Krishan Kumar
Founder & CEO – Simplilearn
Krishna Kumar founded Simplilearn.com in 2010. In the following years, he has built the company into one of the largest players in delivering certification training for working professionals.
Q. Brief us about the company journey of rich experience – origin, inception, early issues, success stories, and major milestones, to name a few.
Continuous learning is imperative for development; and it is through this learning that people are able to understand their full potential, achieve their career goals, and change the world around them. This idea was and continues to be the driving force behind Simplilearn. Started ten years ago as a blog venture to share ‘my learnings’, Simplilearn has today grown into a global educating force. The company started as an online learning platform with a project management certification program called PMP (Project Management Professional certification).
During that time, professionals would make efforts to upskill by themselves. However, a few years later the trend of skilling seeped across sectors, with students and working professionals alike taking to skilling programs in subjects like IT management, business analysis, banking, data analytics, etc. It was during this time that Simplilearn.com transitioned into an edtech startup focused on the training and certification of working professionals. As representatives of the edtech industry, we are fortunate to be able to measure our success against each professional we help upskill, every family we help grow, and businesses we help transform.
Today, Simplilearn, through its unique bootcamp learning model, has helped more than 2,000,000 professionals and 2,000 companies across 150 countries to get trained, acquire certifications, and reach their business and career goals. With over 1,500 live classes each month, real-world projects, and more, professionals learn by doing at Simplilearn.
In Candid Conversation with TEF, Krishna Kumar is the Founder and the CEO of Simplilearn, have shared some insightful views and highlighted the firm’s achievements making it the most recommended E-Learning solution provider.
Q.Brief us about the CEO/Founder of the company.
Krishna Kumar is the Founder and the CEO of Simplilearn. He did his B.Tech from NIT, Surathkal, and started his career with Infosys as a software engineer, but soon his entrepreneurial spirit inspired him to start his venture – Tech Unified. Krishna was the Co-founder & COO of TechUnified, which was acquired by a public listed company in February, 2007. Later, in 2009 he started Simplilearn.com.
Q. What are the different products and services offered by Company?
Catering to B2B and B2C audiences keen on upskilling, Simplilearn provides outcome-based online training across digital technologies and applications in Data Science, AI and Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Digital Marketing, DevOps, Project Management, and other critical digital disciplines. We are known for our high-touch learning delivery model and capstone projects that make the learner ready for the job by the end of the learning program.
Q. Tell us about the notable milestones in the company’s journey.
Milestone 1: Beginning of the Journey
Krishna Kumar, the founder and CEO of Simplilearn, started a blog, to share his learnings with the world and also to learn more about the Internet, personally. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy at the time with not even a single video on YouTube about PMP exam preparation in 2008.
By the end of 2009, over 3,000 executives in 100+ countries had taken online Project Management Professional* (PMP) training from Krishna on the Simplilearn platform. Till then, it was still a blog run by Krishna. By early 2010, he realized it was time to turn his passion for training into a mission to reach, train, and benefit a much larger number of people all over the world. Hence, he turned Simplilearn into an online school for professional certifications, where learners could not only develop or upskill their skill sets but could obtain industry certifications to prove it. Simplilearn adopted a blended-learning model that gave online learners access to live instructors in both real and virtual classrooms and hands-on learning labs.
Milestone 2: Upskilling / Reskilling Accepted as a Real Business Challenge
By 2012, the business community understood that IT skills had a short “shelf life.” IT professionals and their managers had to keep up with a growing stream of new programming languages, computing paradigms, and technologies. Simplilearn attracted the attention and admiration of people and companies that saw the value of blended learning in teaching new skills quickly and effectively.
Milestone 3: Validation of the Idea: Multiple Investment Rounds
In 2012, Indo-US Venture Partners (now called Kalaari Capital) saw the value of Simplilearn’s teaching approach and business model. They invested in the firm to enable it to expand.
By 2013, Simplilearn had demonstrated its potential and was able to attract additional funding from Helion Venture Partners and Kalaari. The investment enabled Simplilearn to diversify its product offerings, moving beyond PMP training, and hire a strong team to serve its expanding geographic markets.
In 2015, Simplilearn raised another $15M, led by USA-based tech investor Mayfield to set up the company’s USA operations.
Milestone 4: Market Motive Acquisition to Set up USA Operations
In 2015, Simplilearn acquired Market Motive, a Silicon Valley-based leader in digital marketing training. This deal marked a significant expansion of Simplilearn into the US market. Moreover, Simplilearn became the first Indian startup to acquire an established American company.
After acquiring Market Motive, Simplilearn moved its USA headquarters from Scotts Valley, California, to downtown San Francisco to attract better talent and consequently support the learning needs of enterprises and universities more efficiently.
Milestone 5: We Boldly Let Go of Physical Classrooms and Began the Era of All-online Blended Learning
In 2015, Simplilearn took its learning ecosystem entirely online. It eliminated in-person classroom training as an option in its courses and ushered in the era of blended learning by way of live virtual classrooms (LVC). This marked a new milestone in the online learning revolution. The business community saw the differentiation between Simplilearn’s high engagement / high-touch approach vs. that of MOOCs (Massively Online Open Courses). This bold yet measured move to online learning transformed Simplilearn’s business model almost instantly. The results were more than encouraging as interest in Simplilearn courses began to soar.
Milestone 6: Simplilearn Doubles Learner Count in Three Years, Now 2 Million Strong
The bold move in 2016 to move its learning model entirely online accelerated Simplilearn’s growth rate. The expansion into the US at the same time increased the number of learners through enterprise customers. In 2021, Simplilearn’s total number of learners reached the two million mark. This growth in learners represented a doubling of the total in just three years.
Milestone 7: Awards and Recognition
- Over the past decade, Simplilearn has won many awards for the contribution to the edtech industry:
- Multiple Stevie awards for Customer Service excellence and innovation
- News Corp VCCircle Award for Education Company of the Year
- AEGIS Graham Bell Award for Innovation in EdTech
- Top IT Training Companies for 2020
Q. Share your views on the latest industry trends in E-learning space. How are you keeping up with them
The new educational landscape is moving toward using cutting-edge technologies to help students learn more effectively. Technology in the classroom has always been a blessing to education, allowing for individualized, mastery-based learning while also saving teachers time and giving students the digital skills they will need in the future. Below are some of the Edtech trends in 2021 that will further enhance the experience of learning-
Virtual and Augmented Reality- Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the education sector, allowing students to benefit from cutting-edge innovations that make learning simpler. One such revolutionary technology is virtual and augmented reality, which is helping students get an experimental learning experience.
Online Bootcamps- Bootcamps are designed to help people develop skills in a short period of time in order to transition into new professions or enhance their competency in a particular field. I believe, bootcamp style of delivery will be a viable model for the future of education wherein the in-person components like- masterclasses, peer and mentor interaction, along with online components like videos, digital query forums will be combined in equal proportion for the growth of the students.
Personalized Learning- Edtech programs strive to personalize the learning experience and meet the needs of all students. Online education programs offer an advantage to students to participate in classes that are precisely tailored to their needs. This kind of learning helps in identifying and tackling student downturns.
Simplilearn’s programs, which have been perfectly refined over time, are based on the highly successful bootcamp model, with the right combination of online classes and expert instructor-led live classrooms, making it one of the world’s leading online bootcamps for digital skills training. Focusing on delivering outcome-based online training in new-age digital technologies, Simplilearn’s bootcamp approach to training not only provides learners a real learning experience but also helps them in getting job-ready training through hands-on experience.
Q. How services offered by your company are designed to give access to right technology at right time?
Post the pandemic, online platforms made for immediate solutions to support learning continuity be it for universities or enterprise-level L&D programs. However, the missing component of live interaction impacted the overall learning experience. Today, Simplilearn is characterized by its live learning bootcamp model, which has garnered interest from learners across industries and the globe. The company’s core focus till date is the practice of live learning programs which has proven to be a more effective and interactive teaching and learning methodology, versus recorded video tutorials. As a result, today we have over 1,500 live classes each month, real-world projects, and more, professionals learn by doing at Simplilearn. Just over the last 6 months, we have on-boarded 50,000+ corporate learners across 12 countries.
Q. How do you maintain a productive work culture at a company while motivating your employees?
Employees are the core asset to any company and this stands true for us too. While we have timely incentives and appraisal processes in place, the most important is to have professionals who are self motivated and team leaders who have clear strategies in place to guide and support their teams. We are fortunate to have both and in the past year when we all were forced to work from home, we witnessed the highest levels of productivity across teams that reflects well on our business growth as well. This, coupled with our quarterly – performance review process, helps every employee to stay focused on the specific pre-decided quarter goals at hand. This has been working very well for us in the past few years.
Q. What are your future plans for the company? Where do you see the company in the years to come?
As an organization, our main focus is to help people transform their careers by providing industry-relevant programs and certifications. In order to help us do this better and expand our reach, we invest heavily on technology and content. We will continue to strengthen our program offerings to make learning accessible from anywhere and anytime.
While we have a strong presence in India, especially in all of the major cities (NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, and Hyderabad), our international business accounts for more than 60% of our total revenue. Enrollments outside of India have increased by over 70% year over year, from 35000 in FY 19-20 to 61000 in FY 20-21. Though the USA is our primary market, we witnessed high demand from Canada, UAE, Thailand, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia as well. We’ll keep expanding our international operations by bolstering our presence in key markets.