The toll of founding: failures and restarts

Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke sit down with Gagan Biyani, co-founder of Udemy, founder of Sprig, and now co-founder and CEO of Maven, the live cohort-based learning platform reshaping how the world's top operators learn from each other.

Gagan started his first business at 13, teaching speech and debate to kids in his living room while his parents went through a divorce and his family rode out multiple tech recessions. By his senior year, that summer camp had 150 students and was financing the trips of every student on his school's debate team.

In this conversation, Gagan walks Jessica and Peter through the unlikely path that took him from a Fremont kid with no idea startups existed, to obsessively reading TechCrunch four hours a day from a government consulting desk, to becoming the business co-founder of Udemy after a single Skype call with two Turkish immigrants who didn't even know they wanted to run the company yet.

He talks openly about getting pushed out of Udemy, raising $60 million for Sprig and watching it crash and burn, and the years of self-doubt that followed before Maven finally clicked. He shares why his habits get stricter the more pressure he's under, why a status-oriented social network is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a founder, and the friend group from high school speech and debate that has kept him grounded for two decades.

Then he and Jessica get into the part of the conversation that should make every leader sit up. Why most AI rollouts fail in week three. Why "just give people the tools" is the laziest mistake HR teams keep making. Why Maven has already restructured its engineering pods from 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2, and is asking whether that ratio still needs to shrink further.

He explains why universities will be the single biggest laggards in the AI transition, why the education gap is about to widen dramatically, and what he'd actually do if he had a six-year-old in the public school system right now.

Topics covered:

• Starting his first business at 13 during his parents' divorce
• The Stanford summer camp that became a $50K business with 150 students
• Why he was a terrible boss as a teenager
• How TechCrunch and one comment from a friend changed his life trajectory
• Becoming Udemy's business co-founder after a single Skype call
• Getting pushed out of his own company and starting over
• Raising $60M for Sprig, burning out, and shutting it down
• Why founders need friend groups that aren't status-oriented
• The counterintuitive habit pattern: stricter routines under more stress
• Why product-market fit is the #1 job, and recruiting is #2
• Why Maven exists, humans still have a place in modern learning
• Restructuring engineering pods because of AI: 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2
• Why most AI rollouts fail in week three
• The biggest mistake HR leaders are making with AI right now
• Why universities will be the laggards in the AI transition
• The Alpha School model and the future of K-12 education

This is one of those episodes where a founder you might not have heard of teaches you more about building, leading, and surviving in the next decade than most of the household names ever will. Gagan is honest about the failures, generous with the frameworks, and clear-eyed about what's coming.