Raghav Gupta of 1% Club on building learning communities and the future of education in the age of AI

Education as a product has the potential to build an active learning community, believes Raghav Gupta, Founder & CEO, Futurense, and Co-founder of 1% Club. 

1% Club is a social and educational platform for personal finance co-founded by finance influencer Sharan Hegde and Raghav Gupta, while Futurense helps tech talent upskill themselves and become job-ready in the AI-driven era. 

“People like to be in communities that push them forward and share common aspirations. For the last six or seven years, when all the edtech companies came up, the focus on community was a bit diluted, but now we are going back to a community angle,” said Gupta, at TechSparks 2024.

Talking about the need for building communities, he explained that one approach has been the creation of a space, like an app, a Discord channel, or a Slack group. Another way to build a community is through content.

He believes that community should be viewed holistically with a focus on content.

“Content is something that people are consuming, and when you consume something, a loyalty factor builds up. So, a community has a lot to do with content, and it is happening on all these social media channels,” he said. 

The AI future

Speaking about AI (artificial intelligence), Gupta said it taps into the emotions of fear and greed. People are fearful of it but they are also lured by the salaries of AI engineers, he pointed out. 

“We are in the right place at the right time—AI is a highly emotional and culturally relevant topic. We are able to create content and add people to the community,” he added.

Gupta said that, despite producing the highest number of engineers and having the most engineering colleges, India—even with its significant talent advantage—contributes only about 1.5% of the overall tech value created globally.

This is largely due to the fact that the IT services industry is being built on a quantitative labour advantage, instead of focusing on value creation, reasoned Gupta. 

“The future with AI is going to be a qualitative labour advantage where the number of people in a team will not matter but what will matter is the quality of those people,” he said. 

Quality of education 

On this note, Gupta emphasised the need for quality education. 

“Quality education has to become more holistic in the society we live in. Degrees and jobs for the sake of simply getting a job should not be valued so much. 

“Learning shouldn’t be about mugging up information, especially because mostly by the time they (students) graduate, those jobs will not exist. What will matter is the ability to articulate thoughts clearly and answer questions logically.”

He also threw light on the barriers faced in Tier II and III 3 cities—both physical and digital obstacles. 

The biggest obstacle is the communication barrier. He explained that people struggle to articulate their thoughts effectively. Many of them cannot articulate in English and often feel less confident, he added. 

Gupta believes that while their skills are on par and they put in a lot of hard work and are ambitious, their inability to put their points across well is a stumbling block. 

Differentiated marketing strategy

Gupta founded FutureSense Technologies in 2020.  He said that, at that time, there was considerable cost arbitrage from the United States to India in data engineering roles.

He also recalled that, during that period, companies such as UpGrad, Simply Learn, Newton, and Pesto came into the market and raised significant capital.

It was during this time Gupta recognised the need for a differentiated marketing strategy. Therefore, he introduced a zero-cost upskilling model, wherein individuals were paid to enhance their skills. 

"We realised that the IT services industry is a great sector for new entrants to establish small, quick boutique businesses. So, we built an IT services company but branded it more like an edtech organisation. 

“We refer to our model as zero-cost upskilling, with the long-term vision of eventually expanding into college education. That is the direction we took,” he said.

Growth takes time, patience is key

There is a misconception about Gen Z entrepreneurs—that they lack patience, said Gupta, a young founder himself.  

“In the last three, four or five years, we have all observed what has happened in the (startup) ecosystem. There is no such thing as quick money; everything takes time. Digital growth, at the end of the day, is still growth that you are competing for. For all of us, I think the last few years have been very humbling,” he said.