- Ankur Nagpal started his first company Teachable in 2013.
- He enjoyed running Teachable at first, but after he sold it, he was left feeling burned out.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ankur Nagpal, 34, who founded startups Teachable and Ocho Wealth, where he is also the CEO. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
After I sold my first startup in 2020, I told myself I would never start a company from scratch again. I was tired. I was burned out. And I was no longer enjoying my job as CEO and founder of Teachable.
Teachable was my life's work at that point. I was 24 when I started it, and I spent the next seven years building up Teachable, a subscription education platform that helps people create online courses — and get paid for it. It's sort of like how Shopify, an e-commerce platform, provides a place for people to sell physical products online. Teachable helps people build digital storefronts to sell their knowledge.
When I first came up with the idea in 2013, I was passionate about the future of online education. I was 24, a few years out from graduating from University of California, Berkeley, and I was even teaching online courses in New York at the time. I had an idea that in the future more people were going to set up businesses to sell information and knowledge they had, rather than physical goods. And I ran with the idea.
What started as a side project, which I called Fedora at the time, eventually grew into a company with over a 100 employees. I really enjoyed running Teachable for the first five years. But by the time we reached that size, I was spending most of my time in meetings and managing people, and I felt very divorced from the output of what we were building. I started to wonder if I was still suited to be CEO of Teachable.
Around that time, I was also considering selling Teachable. It was a conflicting decision. I was a little tired and burned out at that point, which made an acquisition sound appealing. But I wanted to make sure that the move made sense for the company. After meeting with a potential buyer — one that I thought had a lot in common with Teachable's DNA — I felt confident making the decision.
When the pandemic happened in March 2020, Teachable had just announced it was acquired by Hotmart, a global platform for online courses based in The Netherlands and with offices in Brazil. The next few months were completely mental. The world went into lockdown. There was a lot of fear and uncertainty about the virus. Workplaces were adjusting to entirely remote work. But during that time Teachable took off.
The demand was more than we ever imagined. What Teachable used to earn as a company within a year, we were suddenly earning in a matter of weeks. People were setting up all kinds of business through Teachable — courses on computer programming and marketing, to dance, gardening, and yoga.
By 2021, the last year I oversaw the company, the platform had grown to 30 million students and 50,000 creators. That year, we had 50 people make a million dollars in a year, and two people make over $10 million in a year.
Stepping down from leading Teachable was a hard decision to make. Initially, I was steadfast about wanting to be the person running my company. But once I set that aside, I realized running Teachable wasn't what I was uniquely suited to do anymore.
That realization can be difficult for a lot of founders to face: That you don't have to be the person that runs your own company forever.
Stepping down also gave me a chance to reflect on my strengths. I started to ask myself: What are the activities that energize me, and what are the things that drain my energy? And it became very clear that creating — and all its shapes and forms — gives me energy. It keeps me up at night and makes me excited. I learned that's what I'm good at: starting things.
I know I said I was never going to start another company again. But six months ago I started Ocho Wealth, a service designed to help business owners and freelancers learn how to grow their wealth through educational products and financial services.
That experience selling Teachable ended up being foundational for developing Ocho. As a first generation immigrant to the US from India, I've realized that financial information isn't easily accessible in this country. The people who come from money are often the ones who also have access to knowledge about money. By talking about it and making these strategies available to everyone through Ocho, we hope to democratize financial information, so that it's easier for people to learn how to save and invest their money.
We're only six months old. So far we've launched one product, a 401(k) retirement plan. We have a small team.
But that's what excites me about it: getting to start something new.