Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
This essay is based on a conversation with Chris Haroun, CEO and founder of 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 venture capital. And I found that my happiest day at work was always the first day. And then things went downhill and I couldn't understand why. I was fine at work, but I thought maybe I was depressed or something. But it was because I hadn't found my passion.
In all the years I've worked at other companies, I've found that my bosses always felt uncomfortable during 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 can you spend a little less time mentoring other people on other teams?” And I always said, “That's just who I am. I can't change the DNA of who I am.” I love helping people. So I started teaching.
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In 2016, while I was 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 schools in the Bay Area. One Saturday I taught a course I called “MBA in a Day” through the LEMO Foundation, which is aimed at under-resourced student-athletes. And the next day I just set up a camera at home and recorded myself for eight hours. Then I uploaded it to the online learning and teaching platform Udemy.
This course sold nearly 500,000 copies and generated a passive income stream in the seven-figure net profit after all costs. And I kept growing: I now have 72 more courses on Udemy and nearly two million students around the world. And while this work can be relatively simple from a customer service perspective, the goal isn't just to make money. It's about helping others. I spend a lot of time helping students, participating in Zoom calls and answering questions.
The profits from what I do go towards 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 of my students I am now building the second school in Kenya, about a six-hour drive from Nairobi. It's a school for girls.
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For me, that’s a great sense of purpose. When I was at the LEMO Foundation, the founder of that charity told me something that changed 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's exactly what I did.
The pandemic was tragic, but it pushed my vision for the future of education forward by at least a decade. And I think only 50 universities will make it in my lifetime. I think what will end up happening is that most will use up their endowments, and then there will be a Hail Mary pass for alumni to bail out the schools, and then people will wonder: Why should they bother going to university if it isn't? Great 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 pay $100,000 for 20 hours of classes per week and graduate with no knowledge whatsoever.
In my book, 101 Crucial Lessons They Don't Teach You in Business School, I outline 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 business. Graduate and undergraduate business programs teach you theoretical concepts that may have been relevant in the last century. So I think the sector is ripe for disruption. I think Udemy will be the catalyst that will change the industry and get more people learning online.
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Furthermore, everyone has something to teach. For example, there's a woman named Teresa Greenway who's a great teacher on Udemy – and she teaches how to bake bread. And it's an amazing story: Years ago, before she started teaching at Udemy, she was in a terrible marriage to an abusive husband. It was terrible. And she had the courage to leave him and take her children with her. So she was living on food stamps and thought to herself: What can I do to help other people? What am I passionate about? And she loves baking bread. So she set up a camera at home and started showing people on the platform how to bake bread. The same applies here: everyone can teach you something.
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
