This essay relies on a conversation with Chris Haroun, CEO and founder from Haroun Education Ventures. For clarity, the text has been edited and shortened.
After graduating from business school at Columbia, I worked at Goldman Sachs for five years. Then I moved into the hedge fund industry, Citadel hired me and moved my family to the San Francisco Bay Area. There I finally switched to enterprise capital. And I discovered that my happiest day at work was all the time the primary day. And then things went downhill and I could not understand why. I used to be effective at work, but I assumed perhaps I used to be depressed or something. But it was because I hadn’t found my passion.
In all of the years I’ve worked at other firms, I’ve found that my bosses all the time felt uncomfortable in the course of the annual review because they said something like, “You’re doing a great job. You’re doing a great job.” You are a top performer. Everyone enjoys working with you. But are you able to spend a bit less time mentoring other people on other teams?” And I always said, “That’s just who I’m. I am unable to change the DNA of who I’m.” I really like helping people. So I began teaching.
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In 2016, while I used to be still working in enterprise capital, I began teaching evenings in East Palo Alto. I felt alive helping these students. I loved it. Then I began teaching at a number of MBA schools within the Bay Area. One Saturday I taught a course I called “MBA in a Day.” LEMO Foundation, which serves underserved student-athletes. And the subsequent day I just arrange a camera at home and recorded myself for eight hours. Then I uploaded it to the net learning and teaching platform Udemy.
This course sold nearly 500,000 copies and generated a passive income stream within the seven-figure net profit in any case costs. And I kept growing: I now have 72 more courses on Udemy and nearly two million students all over the world. And while this work could be relatively easy from a customer support perspective, the goal is not only to make cash. It’s about helping others. I spend lots of time helping students, participating in Zoom calls and answering questions.
The profits from what I do go towards constructing schools. If you go to… Project Magu, you possibly can see the primary school I built with considered one of my students in Rwanda. And with one other of my students I’m now constructing the second school in Kenya, a few six-hour drive from Nairobi. It’s a faculty for ladies.
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For me, that’s an important sense of purpose. When I used to be on the LEMO Foundation, the founding father of that charity told me something that modified me. He said, “You can’t expect to achieve your life’s dreams if you don’t first help others achieve theirs.” That’s why we’re all here, as Tony Robbins once told me, to serve others and help other people. And that is exactly what I did.
The pandemic was tragic, but it surely pushed my vision for the long run of education forward by at the least a decade. And I believe only 50 universities will make it in my lifetime. I believe what is going on to find yourself happening is that the majority of them are going to make use of up their endowments, after which there’s going to be a Hail Mary pass to the alumni to avoid wasting the faculties, after which persons are going to think, Why trouble going to a university if it is not an important brand like Harvard or Oxford? The system is elitist in that many children are accepted into top schools because their parents went there or because they donated money. Another problem is that you simply pay $100,000 for 20 hours of classes per week and graduate with no knowledge in any respect.
In my book 101 Important Lessons You Don’t Learn in Business SchoolI outline the issue with MBA schools. They don’t teach you the right way to sell. They don’t teach you the right way to network to get a job. They don’t teach you the right way to manage your individual money. They teach you the right way to manage other people’s money. They don’t teach you the right way to present. They don’t teach you the right way to start a business. Graduate and undergraduate business programs teach you theoretical concepts which will have been relevant within the last century. So I believe the sector is ripe for disruption. I believe Udemy might be the catalyst that can change the industry and get more people learning online.
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Furthermore, everyone has something to show. For example, there may be a girl named Teresa Greenway She’s an important teacher on Udemy – and he or she teaches the right way to bake bread. And it’s an incredible story: Years ago, before she began teaching at Udemy, she was in a terrible marriage to an abusive husband. It was terrible. And she had the courage to go away him and take her children together with her. So she was living on food stamps and thought to herself: What can I do to assist other people? What am I keen about? And she loves baking bread. So she arrange a camera at home and began showing people on the platform the right way to bake bread. The same applies here: everyone can teach you something.
