 Yeah, so this is a punchline I keep using that if education is 50-50, ed tech is 70% learning and 30% teaching. See that's part of the model and we have to adapt and use technology in the right way so that the effectiveness or outcomes are delivered with this ratio in mind which is the reason why I also have a feeling or this is what I've always seen and followed that the student who is consuming education through technology has to be supremely motivated. That could also be one of the reasons why today, ed tech is more outcome driven and effective in a higher education kind of a scenario than in school where the students obviously are not too bothered because their parents are paying for them. But having said all that, you look at India as a whole. When we talk about education in schools, we typically talk about the middle class. We talk about the individuals who already have a lot of opportunities but large number of students in India are desperate to get good education and there is no motivation lacking in them. What is lacking is the opportunity. What is lacking is the access and that's where ed tech is truly going to be a game changer. Which is why I feel there is a lot ed tech can do in this country. Yes, the model is challenging but which model is not challenging. You have to use technologies to make it more and more outcome driven for every student in this country. There are multiple challenges which higher education, online education faces but there are also Humpty number of opportunities. Again, I keep on taking the example of India because that's my market and that's what I am very passionate about. So investing in oneself, especially once you have a job is not a very common thing in India. We are a culture where we believe that after I get a job, I should only spend money for my kids. I should not be spending money for myself. So investing in ourselves is never really part of an Indian culture. We think 10 times we go taking a holiday. We think twice before going out for a dinner. The same is with education. I have already spent. That era is over. Now it's about making money and spending on the education of my kid. That's how the typical thing is. This is changing. So today because of the ambition which is available in India today, because of the fact that one generation of IT knowledge professionals have seen a growth and then a challenge when Y2K and the 2008 crisis came in. They understand that if they need to continue being successful, they need to invest in themselves. So that culture is slowly building in India. And this is very prevalent in the West where investing in oneself is so important. Now this is building in India. And once this build, it is building in a group of people who have already passed that brand of IITs and NITs or IIF. These are people who realize that that will take you to one point. But to stay there and grow, you need more. Yes, brand is still important. But they do realize the importance of improving one's skill. And that's the arena we are playing in. But that market, as you rightly said, is very, very short. Majority of the people in India still associate learning, education, upskilling with the brands. And that's the reason why the model today also isn't partnership with the brands. But I definitely see slowly, slowly the other market growing. I am sure that in future, it will be just not about an IIT, IIM or a Howard brand, but also about taking a certification from Upgrad or Google or Facebook is as good. Because finally, what is the objective? Objective is ambition. Objective is a better job or a promotion then. So as long as you are connected into outcome, it becomes a sustainable model to your business. These are questions we ask ourselves every day. We are sure that there will be a trend shifting in few years. But the problem is that once you are ingrained into a business model, then you get lost. You will never know when the shift is happening. You will only know the shift is happening when somebody else creates a business competing with a better margin. So these are questions we keep on asking. We keep on asking our customer and try to see if the shift is happening. The way I see is that I don't really look from the perspective of an enabler or a provider. I see from the perspective of a customer. I look at what the customer needs. The customer needs an outcome. Today, the customer believes that the outcome will require a tie-up and a branch to get him there. Over a period of time, all the stakeholders will start thinking in a different direction. There will be acceptability of Brand Upgrad and that a data science program from Brand Upgrad will give you that transition. That is a process which will happen over a period of time. So what we do is that we keep listening to the customer and see what he wants and go where he wants us to take him, as simple as that. So typically, if you look at a learner who comes to us, they come with the expectation of three different outcomes. Number one is a job transition that is transitioning into a new industry, getting a new job. Number two is a job acceleration that is getting a promotion in the same job he's working. And number three, the most common is professional confidence. Typically, it is I'm sitting on a bench. How do I get a better project? So when a learner starts the program with us, our interface or our dashboard asks him to put in the outcome which he's looking at. So we have an internal engine, a back-end engine. As usually, it is written on AML because there are so many parameters around it, which quantifies and tells the learner that these are the skills you need for it. This is the level you are. And through the program, we show them how they are improving. It goes through various stages. So there are two aspects in it. One, of course, the context because we are giving them hard facts. We are helping them with soft skills, so on and so forth. Second, this process also built in a lot of confidence in the learner because they know that they're working on things. They know that there is a coach who is taking them across. So one, two measurements is this. One, we measure based on finally how many people get the outcome, whether it is promotion, hike, the hard numbers comes in there. Typically, we have all the numbers and you can also see it everywhere, 87% of the people get the outcome they want, 60% hike, so on and so forth. There's also a software aspect which we take through a regular NPS. So we do a quarterly NPS on all our matches which is passing through and that NPS becomes a basis for a lot of things we are doing. So we have been working on that for a really long time, the programs where we have as high as 72 NPS and there are programs which need continuous work on. So these are the two ways in which we measure ourselves to check whether we are providing the outcomes to the learners. Yes, why do you think this interaction is not possible online? It is possible online, right? So what we have been working on and you told about the professors, what about the peer interaction, what about the learnings you have from your friends, what about those informal hostile nightouts where you do a project and during the project work you get it. The aspect is that today's youth, even if they are on campus working with their peers and the professors, they are distracted. They are all the time on the Facebooks and the social media. They are not really getting the advantage of this interaction. So as good, take this interaction to the media which they are present today, which is online. So what we have worked on continuously is develop tools which will allow such interaction to happen. So on our MBA program, we have a tool which is completely focused on networking. You can network with your peers, you can network with your alumni using that tool. The project work, we have compulsory project works to be done in small groups where the students interact together and build that social connection. There are options to have one-on-one interaction with your industry mentors, with your professors if required that the students can have. So all this aspect, we are in the process of building out or we have build it out online and we believe that that is the future because people today are so busy. I mean like even in campus, how many of them take that walk? Rather if out of desperation and out of the fact that they really need to pass, if someone fixes a one-to-one interaction with the professor and get the same nugget, that's what will be the outcome today. So I am totally with you that there's so many things which happens outside classroom but I am not with you when you say that that is only possible in black and brick and mortar. It is definitely possible online and that's where the world is going. You are absolutely right because as you rightly said, a lot of the objective of education is actually to build discipline. More than a lot of knowledge and other things that you acquire, it is that self-discipline. It is that confidence that I can take up something incomplete which comes into that. So hence rigor is an absolutely important aspect and that is the reason why if you look at higher educational institution like us or anyone else, the completion rates of these institutes, these courses are much higher than MOOC platform. So somebody like a Coursera today has got a 2% completion rate while our courses has got around 89% completion rate. That is because we inherently understand this aspect. We inherently understand that a rigor is required and not everyone is self-discipline. The push is required. So if you look at our product, although we keep calling it as product, actually it's not just a product. There's a lot of service element associated with it. So any student who starts the course, there is a buddy who is assigned to that person who manually also tracks what is this person up to. Is he completing his courses? Is his marks good? Is he submitting things in time? The person actually reaches out to the learner and tells him that, hey, you are now falling back. Gives psychological support. At times even tells him that you have paid so much of money into it. Aren't you serious about it? So we do understand that that is required and without that there is no way this can be successful. Another model which we build out is the whole fear learning. So we bring them together so much that they get this feeling that, okay, these guys are going ahead of me. I will also have to do something. So without the rigor, there is no way this can be done. So what we have tried to do is replicate the same rigor you can get in a high quality institution online. And that's what has helped us in getting the kind of completion rates that we have seen today. I have many stakeholders for my product. I have the consumer, the learner who consumes it and a very important stakeholder in the employer who needs to trust that the product is good. But the marketing approach for each of the stakeholders are different. While my approach for my consumer is more about telling the stories. And as you said, the story of my friend going behind beyond ahead of me. This is an insight we got from one of the customer conversations. They called us saying that after a lot of discussion, they said that, see, my friend who was with me, he was not that great. He is now my boss. How do I ensure that I also go ahead? So these are stories we hear from our customers and that's why we feel that it will connect well, right? But when I look at an employer, my medium of talking to the employer will be very different. So I currently have an account management team who literally works with all the key employers who recruit from us or where my admin is working. So it is more about understanding what the requirement is. If tomorrow, I mean, one of the people we work closely with people like Google, VMware, they come, they, during the account management process tells us that, see, this is the capability we are looking in a data scientist. So based on that input, we add things to our curriculum, we tweak things in our curriculum. And then by the time our students are ready, we also forward their series, forward their project saying that, hey, these are the things we are doing. What do you think about it? In that subtle process, employment also happened, hiring also happened. So that's how we talk to our stakeholder in employer. These kind of stories, it's nice to say, but then what they are looking at is how will I get more value out of it? So we have a complete team working on it. We have a subsidiary recruit, which is only focused on recruitment. They also work with around 1000 plus companies on a day to day basis. So that's how we communicate to them our medium or our story. Absolutely. We have an extensive V2B business. We have been working with a lot of companies. See, if you see the way we have expanded business, we now have a high quality learning solution for someone who has completed the 12th standard. We have bachelor's solutions, we have master's solutions, we even have a doctorate program. So it is just not about being must have once. What we are looking at is becoming a lifelong learning partner. What we are looking at is that once you complete your education, please come to Upgrad and we will help you achieve your outcome. That's how we are looking at it. I cannot put a timeline to this must have because India is such a large country. There is a statistics work which once Ronnie told me that only the toothbrush in India has only got 60% penetration. So imagine a concept which has been around for so long. We all do it every morning and still 60% penetration. So I don't want to put a timeline on it. What we are hyper focused is everybody who wants to have a successful outcome driven career today come to us and look us as the partner. We will enable them, help them to reach where they want to go. We want to have that journey alongside them throughout. Today, if you look at it around 8% of our learners come back to take a second course from us, although we do only long form program and that is unheard in the industry. Around 40% of our revenue comes from reference that is students in our system referring their friends. So we think we are definitely going in that direction, but it is a few years ahead of us. There are only so many good teachers, but as against offline, the advantage we have is using technology. You can take that one extremely good teacher and have a really, really big classroom. So what today there are tools wherein the good teacher or the exceptional teacher who knows to handle things on camera does the lectures and in a very large classroom and there are teaching assistants who will be able to take the doubts which comes through the classroom. So suddenly you are enabling maybe a 100,000 students to study in one IIT where you have got really, really high quality teachers. So that is how we are solving for it. I don't really think that we will go slow and steady. I mean, I don't think we should go slow and steady because think about it. We are sitting in a country where the GR ratio, the graduate enrollment ratio is in its 20s and we are talking about becoming a 5 trillion economy, 10 trillion economy, 20 trillion economy soon. How are we going to do it if you don't have the skilled manpower? It's not about it just impossible to build that many universities and that many seats to get to 60, 70 percentage in next 5 or 10 years. The solution is completely, completely and only online. And this is how we need to do it. So we don't have an option to go slow. We will have to go fast and I don't really think for institutions, organizations like us which has gotten product and infrastructure, it will be about diluting quality. It will not be. It is about solving the problems through technologies as and when it comes. So far we have been able to do it. I'm sure you'll be able to do it in future. Absolutely, the sense especially this COVID time scale up, I mean doing scale up during COVID has been challenging everyone sitting at home. So we literally pivoted to become a completely online company making everybody working from home in like two weeks time. That involves changing everything, building SOPs for every team, getting all our software on cloud, so on and so forth. So it, I mean, it has been a challenge. It won't be right to say it is not. Second is that especially if you look at the mainstream of upgrade, it's mostly technology products, data science and all these things. Then we become bigger and bigger. What happens is a lot of non-tech learners also come in which required us to change our approach, which required us to understand that these people don't even know what coding is. So you'll have to do boot camps first, introduce them, give them more of a timeline and more of training to let them into the process. Because today, not knowing technology is not a solution. Even if you're in bank and you don't know about the latest product software, that's a problem. So we are seeing that the customer itself is changing and it required us to change a lot of things in our course. There has been mistakes. We have learned from it. We have ensured that the customer and the learner has been also very, very patient. They have worked closely with us to ensure that it's been smooth. So that I would say is an ongoing problem, which we need to solve. When the market grows and when there is access to capital, it is quite obvious that you will start creating niches. There are cases like e-commerce where niches have been successful. Five years ago, if you had asked a grocery company like BigBasket or a meat delivery company like Licious will work, you would have said, why? I could have bought it on Amazon. But as the market grows, specialization becomes important. That is expected in an ecosystem like Atec also. Only question we need to see is, is there enough size for niche to survive in a market which is so generalist like India? Like India is literally about engineering, medical and technology. So that's a question we need to answer. And I don't have an answer for it today. And over a period of time, maybe an year or two, we will know. Then the question will be whether we want to incubate a specialized subsidiary which will focus on that niche or we would acquire a company and then do the business to us. So that's an evolving question. I really don't have the answer to that. Now to come to the funding part, yeah, Atec has been globally a darling of investors because especially after COVID going in, people realize that you can do learning online. And this is pretty much becoming a permanent change which people may not go back to. I am fairly sure that schools people are going to run back to, coaching centers they are going to run back to because things are not that easy. But professional education is something which we have realized that this is fine. And I don't want to really waste so much of productivity by taking a break. Or why should I go back to do a Masters and MBA today if all the stakeholders are taking my interviews online. So that's a permanent change I am seeing. And that's some reason why there is so much of interest in higher ed. See the Indian situation is a little different. If you look at it, somebody like Baijus is a market leader in multiple segments. They are a market leader in K-12, they are a market leader now in test prep. And an investor would like to bet always on the market leader if the market leader is ready to take money. So that's the typical philosophy of it. But that doesn't mean that others are not getting there. I mean, the press doesn't cover it, but there are lots and lots of small tiny companies which are getting money. The quantum is not big enough. But these are actually creating very interesting products. There is a high possibility that one of these innovative products can become a challenge. So as a fortunate bigger businesses which have access to capital, it is our responsibility to keep watching them and innovate so that we don't go behind. We don't end up going behind. Yeah. So absolutely. Okay. We think that there is a huge opportunity today because whichever international university we are talking to today are more than happy to tie up with us at a global scale. Now, if I have a US brand like a University of Arizona and I can sell that brand using the cost structure and the capability of India, then that's the lethal combination. I have access to great sales force. I have access to great digital marketing folks and I have access to great technology folks at almost 20% of the cost which I would have incurred if I hired them in the Western world. So that is making a lot of Indian companies and hire at very, very attractive. For upgrade, the international focus came in late but last one year we have ramped up drastically. Now, the contribution of international revenue has almost doubled in our top line and that's a huge, huge focus for us. That's the reason why we have got leaders in EMEA, EPEC, US who are building separate companies there using the opportunity or using the product and the technology stack we have built as upgrade. I would say exceptionally good question. Okay. These are the deeper problems we need to solve for our countrymen itself. Fundamentally, in India, everything in education is about getting that transformation at the end of it. A good job, a lot of times, a good girl to get married, so on and so forth. But then, as I told you, slowly, slowly there is a change happening. People do realize that they need to invest. So from the fact where education is a stage in their life, it is slowly becoming a continuous process, although still the objective is keeping ahead of time. But when something becomes a continuous process, it becomes a habit. And once it becomes a habit, then people start looking at it. So rather than trying to change it by saying that, hey, you need to do education for the fourth imbibing knowledge, I think this approach of calling it lifelong learning and telling them that if you do this continuously, your growth will be continuous. And helping them make it a habit is something which we are trying to do with an underlying or an ultimate objective of what you said. But we won't call it out because we call it out. The game is lost.