We'll have more free time. Already today, we have more free time than our ancestors did. We forget this, but it's true. And because we forget about household work. And household work has gone down dramatically, even though hours - I'm raising my hand. Not for me. Yeah. Well, trust me, it has actually. I'm sure it has. It doesn't feel like it. But compared to your ancestors, it has. It's true. Yeah. I'm not having to go to the well and bring in buckets of water.

51:39Thank God. And you don't have to churn butter. Yeah. I'm not churning butter. But I need help with laundry. Yeah. Well, we're still working on it. By the way, laundry folding robots are coming. I know. I want one. Yeah, they're coming. They're real. Do they put it away? Do they put it in the drawers? No, you have to take it and put it into the drawers, but they will fold it for you. That's good. Yeah, it's good. I mean, right now it costs like five grand, so it doesn't really make sense. For most people, or 10 grand, it's like extremely expensive, but it will get cheaper. Yeah, it'll be cheap.

52:10It'll become the price of a washer, which I believe is like one to two grand these days. So, you know, yeah, this is going to be crazy. And it's so exciting. And I think it's exciting for your listeners, not just for founders, not just for CEOs. I think it's exciting for everybody. And my team is jazzed up and they're all learning like all the time new stuff and sharing it during our weekly demos. And so I personally am super optimistic and I hope you take that away from this podcast. Well, I do. I'm just I'm grateful for you coming on the show. thank you, Pete, as well. And thank you, listeners.

52:47And I hope you go take some of the courses on Maven because it's going to change your life. And thank you for just, I don't know, you're just a good human. I'm really glad you came on the show, Goggin. Thank you. Thank you both. Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. I felt like it was supernatural. And obviously, I have a ton of respect for what y 'all have done. And so it's fun to have a chance. Yay. Well, that is it, folks. Thank you, everyone. Thanks for listening to TruthWorks.