This essay is based on a conversation with Chris Haroun, CEO and founder of Haroun Education Ventures. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.
After graduating from business school at Columbia, I worked at Goldman Sachs for five years. Then he switched to the hedge fund industry and Citadel hired me and moved my family to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, I eventually transitioned into venture capital. And I found that my happiest day at work was always the first day. And then it went downhill, and I couldn’t figure out why. I was doing fine at work, but I thought maybe I was depressed or something. But it was because I hadn’t found my passion.
During my years working at other companies, I found that during my annual review, my bosses were always uncomfortable because they would say something like, “You’re doing a great job. You’re a top performer. Everyone loves working with you. But can you spend a little less time mentoring other people in other groups?” And I’ve always said, “It’s just who I am. I can’t change the DNA of who I am.” I like to help people. So I started teaching.
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In 2016, while still working in venture capital, I started teaching evenings in East Palo Alto. I felt alive helping these students. I loved it. Then I started teaching at a few MBA universities in the Bay Area. One Saturday, I taught a class I called “MBA in a Day” through the LEMO Foundation, which serves under-resourced student-athletes. And the next day, I just threw a camera at home and recorded myself for eight hours. I then uploaded it to the online learning and teaching platform Udemy.
This course has sold nearly 500,000 times, generating a passive income stream of seven figures net profit after all expenses. And I kept scaling: Now, I have 72 more courses on Udemy and nearly two million students worldwide. And while this job may be relatively low-key in terms of customer service, the goal isn’t just to make money. It’s about helping others. I spend a lot of time helping students, jumping into Zoom calls and answering questions.
The profits from what I do go to building schools. If you go to Project Magu, you will see the first school I built with one of my students in Rwanda. And with another student of mine, I’m building the second school now in Kenya, about a six-hour drive from Nairobi. It is a school for girls.
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It’s a great sense of purpose for me. When I was at the LEMO Foundation, the founder of this charity told me something that changed me. He said, “You can’t expect to achieve your dreams in life if you don’t help others achieve theirs first.” So we are all here, as Tony Robbins once told me, to serve others and help other people. And so that’s what I did.
The pandemic was tragic, but it really set my vision for the future of education back by at least a decade. And I think in my lifetime, only 50 universities will make it. I think what’s going to happen, eventually, is that most people will exhaust their benefits, and then there will be a Hail Mary pass to the graduates to save the schools, and then people will think to themselves, Why bother going to university unless it’s a top brand like Harvard or Oxford? The system is elitist to the extent that many children go to top schools because their parents went there or gave money. Another problem is that you pay $100,000 for 20 hours of class a week and graduate with no skills.
In my book 101 Critical Lessons They Don’t Teach You in Business School, I describe the problem with MBA schools. They don’t teach you how to sell. They don’t teach you how to network to get a job. They don’t teach you how to manage your own money. They teach you how to manage other people’s money. They don’t teach you how to present. They don’t teach you how to start a company. Graduate and undergraduate business programs teach you theoretical concepts that were relevant perhaps in the last century. So I think the sector is ripe for disruption. I think Udemy will be the catalyst to somewhat change the industry where more people will learn online.
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Plus, everyone has something to teach. For example, there is a woman named Teresa Greenway who is a great teacher on Udemy – and she teaches how to bake bread. And it’s an amazing story: Years ago before she started teaching on Udemy, she was in a terrible marriage with an abusive husband. It was awful. And she got the courage to leave him and take her children with her. So she lived on coupons and thought to herself, What can I do to help other people? What am I passionate about? And she is passionate about baking bread. So he put a camera in the house and started showing people how to make bread on the platform. Again, everyone has something to teach you.
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