Cherian Thomas is a senior vice president at BYJU’S who led the company’s acquisition of Osmo from BYJU’S and the company’s entry to the North American market—as its first international employee. A computer scientist by training and a self-proclaimed nerd through his college years and beyond, Cherian began his career as an engineer and quickly found his passion in the world of startups, including the gaming company Zynga.
Prior to BYJU’S, Cherian founded his own startup, Cucumbertown—a network for chefs—that was acquired by Cookpad in 2017. Cherian leads business for some of BYJU’S key initiatives and is responsible for several hundred million in revenue per year that spans across 15+ countries. Currently, Cherian’s focus remains on Osmo from BYJU’S which builds a universe of hands-on gamified learning experiences validated by education experts to nourish the minds of children.
Recommended Resources:
TED, TEDx
Watch me play ... the audience! by Bobby McFerrin
EdSurge
Youtube
Cherian Thomas is a senior vice president at BYJU’S who led the company’s acquisition of Osmo from BYJU’S and the company’s entry to the North American market—as its first international employee. A computer scientist by training and a self-proclaimed nerd through his college years and beyond, Cherian began his career as an engineer and quickly found his passion in the world of startups, including the gaming company Zynga.
Prior to BYJU’S, Cherian founded his own startup, Cucumbertown—a network for chefs—that was acquired by Cookpad in 2017. Cherian leads business for some of BYJU’S key initiatives and is responsible for several hundred million in revenue per year that spans across 15+ countries. Currently, Cherian’s focus remains on Osmo from BYJU’S which builds a universe of hands-on gamified learning experiences validated by education experts to nourish the minds of children.
Recommended Resources:
TED, TEDx
Watch me play ... the audience! by Bobby McFerrin
EdSurge
Youtube
Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors, driving the future of education technology. I'm your host Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies. Cherian Thomas is a Senior Vice President at bio Jews, who led the company's acquisition of Osmo from BYJU's and the company's entry to the North American market as its first international employee, a computer scientist by training and a self proclaimed nerd through his college years and beyond. Cherian began his career as an engineer and quickly found his passion in the world of startups, including the gaming company Zynga prior to buy juice, Cherian founded his own startup cucumber town, a network for chefs that was acquired by Cookpad in 2017. Sharing leads business for some of my juice key initiatives and is responsible for several 100 million in revenue per year spanning across 15 or more countries. Currently, Cherian's focus remains on Ozma from buy juice, which builds a universe of hands on gamified learning experiences, validated by education experts to nourish the minds of children. Cherian Thomas, Welcome
Cherian Thomas:to EdTech insiders privileged to be here on it like,
Alexander Sarlin:yeah, it's really, really terrific to have you. Let's start with an overview, you know, in a couple of sentences. Tell us what brought you into the tech world and what is your background and what led you to your role as senior vice president at 5g is focusing on asthma
Cherian Thomas:and suddenly live as an engineer then went on to work with hyper growth startups of the era, then went on to do my own company, which was sold and post that I was looking at the industry on what is going to be transformative 10 years from there, and what is going to change from there. As a guy who has built and scaled things, these I have a knack for finding these kinds of trends before it gets quite a few of my friends worked at one of the leading VC firms. And I was not necessarily so fixated on ed tech, but where I met with Baijiu. And the kind of vision that he had, I was quite enamored by how he has found his way into plunging through the whole industry. It's complex, because for decades and decades, people have been talking about revolutionising the tech industry, but nothing has really moved. And here you see a person who has the ability to push through that that got me hooked into. And then I joined by just as the first international employee, and then worked in a small shed office, built the whole thing and arrived over here.
Alexander Sarlin:Wow, first international employee, I'm sure that was an amazing role. And you get by Jesus, such a huge and increasingly international company. So you're right in the seat to start with that international expansion. So interesting. Let's talk a little bit about Osmo as well as a fascinating technology. It combines, you know, mobile tech, with specifically iPads, and Amazon Fire tablets, sort of mobile devices with hands on tactile tools, numberblocks, pen grams, letter shapes, so that basically kids can actually touch and move things in a physical way, which are then interpreted by the iPads, camera and effects on screen behavior. And they can play games do activities in a wide variety of different activities. It was founded by ex Googlers. And it's been really successful both as a b2c and a B to s school product used in 10s of 1000s of classrooms. So that's a pretty unusual story for an edtech product. It's a physical product and has a really large and sort of ravenous you know, happy consumer base and a big audience of educators give us a little bit of an overview of how Osmo came to be and how it created these two very different business lines.
Cherian Thomas:So by just started off by creating curriculum content for first 12th graders in India, then mentoring eighth graders, and then sixth graders and fourth graders. As you go higher up the spectrum in age, it is easier to get the motivated kids to pay attention to the content that you're doing, and therefore we tackle that industry. It also paid that big Vasa teacher for the higher grade segment. We never attempted the lower grade segment because kids are the toughest customers. The mantra is not even that you need to teach them. The mantra is that how do you keep them microsecond attention spanning? So one of my first mandate was to find companies that can help kids learn and go up by two always wanted to start from The lower age group and get them all the way up to 12th grade. But he just didn't have the right technology or the toolkits to go do that. So went and did recommendations work across the spectrum, talk to a lot of companies. And finally, it was by issue who actually found I initially found Osmo, but wasn't able to come and surprise you. But when Baidu son started using Osmo, he understood the magic behind it. And that also had key items, which is enable for physical handplane, which we think is particularly important, it used technology to give real time feedback, we don't talk about computer vision, anything. So what also fundamentally is awesome, it took a lot of things that was common in the world of learning, like Tangram, it's been there for 2000 plus years to get the real time feedback, which meant that the parent didn't have to do real time attention to help the kid, you know, your five year old, you know, parent has to have complete attention to go and did a much better job than a parent, you make a rabbit first with a tank, bam, next becomes a sweat. And you know, apparently gasoline doesn't know the progression from that. So this is magical technology to us. We didn't see anything like this ever before. So as soon as you got it, he was like, go around or get it I was here and met with the founders. And things went from there. It was sheer coincidence that they were also very fanatically obsessed about learning. They, they were also this company that at that time, prioritize more on learning. But fun learning, how do you fund a skin gradient and promote the founder, co founder of Osmo was from India was born in India, so promoted and Baidu connected over the theory of making learning fun, and the relationship was born from there.
Alexander Sarlin:And that's really interesting. So high engagement, focus on learning hands on Play, and a real dedication to a user experience that was going to really work for younger children. And then even with all that it was by Jews, children, who actually made the sale and in some ways, who actually convinced him it was a really good, that is a thing that happens in education, people want to say, you know, I'm not the age of the learner. So let me put it in front of my kids or my kids friends and see what they say. So Osmo has a number of different kits. And it's a really interesting product and genius starter kit has almost 13,000, Amazon reviews, very good reviews, and they offer starter kits and kits in a lot of different learning categories. So you mentioned how, by Jews wanted to go down in age and really be able to teach younger students, it teaches a lot of different things. There's coding and math and drawing business topics. And there's a new reading adventure product that is designed for early readers, I'd love to hear you talk about some. That's just a quick overview. There's more than that, how Osmo thinks about its curriculum and the subjects it teaches and how it sort of determines how to keep rolling out new ways to new topics using this unique hands on meats, computer methodology,
Cherian Thomas:the first thing we go behind us to make sure that it has a learning complemented that's a base case scenario that goes from that, then we look at is it something that can be aided with technology that can improve the experience dramatically. So that's number two, it has to be magical. Being a product manager and all those things, a lot of these things can be made tangible metrics, but the key phrase for us is magic. And that goes beyond that. It's a metric for us to solve for then we look at things that parents understand and can relate to that can be seen as functionally learning and fun. 10 grand is an example of that. masterpieces drawing, drawing and creativity are very strong, correlated topics for a learning, reading adventure, you talk reading Adventures, the newest product just taken off more than what we could ever dream of, in fact, it probably is going to become the biggest launch and subsequently the revenue product for us. But it's a combination of what we looked at can speech recognition, play with real time feedback, can computer vision, play with real time feedback, can all of this together, Make it magical, so lots of key components, and it's all run by technologists from others, an engineer, Jerome is an engineer, a mark is an engineer. So all of these folks sit through these products. And then you need to see there is something about having being a Silicon Valley company that applies fun and learning. It's a little bit of geeky way of thinking. So we have taken things like detective which is all about learning geography, and made it fun. We've taken things like pizza, which is actually all about learning about money and entrepreneurship and balance sheets and others. The kids never really understand that the balance sheets at the end of the day in a fun manner from the same map was that you really learn math in a way that you'll never Audio to learn math. And finally reading enriched with that. So the applications to create, learn and have fun, and explore the advantages of technology for real time feedback on aided learning to get to that, you know, how does that antiquity? That answers a little bit, but I can go for the next half an hour talking about this?
Alexander Sarlin:It's really interesting to hear that sort of set of criteria, is it something that can be truly enhanced through technology, and specifically, the sort of Cosmos pretty unique take on technology, which is hands on real time feedback, you've mentioned a few times, I love this idea of sort of magic as a metric. And it reminds me of that famous science fiction quote about, you know, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It's Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer. And it makes me think of, you know, for engineers, like yourself, and some of the developers of this platform, you're thinking about what's going on under the hood, you know, what are the tangible artifacts that need to be moved around the manipulatives, what is going to happen on screen what's going to happen for speech recognition, but for the kids, I can imagine, it really does feel like magic, they're moving things on their rug, and home and characters are responding or things are setting up code in a platform,
Cherian Thomas:it's surprisingly slightly different, you know, parents, people of our generation look at it as magic and kids actually look at it and say it's given, I expect it to be like this. And it's because they're born into an era of tiktoks and Instagrams and sufficiently advanced technology, which is considered a baseline for them, which we cannot maybe I'm getting old routine, and maybe, but they just expected, I mean, kids born to an iPhone world right now, which gives them instantaneous feedback on a lot of those things. So it also plays my daughter's five and a half years old, she just expects the magic wand to work, and which is actually a prop in reading adventure. And I'm like, You do understand that there's a whole complex computing ecosystem that sending data back and coming forward and doing all these things, and you're just clicking and clicking and just thinking that what isn't working all of a sudden, because the speech recognition has to work, you know, and I have another toddler who screams behind the screen, and then it disrupts, and you know, they don't have the patience for it. But it's an observation to not for
Alexander Sarlin:that's really interesting. So yeah, so you're saying that maybe they expect magic that magic is the baseline, if you grew up in a world with with iPads and iPhones and and so an edtech product has to hit that magic button, and then some you can't that's the the ante to get into the minds of children. I want to know a little bit more about this reading Adventure Program, you mentioned that it's gone incredibly well, that it's quickly, you know, rising to become one of the biggest products in Osmose catalog. How did the Osborne team decide to tackle breeding as a topic? And how did you sort of, you know, develop that program? What do you accounted for its success and popularity,
Cherian Thomas:the looked at what is it? That was a problem to the kids that was a need, and not a one that applied to just about all kids. And this was probably three years back? What is the universal problem, that technology has come a long way in 2020, when we started looking at this problem, technology still wasn't advanced enough at that period of time to tackle we went through mountains to solve this problem. But we looked at it. And we realize that reading is actually a very difficult phase for a kid because they're just being asked to do something that they cannot relate. It's a paradigm shift in their way of doing it. And it's excruciatingly painful for a parent at that same sort of phase of life, because the parent has to help with a lot of homework to help the kid do that. And then the spring COVID At that time, but even during that period, literacy rates were falling in the US dramatically falling even at seven years old. kids weren't reading in public schools in the US and look at other developing countries could start with very well, including sights words and comprehension by five years old. So what is it that's causing this trouble? We start to look around a lot, you know, and we have a fairly developed research team that looked into it and parents up to jobs, you know, out of the urban cities, it's really hard for parents to come and dedicate time when they're prepping dinners and meals or the very next day and then we started looking at it and initially it was just a computer vision solution problem for us. They didn't even know it would work. We tried attempting that and then prototypes were built to create a we could do speech recognition with it and speech recognition and can complex problem though because kids blabber kids pause that incorrectly. Word, and then they start doing other things, then they repetitively speak the same wrong word that they cannot correct themselves. So mountains to cross for us. But we realized that it's a problem to solve for the problem proceeded, and we were hell bent on finding a solution to the problem. It took us a long time, more time than James Cameron took for Titanic. It because we just wanted it to be magical. We told ourselves, we're not going to list it until we get it right. Because unlike most tech solutions, which have an iterative approach, we had to get it out and solve it. The books that are written are so endearing, kids love it, they want to reread the books and others. And so we went with the hybrid approach of having books having wands is in computer vision using speech recognition. And you really need to use it to believe it, that it works. You know, I tried actually explaining this technology and what we're doing to people outside before it was well, and people didn't get it. And now kids use it, and we send a video and they just get there. That's Osmo, it has always been like that. The Hope that helps. And now we have launched reading box. And I was looking at the retention metrics. Today, there are kids that have been using, and it's not even outliers. These are the top 10 percentages. And it's been just 30 days since we've launched. And there are kids who have used it for more than 25 hours. And parents find it useful. And they don't even find it useful. Useful is not the right word here. Parents actively encourage kids to use it. Think about it for years back. Early childhood education, its biggest enemy was technology. No school increased it COVID accelerated the adoption. But now pens are well aware that there is good technology and bad technology and FYI, hands good technology the right way. My kids are progressing much faster than if I were to sit and help them out. And the kids aren't realizing that's the beauty of it. They are just having fun. And they're just clicking on and trying things and reading these fun little cartoon books that they'd never thought they would read. And then all of a sudden they're reading the them much little for Steffi is got to watch this kids do that, you know?
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, no, no, it definitely does. And, you know, I think when I hear you talk about the development process, the lack of iteration, because it's a sort of hybrid software, hardware, you know, product, I can imagine that you as you mentioned, it's not as you can't iterate or a B test, the same way that a pure software product would be because you have a limited, you can't change the hardware, you can change the titles or the letter cubes after you release it. So getting it right before you release is is really important. That's really interesting. And I think, you know, relatively unusual for ad tech. It's also I think, a great example of what ad tech does really well, which is takes the onus off of parents for the things that they don't have time to do puts it on technology, which never gets tired and can always listen and give feedback for you know, 25 hours, and then wraps something that kids might find onerous or difficult in a non technological environment, in an engaging, exciting format, so that they really liked doing it when you mentioned, you know, they're learning all this all these new words while having fun. That's sort of the the dream, that's the holy grail of especially, you know, gamified edtech are improving, but it doesn't feel like work. You mentioned, you know, you have a research team that works with within Osmo a pretty significant research team and that you're starting to see results. One thing we I know, you're only 30 days in with reading Academy. So we'd like to ask about, you know, what are the outcomes you are seeing for our company like Osmo that works both at in homes and sells directly to parents and families and also works in schools? How do you think about sort of learning outcomes and doing research about what is working or not in terms of learning outcomes for your students?
Cherian Thomas:Yeah, I joke around internally that it's easier for me to work with the FDA to get pills approved. And to work with my internal research teams. Which team is run by Haley Maldonado. She's a Stanford grad. She is so much of a stickler for the right principles and norms that really you can't even sometimes I just try to bypass these things because we are always in a time crunch. But Hebei and team over a period of time has built in peer reviewed research frameworks that had existed for ages and use that to go test our products. This is much before it goes out into the market. In addition to that we work with the universities that and we have research grants that ensure that even before the product launches, we receive feedback and there is objective outcomes on these products and This aids a lot, not just a badge in the box, but also to staying true to our goal at all. So it's just black and white, you know, there is no gray area traversal. And it's not as if the leaders in the company have a dictatorial way of like, let's do this Nope, they get pushed back up and said, because the people in the system say, this is the right approach to do it. And we're going to do this the right way. So multi pronged approach, which is a research framework that 1000s If not 1000s, hundreds of teachers and hundreds of parents, because also has such a large user community, we tap into them. Before we even do a product the same way you'd see Apple do some of the testing and things like that, we take that into advantage. So between very crowd based active feedback system, and a principled approach with industry experts, using a framework, we get very this is what allows us to launch a product with widespread like when we launch a product, we go to Amazon, we go to target, we go to Walmart, this unthinkable in the tech industry. And we still launch products like that you ask a lot of companies, they launch 100 units of a product, wait, ramp up, ramp up, ramp up, when we launch something, we have 10s of millions worth of inventory ready to go into all these stores over there. And the only reason we do that is that the research and the feedback loop system gives us sufficient confidence and NPS scores that we would say Okay, here we go, you know, let's go do this. Because we have manufactured wants books, boxes, props, paraphernalia, everything, you know that you can't go back and do all these things. And the bedrock of that is a strong research team within our system.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, it's really interesting. So you know, a number of different sort of threshold. And that checks for learning efficacy inside the company, starting with the frameworks that go into the product, calling into university studies, to peer reviewed studies to internal research. And that's necessary, because again, the uniqueness of a product like Cosmo, where it's hardware, you, as you say, you know, millions of of individual pieces getting shipped to targets and Walmart's and then through Amazon, you really need to have your ducks in a row from a learning perspective before going live at that scale.
Cherian Thomas:I haven't even touched playtesting. You know, we have rooms with cameras, that anytime you go to the office these days, there are at least five to 10 kids that have voluntary showed up parents, some PAL or door or from Atherton or Tennessee show up because they want to be first in line for them to experience this new thing that doesn't have a name that's gonna go out six months from now and have that experience. We have treasure boxes with gifts that you give us return gifts to kids, when they go back. And after the playtesting. The whole point is even the small things are considered in the playtesting experience outside of all the research framework to get this feedback loop systems, you know,
Alexander Sarlin:yeah, that's so interesting. The Swedish company Toka book and Lego, also Scandinavian company both pride themselves enormously on their playtesting. They're always, you know, making sure that users and young users playing all their games and gaming companies do that as well. It's really nice to hear that we have our own version of that in Northern California, where you have people lining up to be beta testers. I think that's what I want to ask one follow up question because you know, when I hear you talk about how the product and sort of business side of having always having deadlines and needing to get the product out of the door, and then the internal research and academic team wanting to make sure everything is exactly right. from a learning perspective. That's a very common dynamic in edtech. And I'd love to hear just a little bit about how Osmo navigates that you've mentioned, you know, it's not nothing is coming down from above, it's really about the different teams working together to get to the right solution. How do you sort of organize that collaboration between the academic and research teams and the product and development teams.
Cherian Thomas:So it starts with the problem statement. And at this point of time, we have a huge body of knowledge with veterans within the company that we know problems that we need to solve, I often joke that with some of these members leave, they can just start a company on that particular problem statement. And we would probably end up acquiring that company at some point of time. So so this is huge body of people who've been there since Day Zero for small, maybe first month of inception employees, you know, have grown up to be the star walls of the company. So there's a huge body of knowledge on that. So it is not even epiphanies at that point of time when we think about new problems. Now, when these folks come up and say we need to tackle this problem, you don't even need to create a deck out of it. The business teams, the largely look at it and do a basic target addressable market analysis on the problem. So then we come to it and say, What is the price point and others that we need to operate, how is it going to be accessible and things like that basic around the table we are conversation equals happen with that, you know, and then from there, we go to the research team, the research team comes back and tells us if it is worth pursuing these kind of problems. And they start with very basic grounded research, which is using PickFu and Qualtrics. And others spend like $2,000, or $1,000, and get statistically relevant distributed data around these kinds of things. And then we have lots of teachers don't curriculum experts who have and are people who are people of eight years into existence and don't really know the landscape of the product, they come back and give you this product partially does the solution, this product is good, this product is really good, this product was really good and bad, and all those things, you know, so we have a sense of that. And then we start thinking about that still isn't making that person happy, because the kid doesn't have this kind of feedback and loops and such kind of things. So then it starts to germinate from there. And really what happens after that is somebody's secretly doing a prototype that nobody knows. And then nobody has funded it, nobody's done anything to, in fact, very recently found out about such a project. And initially, I was furious about it. But it turns out that the set of people did it in their free time. And now the whole product is just magical, we haven't put a real name to it, but it's for the higher age group. And hopefully, we can get it out sometime end of next year or early here after next. But then when you start seeing the results, it's solving problems, you know, it's solving, the good thing about being a toy company that is technology focused is that you have these passions within the company who are there for the purpose, they seek meaningful work, they are the largest companies, ex Googlers. And as ex Facebook, guys, and frankly, they can be paid 2x or more going back into those companies. But this see stay here because the work is very, very meaningful and beautiful for them, and it reaches out to kids that they seek their reciprocation, you know, that keeps your life going from there. So this is kind of process for us that has evolved over the years. But if you go back initially, the founders have got fields around it, and then they build it. And then any new technology is not built with competative initialisms. It's built with somebody who thought that this is a crazy idea, let's go behind it. But they were talented enough to do it in a very short period of time that they iterated and fixed it. And you know, it's like building the first helicopter, you really have no idea the whole thing of Danville, but you know, you try it out, and then you get from there. So we are a treasure trove of ideas right now. We just have to balance between business economics, executing, generating revenue, using that to find the next idea and scaling it up and going from there.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, that's a terrific answer. It sounds like it's sort of a balance between formal processes like, you know, market analyses from the business team and research reviews. And then that sort of passion that comes from, you know, in edtech, where people are just spending their nights and weekends thinking about how to make it magical and creating new new ideas and really pursuing them. And I think that's, that's how it should be, you know, I think if it goes too far in either direction, you could fall off. So that's I love that answer. I think it's really informative for for some of the listeners who are running their own tech companies don't squash the magic, but don't let it be completely freeform, you need some process to make sure it's actually going to work. I want to zoom out a little bit. You know, we've talked a lot about Osmo is a fascinating, fascinating company. We talk a lot about by Jews at large tech insiders. It's the biggest private tech company in the world. It's really kind of a flagship company in the entire space. And you know, you mentioned being the first international employed by Jews. I'd love to hear your overview of sort of the by Jews story from your perspective right at the center of it.
Cherian Thomas:So I joined by Jews in 2017. Only then it was to a company that stayed in a single building. And now in India, it probably has 10 buildings in a city itself and it operates in more than 40 cities with offices and all those things. But back then it was a relatively smaller company out there. What fascinated me right from the start, as it is run by a person who continues to be a teacher. He was a teacher he used to teach give them go to schools and teach. But he used to do this after school classes, where a lot of kids just showed up and learn for which is a big industry in India, because it's actually pretty hard to prepare for this practice that are the equivalent of SATs and GRS and other things. So Biden did that and scaled up the whole system. And then I don't even know if people know these terminologies like used to broadcast his classes on these sets, you know, which was the predecessor to internet streaming, and all those technologies. This was in 2008, or 2009. From there, and India started to get to a point where the aspirational value for parents and sub metro cities, which is the Suburbans and further out from there, which is the real, what we term as the villages, the aspiration by parents to get their kids educated, and have kids achieve the same mainstream levels, the education was the big equalizer, or continues to be the big equalizer for kids and parents in India, it's a great escape route to be ruthlessly. So at any cost, a parent would take their kid to what they can attend to be the best education that they can provide, so that the kids can and as opposed to the US, education in India is cheap, damn cheap, you know, somebody was telling me that it's like it's foreign debt coming out of colleges over here, you know how much I paid for my engineering, whole education, it was around 1000s $100 for years in a university 1000s $100. And then the four years, they send me back a check, because I paid in excess, you know, that is how much you pay for all this, every kid gets to learn over there. So the aspirational tone, or the value by the purchaser, which is the parent was very high Baijiu had a solution to a problem that plagued millions and millions, there are three 50 million plus kids in India, which is the population of the US in India, 1.8 billion people, three 50 million plus kids, even if you attempt to grow to percentage of the market that's as big as your target addressable market over here, and you still have room to grow in India. So Budget tab down to that with a solution, which is an interactive set of video classes, that kids were hooked on to get loud, because the basic theory was that teachers and suburban cities weren't at the highest level of quality that you want to get. Because, you know, teaching is not a lucrative providence. So people didn't go behind that. So if you manage to create video classes, followed by interactive curriculum, then which is at least 10x, better, in a way that kids can understand, understand, like a movie, then we would have an audience. And because he was a teacher who did that previously, he understood the new answers. And then he applied it to video. And it picked off from that. So by just right now has one 15 million plus kids learning. And if you between all the subsidiary companies and everything put together, we operate in more than 42 to 43 companies across the globe. And India, still not even four percentage penetrated into the market. So the room for him to grow or that so it is no surprise, that company that seeks to revolutionize education comes from a developing part of the world, where the value of education is so high, set the narrative and is going across the globe. Because the rigor needs to come from someone who sees it as a mechanic to escape and be treated equal in terms largely, I still think those principles apply in the US and for our set of people over here who need to get back and find that leveling ground and to escape what can be and we are actively working towards those solutions. You know, we be hopefully we can get to it'll take time. But we'll get to it pretty soon.
Alexander Sarlin:Fascinating take on the big story and I you know, very inspiring way to think of Baijiu and his journey from you know, a tutor and test prep and teacher to you know, a tech magnate by juice has made many acquisitions now and I want to ask, you know, one of the things that's so interesting about the Indian edtech market, as you mentioned, is because parents are so desperate for good reason to get their children to get amazing scores on the standardized tests, which is really sets them up for a much more successful education in life. There's a huge amount of interest even now even 1015 years after by Jews started in in test prep, and there's So a lot of investment in new companies coming out for various types of exam preparation. But when you think about badges, you know, which you mentioned earlier started with older learners started with people, you know, near the university age because it was really about testing into university and then moving into younger students, that the purchase of awesomo is a really unusual twist, you know, by Joe's purchased as well in 2019, for $120 million was an all stock deal. It was their first US acquisition likely because as you mentioned, you were the first international employee and you were working with them as well, at the time, they've raised $30 million dollars, they, they had investors like Mattel and Sesame Workshop and some some big Silicon Valley VCs like Excel upfront a canine, and by Jews being this massive company, it just closed a $540 million round. And so the $120 million Frosmo was, you know, less than a quarter of the new round. And the reason I say all this is just that the idea of a company that has its roots in test preparation and teaching moving into this much more hands on younger students, you know, toy first direct to consumer and in schools approach. It's such an interesting expansion. And I'd love to hear you're sort of the perfect person to talk about how Osmo fit into budgies overall learning strategy after you know by Jews, children convinced him that it was the right purchase and how it's been incorporated into by Jews overall offerings and sort of philosophy in the last three to four years.
Cherian Thomas:So truth be told that we struggled with Osmo, there was no Grandia business plan that would recover revenue, or that Americans see equal and consulting sheet would have showcased we didn't have it was our napkin base calculation. And after we acquired all small, we got lucky that we found a certain set of people within the company who are extraordinarily good at taking and having a broader vision of this magical technology, you know, we got the technology, we got people and we got distribution or revenue along with it, you know, the Amazons and the Walmarts of the world. So while we acquired last month for the lower age group, we in two months realize that the same technology can be applied for higher grade and team was spun out. And they started working on creating mechanics to enable textbooks and others to become life. And we used in India, so the team started building out a device. So in India, when you buy curriculum products from villages, you get a tablet with a lot of content on it, that's being replaced by what we call learn station and device in India. And it's it looks well, it's hard to describe, but it uses computer vision technology from Osmo, you open up a textbook in front of it, it realizes this is the piece that net does the topic that you're reading through, and it gives you it gives you complimentary content, it gives you more augmented reality versions of a covalent bond, or organic chemistry explanation, which is hard to be explained in a two dimensional format from that. So like I mentioned, before, we struggled, we struggled when we realized that we also wasn't just Kids Learning Technology also is used for worksheets for byjus. Right now, also is used to power this device called Learn station right now in India and some coming to other parts of the world. So these are aspects that help us allow kids to learn from three years all the way up to 12th grade in India over there. So also has been that triumphant story of success that way. Yeah, that's really interesting
Alexander Sarlin:to hear. Well, you know, I think you have such a unique vantage point to see how Osmo was chosen as a first US acquisition in the first place and then how it's been expanded inside the by Jews, you know, universe to have multiple use cases, as you say, different age groups, different topics, as well as continuing to grow quite well as a consumer and school product. It's really is a traffic product. And it's really interesting to hear you explain the whole story.
Cherian Thomas:It's interesting as slightly digressing a little bit awesome was the largest check that we wrote. Until then, one 20 million in check. And also success was so infectious in terms of integrating with the central company and all those things that paved the way for us to write bigger checks in India, which is the epic acquisition, the Tinker, acquisition, great learning in India and finally to our cash, which was a billion dollar acquisition for us. We understood that it was I was biting nails and by the end of the time, I stopped biting my nails and I was just biting my skin and the point of compelling because almost We just gives you sleepless nights thinking what will be it's such a huge responsibility of 100 and $20 million acquisition to make sure that this pans out, right, you know, everything can go wrong, the founders can leave the employees can mass resign, you know, all those things to not believe in that what we bought was right company with balance sheet and all those things. But it was exactly the opposite people stuck around, they love what they're doing, we were able to take a company and forex the revenue in 20 plus months from there. And we have 100 plus million in revenue right now, for last year. And it is a love story of how great business can be built. If you have the right product for the masses,
Alexander Sarlin:it really does sound like and you know, they talk in business school about how many acquisitions don't always pan out. So it's quite common, I think it's something like 80% of acquisitions, don't go the way that people expected them to. And that is also true in ad tech, we've seen some acquisitions not work. But you know, it really is a sort of case study in how an acquisition can expand the scope of a business expands it in the technology acquisition in the people it brought in and in the age groups that it could serve, as well as being able to crossover and use the technology and other sections of the business. I would even say that, you know, the magic, the idea of sort of a little bit of that, you know, Mattel sesame, Silicon Valley, Google, you know, magic philosophy, I think with sounds like was also a really nice complement to by Jews very successful, but very pragmatic approach to education up till then. So we can talk for a long time, I've learned a huge amount from you in this interview, and I'm sure our listeners have as well, I have a whole different respect for the Osmo world. It's really fascinating. But we do have to wrap up here. And I always end with two questions. One I'm really curious about your answer for which is what do you see as the most exciting edtech trend, that our listeners should keep an eye on what's rising in interest in popularity that you think is really going to going to be something in the future?
Cherian Thomas:Let me take two steps ahead from there. And then I'll come back over here. One is the temporary one has a solution for the next five, six years, as technology advances in others, what we seek to see revolutionized 10 to 15 years from now, our kids, kids who are three years old, four years old right now are going to be exposed to a world that they're 18 years, 19 years to do things that are never thinks that they learned. So creating and building frameworks that enable them to be individuals that can navigate a new world is what education has to deliver. You learn from history, and you learn that these are things to do and not do. So that's history for you. You learn frameworks of math, science, and stories, so that you can be prepared to tackle a new world that is fully automated, that requires you to do very little work. And then you are left wondering what the sometimes our kids will worry what the purpose of human life because they don't need to do anything, everything is readily available in front of them, humans are going to live 100 years on an average our organs are going to be replenished with systems and we are going to be very healthy human beings that have conquered cancer and all of the ailments and gone from there. And we already seen that with declining growth rates and all those things. So that is the path towards what Baidu seeks to look forward to, which is we tell ourselves we are trying to advance human potential to navigate these new worlds. So that is the trend you will see from founders, visionary founders that are trying to take their companies, not just by just you know, a lot of these great companies like old school and lambda school and others that are trying to take the companies to that is the larger vision I see in I'm not I'm a Business executor. I see them and I follow them and I give them things to achieve their dreams. That's what you know, that's the long term trend that I'm seeing from company. The short term trend is enabling technology to make what was unimaginable has an experience to do these things intersection of physical and the software worlds and then having worlds and software that you wouldn't put I like to straightline light is a wave and light is a particle. I wrote memorized this when I was in my eighth grade, not understanding anything about it and come along great. They taught me de Broglie serum. And then I was like, I have no idea what it but I'm going to learn this and then I'm going to mark it up and tender. A kid today can exactly get to the root of why a light is a particle that it can bounce off from some random thing. And then the photons coming back, I have no idea. Absolutely zero idea. You know, with the combination of VR, AR with the combination of having physical worlds that can show this and interact with the software world, kids truly understand things that we don't understand, absolutely have, that's a trend that is going to continue for quite some time, right now, over the the experience that toddlers are, in my words, going to get live enough, you know, like the you everything will have micro touch of technology that gives a little bit more greater experience and explanation that makes you understand those things better. So that trend is going to continue from there, I've been sort of the larger vision part or the hope that helps.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, the short term vision is more combinations of physical and virtual technology or digital technology to make the unimaginable, you know, imaginable or tangible. And that can happen both through technologies like asthma, as well as VR and AR, I'm sure that there is some overlap in those as well, and computer vision. And then in long term, it's really about a completely different world, that our students, you know, I have a young baby. And I think when by the time he's in, you know, taking those college entrance exams in 18 years, it's going to be such an incredibly different world. I love that idea of you know, how do we understand what the future world is truly going to need and adapt to a world that's going to be very different in terms of what people do for work, if that's a big trend is a big one to think about. I think there's a lot to unpack there. And I love that, that ad tech can play such an important role in it. And then to wrap up what is a resource that you would recommend for our listeners who want to learn more about any of the topics we talked about today, that could be a book, a blog, newsletter, any podcast, anything that would help them follow up and go even deeper?
Cherian Thomas:This is surprising. I don't know if your previous folks have talked about it. Ted, is my go to for all these things. TED and TEDx continue to lead. Today I was watching Bobby McFerrin teach music with an audience on the pentatonic scale. And I've learned how to do three dimensional graphs and others. So it is my good two worlds to go learn this. And but I keep update, updating myself, the trends, and that's purely because I'm a business guy, I look at search and others to keep updated. But YouTube has grown in our like places like the sauce to the test sium, to smart things about smart things, you know, all those things, unimaginable resources that were unfathomable to even like knowledge, that was a billion dollars and values available for free by just clicking on Next, next next year. So Ted is my go to for all these kinds of things.
Alexander Sarlin:That makes sense, you know, the TED lectures are, they try to time them for about 18 minutes. And I remember thinking, you know, when I, when I realized that pretty long for a lecture for a videotape lecture, usually, people's attention spans aren't that long online. But because the TED Talks and the TEDx talks are so well crafted there, they use all of these amazing visuals and storytelling techniques, it makes that time fly by I think they've done an incredible job of sort of turning the lecture, the idea based lecture into something that is global and palatable and gets millions of views. So I like that recommendation a lot. There's also I want to pitch you know, Ted Ed, there's also an education arm of Ted, that's definitely worth looking at, as you're on those TED and TEDx websites. This has been a fascinating conversation. Sharon Thomas, Senior Vice President advised us on Osmo you know, you're welcome back anytime. And we really appreciate you being here, giving us all of this amazing insight into the Osmo world and into the future of edtech. Thanks for being here with us at Tech insiders.
Cherian Thomas:Oh, thank you so much for that. I might have stumbled upon it, but I didn't have it in my head. But thank you.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders News. This letter on substack