This essay, as said, is based on an interview with Chris Haroun, CEO and founder With Haroun’s educational endeavors. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.
After graduating from business school at Columbia University, I worked at Goldman Sachs for five years. I then moved into the hedge fund industry and Citadel hired me and moved my family to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, I finally switched to the enterprise capital sector. And I discovered that the happiest day at work was all the time the first day. And then every part got worse and I could not understand why. I used to be doing well at work, but I assumed possibly I used to be depressed or something. But that is because I have never found my passion.
Over the years I have worked at other firms, I have found that during my annual review, my bosses all the time make me feel uncomfortable because they say something like, “You’re doing a great job. You achieve great results. Everyone loves working. But can you spend a little less time mentoring other people on other teams?” I all the time said, “That’s just who I’m. I can not change the DNA of who I’m.” I really like helping people. So I began teaching.
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. Love it. I then went on to teach at several MBA universities in the Bay Area. One Saturday I taught a course called “MBA in One Day” via: LEMO Foundation, which serves underfunded student-athletes. And the next day I just threw the camera at home and recorded myself for eight hours. I then uploaded it to an online learning and teaching platform Udemy.
This course sold nearly 500,000 times, generating a passive income stream of a seven-figure net profit after all expenses. I continued to scale: I now have 72 other courses on Udemy and almost two million students worldwide. And while the job could also be relatively hands-off from a customer support standpoint, the goal is not just to make money. It is to help others. I spend a lot of time helping students by using Zoom calls and answering questions.
I take advantage of the income from what I do to build schools. If you go to Project Mag, you’ll see the first school I built with one of my students in Rwanda. Together with one other student, I’m building a second school in Kenya, about a six-hour drive from Nairobi. It’s a girls’ school.
It’s a great sense of purpose for me. When I worked at the LEMO Foundation, the founder of this charity told me something that modified me. He said, “You can’t expect to achieve your dreams in life unless you first help others achieve theirs.” So we are 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 truly shifted my vision for the future of education by at least a decade. And I think that only 50 universities will achieve this in my lifetime. I think what is going to ultimately occur is that almost all will deplete their funding and then there will likely be a Hail Mary pass for graduates to save the schools and then people will think: Why hassle going to a university unless it’s a great brand like Harvard or Oxford? The system is elitist to the point that many children get into top schools because their parents went there or donated money. The other problem is that you simply pay $100,000 for 20 hours of classes a week and you graduate with no skills.
In my book 101 Key Lessons They Won’t Teach You in Business School, I outline the problem of MBA schools. They don’t teach you the way to sell. They don’t teach you the way to network to get a job. They don’t teach you the way to manage your personal money. They teach you the way to manage other people’s money. They don’t teach you the way to present. They don’t teach you the way to start a business. Graduate and undergraduate business programs teach theoretical concepts that were relevant perhaps in the last century. So I think the sector is ripe for disruption. I think Udemy will likely be a catalyst that may kind of change the industry where more people will learn online.
What’s more, everyone can teach something. For example, there is a woman named Teresa Greenway who is a great teacher on Udemy and teaches you the way to bake bread. This is an amazing story: many years ago, before she began teaching at Udemy, she was in a terrible marriage with an abusive husband. It was scary. And she found the courage to leave him and take her children with her. So she lived on food stamps and thought: What can I do to help other people? What am I passionate about? And her passion is baking bread. So she arrange a camera in her house and began showing people how to make platform bread. I repeat, everyone can teach you something.
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