"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." Ankur Nagpal's honest reflection on building Teachable.

The 24-Year-Old Founder

"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 provides a place for people to sell physical products online. Teachable helps people build digital storefronts to sell their knowledge."

The Vision

"When I first came up with the idea in 2013, I was passionate about the future of online education. 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."

The Scale

"What started as a side project, which I called Fedora at the time, eventually grew into a company with over 100 employees."

• 30 million students
• 50,000 creators
• 50 people making $1M+ per year
• 2 people making over $10M per year

The Burnout

"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."

The company was acquired by Hotmart for a reported $250M.