Educational Startups to Watch — Springboard

Cisco chairman emeritus John Chambers noted in a recent Knowledge@Wharton interview that more than 70% of all startups fail. Sometimes, when death seems near, survival might well be within reach if the startup team is enthusiastically involved. That is a lesson that a near-death experience at his startup taught Gautam Tambay, co-founder and CEO of Springboard, a three-year-old firm that provides online education courses in “new economy” skills such as data analytics and AI/machine learning. A couple of years after its founding, Springboard faced a crisis. Tambay and his team realized that though they had a good product and decent user reviews, usage was dropping, revenues were flat or declining, and they had only enough money to survive three months. They determined that their distribution model was flawed, and the only way out of the crisis was to raise more capital. If they failed to do so, Springboard would have to close.

That was when the 20-person team — which was “young and hungry” — took Tambay and his co-founder, Parul Gupta, out to lunch. They said, “We’ve seen the numbers. They are not good, and you must be stressed. Why aren’t you involving us?” Tambay said he was afraid that sharing the firm’s troubles might have led the team to quit. The team members reassured the founders that “they wanted to be part of the story,” which is why they chose to work for a startup like Springboard and not for a big company. “That was one of the biggest lessons, [although] it was counter-intuitive to me at the time,” Tambay said. A more involved team then worked together to revive the firm’s fortunes, he added. He changed his approach from one of being “the umbrella to protect everybody from bad news” to one where “you let the bad news flow as soon as possible, so you get more people working on the problem.” With offices in San Francisco and Bangalore, Springboard has grown since that frightening experience. It has now trained more than 200,000 students in 77 countries.

— What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed

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