Episode 1: The Digging in Series - The Journey of Entrepreneurship with Shaunak Roy, Founder and CEO of Yellowdig

Holly Owens (00:01)
Hello, everyone. We're live and welcome to another episode of EdUp L &D. My name is Holly Owens and I'm your host. And I have the pleasure of having my boss now and founder and CEO of Yellowdig, Shaunak here with me, Shaunak Roy. Welcome to the show again.

Shaunak (00:23)
Yeah, thank you so much, Holly. Great to be here today.

Holly Owens (00:25)
Yeah, I'm so I really love the idea that we came up with the kind of do these sessions each week just to talk to you and get an insider's perspective about being like an owner and a founder of an ed tech company. But I know you've been on the show before, but before we jump into everything, for those who don't know you, tell us a little bit about your story and your background. And then we're going to get into all things entrepreneurship today.

Shaunak (00:55)
Right, okay. So, you know, so in terms of my background, Holly, as you know, kind of been on your show at least three times now, I guess, right? So the first time was 20, right during the pandemic. If I remember, that's when we got connected and we had this...

Holly Owens (01:03)
Yeah.

Yep.

You were the third episode in 2021. You took a chance on me. I tell everybody that.

Shaunak (01:16)
All right. And you took a chance on me as well. We were just getting out of the pandemic, building the company. yeah, mean, long story short. So Yellowdig has been kind of an exciting story for myself personally. I started the company back in 2015. We launched the platform in 2016. So it's been nine years going. It's going to be a 10th year next year. exciting. mean, it's a story of perseverance, I would say. We didn't give up.

Holly Owens (01:46)
Right?

Shaunak (01:46)
I guess, maybe that's one way of looking at it and have been building this with a great group of people and you joining us recently. Very excited about it to see what the future holds for us. Yeah, so that's kind of been my kind of a personal journey building Yellowdig. And of course, I would say I'm a lifelong learner, always have been passionate about learning.

And we can dig into that. you know, I kind of merged my passion in learning and my interest in building digital products together to build a company. And of course, now we have an amazing team. I can't take any of the credit. mean, to be honest, the first few years was me kind of trying to build it out in my little attic back in the days, trying to talk to people. But now there's an amazing team, which is kind of taking the mission forward with me. So yeah, that's kind of my story.

Holly Owens (02:36)
Right?

Yeah, love it. And I know there's more to say there, but we'll definitely dive into that in other episodes. This particular episode in this particular live, I want to focus on entrepreneurship. So there has been a lot of chat about people. know, the job market itself is very tough right now. And people are kind of thinking like, what can they do on their own? Could they start a business? Could they maybe have an ed tech startup? Could they, you know?

There's a lot of different opportunities here in the United States and abroad and thinking about how to get things started. So one of things I want to ask you is how do you define entrepreneurship? then also, how would somebody get started in this? One of the first questions I asked when I decided to do an LLC is, why am I doing this? And how do I navigate this?

define entrepreneurship for us, what does that mean to you? And then, like, how do people get into it? What do they do?

Shaunak (03:45)
Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the shortest definition for me is it's a way of living. You know, it's the choice that you make. It could be the job market is not great and you want to kind of really jump in to build something or you kind of have been doing this corporate role for a long time. And, you know, you kind of didn't really not connecting with the mission of the company and you really want to build something on your own. it's a choice. And I feel that, you know,

The conventional wisdom is that it's a very hard choice and it's going to be testing you in many ways. does, entrepreneurship does test you in many different ways, but it is something that anybody can do, which is what I've realized. It takes a kind of a shift in mindset probably to start with. And once you're on the journey, it takes perseverance, especially in the early years. And I can talk to you about

Holly Owens (04:33)
Mm-hmm.

Shaunak (04:41)
what it took me to kind of get through that early years to be able to, I would say first survive as an entrepreneur. That's the first thing. I mean, if you don't survive, as you know, 90 % of companies fail. So that's one thing to keep in mind that there is a high risk of failure, especially in the early years. But if you can survive through that, the 10 % of the companies that make it, a lot of them kind of grow on to big, companies eventually.

Holly Owens (05:09)
Yeah, I think people's misconception is that entrepreneurship is like kind of working when you want, making millions of dollars and kind of sitting at your sitting at your house. You know, like when I was in my 20s, I was like, I just want to own my own business because I want to set my own hours and just do whatever I want all the time. It's not that at all. It's not that at all.

Shaunak (05:30)
It's not. It's not that and it's exactly the opposite. As you can imagine.

Holly Owens (05:34)
Yeah, I like how you said it's a way of life and just interacting with you at Yellowdig these past four weeks, it's like, it's your whole life. Like it is literally from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep, like thinking about all the different things anyways, but 20s to now, like I had a completely different understanding of what entrepreneurship was.

Shaunak (05:56)
Yeah. And, to be honest, I always feel that I mean, mean, sometimes I'm wearing two hats, you know, in one side, which is the passion, which is, you know, this is going to be this wonderful experience because we are building this amazing product or a service or a concept we bringing to market that gives you that excitement or joy, which is sometimes not felt on a day-to-day basis, which is the other side of entrepreneurship, which is you're fighting fires most of the time.

and trying to build it and trying to hold on to that mission on a day-to-day basis. But once in a while, you get to zoom out and you get this award or something. This year we got this award from Times and London, NETTECH Week and other things happened. And they were like, wow, my God, we have achieved so much. This is great. And they're going to go back to business again. And then you're to be fighting fires.

Holly Owens (06:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Is there like a moment, you know, like as a founder and CEO, I've always wondered this where you're like, I feel like this happens to celebrities where they've either got like an EGOT or they've got or musicians when they got a Grammy. Is there an ever a moment when you're a CEO and you're like, OK, this is the point when I know I've made it like this is this is the the holy grail. I've made it now. Now can sit back and kind of write it out. I don't I don't feel like there is, but I want to know your opinion.

Shaunak (07:17)
There is not. can tell you this. Entrepreneurship and being a celebrity are two different things, by the way. Some of them become, like if you look at these like big time entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and others, they're almost like celebrities, but vast majority of entrepreneurs, including myself, I think it is almost like this. But there are moments where I feel that we are making some real impact.

Holly Owens (07:23)
Yeah

Shaunak (07:44)
And it kind of really kind of shakes me up a little bit. Of course it shakes up the team a little bit. Like one example I said, like we won some awards that always is kind of, you know, there's so many companies they can pick from, they picked us. I mean, that's very gratifying in that sense. You know, like the other thing I was saying the other day, which is we have over half a million students on our platform. And sometimes we kind of...

Holly Owens (08:08)
Over three billion words, something like that. It's crazy, it's crazy, so many. Anyways.

Shaunak (08:11)
Yeah, like three billion words. And exactly. And it's sometimes easy to kind of look at these as numbers, like, OK, half a billion, half a million students, like 500,000 students. Yeah, that's a number. But there are literally a lot of students who are using our platform now inside of courses, learning with one another. You're probably changing tiny bit in their lives in some ways.

You know, takes sometimes we take a, I mean, I take a step back and think about those things a little bit and kind of self motivate myself like, okay, yeah, we are on this journey now. Can we go to the next level? So, but, but yeah, there are no like celebrity moments per se. Like people write to us, they tell us how much they love us and all those things that definitely keeps us engaged.

Holly Owens (08:57)
Yeah, those are the things that keep you motivated, That gratification is an important part. And I think, you know, the other thing too about entrepreneurship and like owning a net tech company like you do is like keeping up with what's happening. You know, we recently released some features surrounding AI and like having like, you didn't know 10 years ago that that was going to be a thing unless you did, because you, you're Notre Thomas and you can predict things, but.

10 years ago, you didn't know that AI was gonna be impacting our culture and the education spaces as much as it does. as you grow as a company and those things happen, how do you deal with that? How do you position yourself? Because in some situations, these things can become very polarized in terms of people truly accept it and they'll run with it and they'll accept AI or they won't. And that can be insert said,

said technology here, how do you deal with it as an ed tech company and sending out a message like, we're supportive, we're kind of supportive, we're in the middle, you know, what do you do? How do you make those types of decisions?

Shaunak (10:07)
Yeah, no, it's a great question. mean, for us, we have been having lots of discussion around AI. One of the things that we do in the company is we always look for things that are happening on the edges and how does that impact our platform, our product, our feature sets, our customers, users, and we have discussions around it. So on this topic of AI, you know, especially when Gen.AI came to market, which was, think, late 2022,

essentially, Chad GPT was launched, there was a lot of buzz around it. you know, pretty much every meeting I was in, you know, with investors or customers or anybody else who in the space, there were questions about it, like, what are you guys doing about Gen.ai and how it's going to impact Yellowdig or your users? So that definitely forced us to have internal conversations. So we had a lot of internal conversations around it. And one of the first thing we did was kind of agree on what is our

Holly Owens (10:41)
yeah.

Shaunak (11:05)
principle as a company, and which kind of led to this AI pledge that we kind of launched, where we kind of put it out there saying that we as a company, are going to be focused on making learning more equitable, more accessible, and more student-centric. And whatever we do in AI, the kind of features we build would actually support that mission. Because you can also imagine,

Holly Owens (11:07)
Mm-hmm.

Shaunak (11:35)
you one version of AI could be is that, okay, you don't have to talk to anybody else. You have an AI chatbot and all you do is to talk to you know, chat.

Holly Owens (11:41)
Right? Or it just generates the student responses for them and they really don't have to necessarily think about it. It just does it.

Shaunak (11:48)
Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so that is one vision of AI, but our vision is to kind of maximize human connection. So the question became like, how do we use AI to drive better human connection, authentic conversations, ideations, idea generation, as opposed to kind of going to chat GBD and kind of trying to get answers. So that conversation led to a kind of series of more conversations around.

Holly Owens (11:50)
Yeah.

Shaunak (12:18)
how can we build feature sets that supports that mission? So we came up with a few hypothesis and some of the hypothesis that we build, you know, got some internal traction, then we kind of decided to actually invest in that area. So we started working on it almost a year back and then finally took about a year for us to kind of finally launch it. Because, you when we launch a feature, it has to be safe and should be.

compliant in terms of data privacy and other things which are important AI. it took us a while. So I think the key thing for me was to be able to have those conversations internally, build alignment and kind of focus on feature sets that pushes us forward in our mission and doesn't go in a different direction.

Holly Owens (13:04)
Yeah, I love it how it's more of a collaborative effort with AI than just saying, okay, because I feel like a lot of companies would say, they've just put the chat GPT, put it in there. It's just integrated in and that's what it is. And then saying that they have AI enhanced stuff. But I feel like just from the conversations that we've had and seeing what's happening internally, you really had a lot of thought behind this and it did take a really long time.

to get to the point where we're releasing the things like the course summary and flagging the different posts and things. And one of the things also too is like deciding as an entrepreneur, when you're running a company, where do the priorities lie? Like those shift probably, well, I know they shift daily for you. So how do you navigate that where it's like, okay, this is on fire today or this needs my attention today, but you are going to,

focus on say the AI stuff, but something else has come about or come across your desk. Like how do you manage all that and still retain like having a life? Because you said entrepreneurship is a way of life, but I know you're a person outside of Yellow Dig. So how do you balance like the shifting priorities, but also having like, you know, like a life, you have a family and stuff.

Shaunak (14:14)
Ha

Yeah, I have two daughters. So I'll say one thing though is, they do. I they do. I try to kind of make, you know, connect the dots, the things I'm working on and actually talk to them about it. And that's the whole thing. I try to get them excited about entrepreneurship because I love to see them as entrepreneurs in the future. And one of the things I am really passionate about is to, you know, to your initial question, which is, you know, can we have more entrepreneurs in this world?

Holly Owens (14:30)
And I'm sure they keep you busy.

Right.

Shaunak (14:57)
And I truly believe we can have a lot more entrepreneurs and not everybody has to start a company that changes the world, right? We don't have to have Facebooks and Google that when we only few of them, but we can have many, many companies which are in the middle, like mid-size companies, smaller companies provides great family support for the entrepreneurs themselves that they can hire people locally. And that I see that to be the future of.

you know, our civilization because to be honest, like this bigger company mindset is kind of going away. And, I think that it's a leading the way of having the same self-employment to every small businesses to bigger businesses. I think that's very much possible. the other benefit, you know, in terms of my own, kind of work life balance, you know, as a person, I do work very hard. mean, I, I, and one of the things I say about myself is that if I find something very interesting, I'm all in.

Holly Owens (15:50)
Right. I think we share that attribute.

Shaunak (15:50)
So it doesn't stop for me. Probably. I don't know if a lot of people, but I do find people who are like us actually, are part of the reason people want this work-life balance is because work is this thing you do, check the boxes, push papers around and then kind of leave for home and then you have a family life. But if you find something that you truly enjoy and you truly feel that is actually having an impact and provides you the necessary.

financial support to be able to going in that direction. I think that's an amazing situation to be in. So.

Holly Owens (16:23)
Yeah, marrying your passion with your what you do for a living. mean, I mean, that's finally happened working at Yellow Dig and I'm not just saying that because oftentimes, like you're saying, like, there's a separation of like people nowadays are craving like the actual nine to five. Like you're turning it off at five o'clock. You're turning it off. Not saying that it's.

It's something that you need to constantly do in order to fulfill your passion or things like that. do need to step away. But that doesn't exist in this type of world. You can go away on vacations and stuff, but I always feel like I'm thinking of something. I'm always thinking instructional design. When people are designing highways or if they're designing shopping centers or when I'm traveling, how people design things and the way.

the whole process works, even to get on the damn airplane. Like that's instructional design to me, like thinking about ways to improve those processes and that can all shift into what I do at Yellowdig. So I'm always thinking about how to improve things for humans. So that's the...

Shaunak (17:29)
I'll defend.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds exactly what you said. Like you truly enjoy that process of thinking about design improvements. Like ID is one area, but there were so many other areas. And I always find that if I am working on something that I'm truly interested, you know, I truly want to solve that problem. You know, I'm reading articles, I'm watching videos, I'm trying to expand my knowledge in that area. Like AI is a good example. Like, you know, in my free time, I'm like playing with different AI tools.

Holly Owens (17:59)
Mm-hmm.

Shaunak (18:02)
not because I have to do something about it, but I just want to learn like what's really going on and being able to be in that environment and having that agency to be able to do that is the biggest advantage of being an entrepreneur in my mind. So that you don't have to like, know, just go there and kind of do something that you don't like. mean, you know, I only do things that I truly like. And the other thing is like getting, you know, great people like yourself, like building a team that is truly passionate about it.

I think makes like the whole thing really go well. And it does not mean that I work 24 seven. I mean, that would definitely not the case. I did do that for the first like three, four years. I was just working like literally no breaks, nothing. But now what I do is I, you know, I have my meetings from like 9 AM to 6 PM and by 6 PM I'm pretty much tired by then. Like I've done like a whole day. So what I do there is I go to the gym or do something else and then kind of read stuff like things that I

Holly Owens (18:40)
I'm sure.

Right.

Shaunak (18:57)
part of like, know, listening to maybe a podcast or something like that. Watch YouTube videos. There's so much of information in YouTube. I love actually YouTube as a platform to learn. So I love learning. So that's what I do. And then, you know, back, back to the same thing in the next morning.

Holly Owens (19:11)
Back to the, yeah, it's like Groundhog Day, absolutely. I think it's important to point out the, and I think of this analogy when I talk about this is that we have the president, whoever that will be, is like the face of the country, whoever the leader is, but they have a lot of people working with them that they trust and are more, have more of an expertise in certain areas.

I think it's important to understand that as an entrepreneur, while you retain, you have a lot of knowledge in different things and you do a lot. You're not the main expert on everything. So it's important for you to hire, which I've seen you do just knowing the team, people that you trust, people that are experts, people that really are go-getters and really are going to increase the value of

the product and what we're trying to do in the education space. But I want to know from you, like, how do you manage like building that team? And then when something happens in the space where the trust is broken with somebody and how that impacts the team, how do you deal with that? Because I know that's a thing.

Shaunak (20:25)
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. you know, in terms of just to kind of reiterate or double click on one of the things that you said is super important, which is self-awareness. know, entrepreneurship is a great way to build self-awareness and people as you build more self-awareness, you become more successful, I feel, because it is not a single player game. It is a multiplayer game. So you are working as a team and

Holly Owens (20:51)
Right.

Shaunak (20:53)
Doesn't matter how good somebody is. mean, they cannot be experts in everything. there is no, mean, but exactly, there's no way to do that to, but what one can do though is one thing that helps me is to learn about things so that, you know, I can have learned as much as possible around, for example, AI or sales and marketing or building products or architecture or new technology. So I do also spend a little bit of time, try to understand as much as possible.

Holly Owens (20:58)
There's simply not enough time in the day.

Shaunak (21:22)
and then make decisions around whether we want to pursue that. If we do pursue that, what kind of a person we need to pursue that initiative. And then what are the steps in terms of going towards that? Like how do we build some momentum to be able to see whether that's working or not? So that is absolutely very important. And if there are like mistrust that happens, and what I've found is this, and this is probably one of my own learning that has happened is,

Human beings are not zero ones. So if there is a misstrat that happens, it's kind of something is kind of not aligning, meaning, you know, it's kind of maybe what I'm saying and somebody the way they are understanding that there is a gap and it can happen as the company grows. maybe there are two or three people in the beginning, everybody's kind of on the same page. But when you grow to like 30, 40, 50 people, you start to kind of see there is a little bit of misalignment that happens.

So my strategy.

Holly Owens (22:23)
Like that friction, that friction that comes in with other ideas or what people think is the ideology behind insert said thing here.

Shaunak (22:33)
That's absolutely right. So there are people that have their own ideas and own biases and other things come up, right? Because that's kind of the... So there is a healthy balance there, which I always say it's a check and balance, which is if I am saying something and everybody agrees, maybe I'm not getting enough feedback. So I need to see something, which is like somebody's at least disagreeing with me so that we can have that conversation and hash it out because we don't want a team where everybody agrees on every idea.

that's not a very hilly dynamic. So I think the high dynamic is that we have a team where people have different points of views, but they're open enough to have a conversation. But once you have gathered all the feedback, then we need to make one decision and hopefully stick to that decision. Till the point we get more data that either it's working or not working. So we're gonna re-evaluate that. So that's been my approach. And overall, I think that approach has worked very well for us.

Holly Owens (23:17)
yeah.

Shaunak (23:29)
over the years, mean, of course we had disagreements and passionate conversations or discussions or debates, but typically this has worked quite well. Where, and if that happens, and my approach is to just kind of do a conversation, try to understand that point of view and see if you can resolve it.

Holly Owens (23:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, so empathy, obviously, for where they're coming from. And I think it's pretty evident inside Yellow Dig, and I can say this now for sure, is that, you know, like you're so approachable and open to any sort of like feedback and stuff. Not to say that you're going to always take it into consideration, but you listen to people like you will definitely take the time to sit down with people one on one and have a conversation with them. And I think that is something that when

the company itself, like when companies become super successful, sometimes the CEO leaves that situation. And that's when kind of things fall apart because then the people aren't feeling as valued in the company. So it's important to understand that no matter how successful the business becomes, you still have to be able to develop those relationships. And we talk about human connection a lot at Yellowdig and we do this within our own teams.

You have to be able to retain those relationships and continue to develop new ones and make sure the old ones are stable, things like that. And it's so important, like people just, you're not just gonna go hands off if you're making billions of dollars, you're still gonna be around.

Shaunak (25:02)
Right. And, you know, just to add to that, what you just said is, you know, there are two philosophies of building companies and I've seen, because I've worked in consulting companies back in the days and also big corporations, the predominant point of view sometimes is to kind of manage companies as a set of numbers. Like numbers do matter, but then kind of the idea here is that if somebody is a good fit for the role, they're great. If they don't work out, you move on to the next person right away.

And it's pretty cut-throat kind of an approach. It has worked for lot of companies, but I don't believe that approach is going to work. And not that if you have human connections, your standards go down. Like sometimes I've heard from people is that if you do not hold people accountable, they would not deliver to the highest level because as a company, you're always trying to raise the standards there. But I think both can be possible. Meaning, if we can...

have clear conversations on the goals that we are setting. Everybody understands what the goals are, and truly kind of understand where people are coming from. If somebody is not aligned, for example, on the goals, try to have the conversation and try to see where they fit in. If they don't fit in in that particular role, it takes a little more, as you said, like hands-on approach. But I do feel that creates a much more lasting culture than the previous one, which is

very much kind of looking at human beings as you and one, is like, works or doesn't work.

Holly Owens (26:30)
Right. We won't mention any big companies that do that. No, I like that. And I think one of the things too that I really wanted to get out of this conversation is for the people who are listening, you're 10 years into this entrepreneurship, this Yellow Dig situation and to like final wrap up thoughts and then we'll see if there's anybody. We had some people.

Shaunak (26:36)
No, yes.

Holly Owens (26:58)
somebody asked about job opportunities at Yellow Big. I was like, I don't think there's any right now, but maybe in the future. And then we'll answer questions. So the first is like, where do you go to get support for this? So are there any like communities that you reached out to? Did you have a mentor? Did you have multiple mentors? Did you have like people, like a network? Like, where do you go to find the support to get started with entrepreneurship? And then a follow up question to that is,

What's the best advice that you received when you were starting this journey? So entrepreneurship, like the best support thing, and then the best advice that you received that helped you during this journey.

Shaunak (27:46)
Yeah. So in terms of building a community, the best way to do that is to try to be friends with more entrepreneurs. People who have already gone through the journey or they are in the journey. And this is what I did. So when I started Yellowdig, even when the idea was kind of coming together, I made it a point to at least have, I think, probably 50 conversations with people.

who have been entrepreneurs, any of my friends who have done startups, people who have worked on similar ideas to kind of pitch them the idea and try to see what they say. So the best way to get started is to have, reach out to people, most entrepreneurs, I mean, they may be busy, but a lot of them try to help out as much as possible. And kind of having that community is very helpful. The other thing I'll say is that, you know, when you jump on this journey,

The hardest period is the first couple of years. I always say is that the first couple of years, mostly people do not know what they do not know. And they're kind of trying to kind of, you know, walking around and trying to see what works. So try to make sure that you have some sort of a financial support system for the first couple of years. I've seen companies or people, I mean, they suffered a lot. lot of the times it's not a bad idea to have a consulting job on the side.

as you're trying out something new or maybe a contract could be part-time to be able to kind of support that so that you give yourself enough runway. It is a, you know, it takes a couple of years. That's the kind of a number I've seen that works out quite well. And in a couple of years, if it's not working out, it's a good idea to maybe find a job somewhere. And by the way, one thing I always like to say is that if you have done entrepreneurship or something entrepreneurial, that skillset never goes away. So the next job that you get,

Holly Owens (29:35)
Yeah.

Shaunak (29:36)
you're probably going to do like much better and you might get promoted much faster just because you have that experience. So that's one thing. And in terms of best advice, would say, the one thing I kind of always find is, okay, maybe this is a good story. You'll like it, Holly. And I was talking to my team about it.

Somebody told me when I was starting up is that entrepreneurship is like a full chip test. What it means is that if you know electronics chip, like you have a circuitry where you put power in from electricity in front of one side, it'll go through a bunch of logic inside and the other side, the electricity will come out. And what ends up happening is that

Holly Owens (30:10)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Shaunak (30:26)
People tend to be good at some things and we have our weaknesses. Everybody has weaknesses, right? So maybe we are great at product or great at engineering or great at design, but we are not really good at marketing or not really good at sales. They're not good at, you know, finance. So in entrepreneurship, you are pretty much doing everything, especially in the first couple of years. So you will be tested on things that are not really good at. So make sure that you're cognizant about it.

It's great to have a strong area, which is you're going to build a business around it, but you cannot completely ignore the other areas. So try to learn about it as much as possible. So for example, for myself, I was really good at product, good at, you know, good engineering. So I kind of understood how to build a good product, but I wasn't really good at sales. I wasn't good at, you know, some of the other sides. I hated pitching my business to investors because I was so focused on building the product. So.

Holly Owens (31:01)
Right.

Shaunak (31:23)
A good advice was that so that I did pay enough attention to kind of get better in those areas over the years and hopefully kind of eventually you'll find people who can really do those well better than you. But especially in the initial years, make sure that you cover those bases so that the electricity actually passes through, know, and you can actually.

Holly Owens (31:43)
Yeah, yeah, actually everything works. Yeah, that's good advice. And I think that's also something to be said about like, again, you don't have to know everything and everybody, like you said, has weaknesses. I think all too often we create this negative self talk around the things that we can't do. And I think as just knowing you from a mental perspective, you're a very positive person.

And like that's important too in this sort of realm is that you have to be very positive because there's going to be extreme high highs and extreme low lows and everything in between. So you have to think about, you know, all those things as a part of the journey as well.

Shaunak (32:23)
Absolutely. It works out. So I would say, yeah, exactly. And if it didn't work out, I would have done something great, think, maybe some alternate knife. yeah, never, I entrepreneurship is never a bad idea.

Holly Owens (32:24)
Yeah, it does. So far so good, right?

Yeah, I love that. Well, have, well, Olga joined us and she said she's loving the conversation. But we did have Melody ask a question. She wants to know, how did you decide on the name Yellowdig? And this might be given a way to answer to one of our recent social posts, but she wants to know how did you decide on that?

Shaunak (32:58)
So, know, the name, the secret to the name actually is in the color of Yellowdig. So it has two parts, yellow and dig. When I was starting up, I really wanted to build a product that has an emotion attached, like an experience. And as you know, Yellowdig's definition of the color yellow is cheerfulness and fun and creativity. So the color yellow gets associated with all these positive emotions.

So I wanted to have that in the product. So that's how the yellow came and the dig part is Learn as a community. We all have lots of interesting insights. So if you come together share exchange our you know Personal lives as well as our ideas. I think we all learn better So that's how the big part came along and that's that together is yellow day

Holly Owens (33:48)
Yeah, that's awesome. And I love hearing you talk about that every time you explain that. It's really cool. And then Olga had a question. She wanted to know if there's a specific framework that you found particularly useful when you embarked on your entrepreneurial journey. So is there anything, like for example, instructional designers, we really focus on the framework of Addy and implementing our processes. And it really does overflow into other things, but is there a particular one that you focus on?

Shaunak (34:15)
My philosophy typically goes around rapid experimentation. So the way I looked at it is, what can we put out there? And your dogs have some fun in the back.

Holly Owens (34:23)
Hey!

Yeah, there's five of them. So, you know, there's going to be fun happening sometimes on the show.

Shaunak (34:34)
They've been surprisingly quiet. think they were also listening to the podcast.

Holly Owens (34:37)
Yes, they're very much ready for the entrepreneur journey.

Shaunak (34:41)
So just to wrap on that, I would say I'm a big fan of this rapid experimentation framework where the idea is that we start with a problem, of course, but we try different solutions to that and try to learn as much as possible because a lot of the times what happens is what really works, works in one or two other experiments. And once we kind of really understand what's really working, then try to hone on that and try to build a

company around it. So in our case, one of the early insights that we got was around gameful learning. When we launched Yellowdig, of course, it's a great platform for students to engage with one another. But the problem we saw was that, how do we get people excited about talking to one another? As you know, that's our problem to solve. So we launched this gamefulness, which is you on points, by interacting. And then we started playing with the points. Try to see that at what

how do we kind of change the system so that students actually get to talk to one another and create the right incentive? So that whole idea came through experimentation. So yeah, big believer in that.

Holly Owens (35:50)
Right. Yeah, I think it's I think that's that's amazing. And also, too, like when you were just talking about earlier about your thought process behind using AI, like that happens with all these different things that that come to the table. Like you're really sitting down with other people on the team and you're thinking through these things like you're not just making the decision in a vacuum like saying because I'm the CEO. This is what's going to go or the founder. This is going to go. You're actually.

Like it has to be researched, has to be like tested. There's a lot of different things that have to happen.

Shaunak (36:23)
Yep. In other words, there lots of checks and balances in place. So they're going to make crazy choices. Yeah, for sure.

Holly Owens (36:27)
Yeah, lots of checks and balances. let's not get too political. But I did used to teach government and I know Bob used to teach, loves political science. So I don't think we have any other questions in the chat, but in wrapping up the episode, I wanna know if there's anything else that you wanna share with anybody about entrepreneurship. You did do a recent quick video that I'm gonna share out on our LinkedIn page about what it is and.

just you do talk a lot about starting your own business and how that all works. But is there anything else you want to share? Obviously we want people to go and check out Yellowdig and see how they can use it at their institutions. And we don't just have the one product we talk a lot about is Engage and that's the courseware product, but there's also Succeed and Connect, which we can definitely talk to you about. I'm going to plug Yellowdig as much as I can. But anything else you want to share? All that's going to be in the show notes.

as we wrap up this episode.

Shaunak (37:27)
I you know, what I like probably already said, is, you know, entrepreneurship sometimes is seen as this like massive thing where it's a very complex thing, but I would say like, if you feel for it, go for it, try, give it a try. and there is a lot of support system in place now to be able to kind of at least kind of give you, know, for you to build something up. And if it doesn't work out, of course, there are a lot of people out there like ourselves who would love to hire entrepreneurs. We've built things. So, yeah. So that's kind of where I would.

close it today.

Holly Owens (37:57)
Yeah, it's like I love the message here is that anybody can do it. It's really, you know, and all this is a matter of if you're going to stick to it when you kind of like a relationship, when it gets hard, are you going to stick with it or are you going to bow up? But, know, that's what that's really what entrepreneurship is. So thank you so much for coming on and spending part of your day with me and the audience. And we're definitely going to drop this as an episode. We'll include everything in the show notes on about Yellow Dig.

how to reach out to Shawnek and our team. If you have any questions, please connect with us and follow us everywhere. It's a great culture internally, as you can see, and we're just trying to change the world of education and make more of a human connection. So thanks for listening.

Shaunak (38:42)
Thank you so much, Holly. Always a pleasure.