Ignite Startups: Why Corporate Training Is Being Rebuilt Around AI and Just-in-Time Learning | Ep298

Yuvraj Singh Shergill (0:00)

Traditionally, I would have always believed that there are certain qualifiers which really allow you to like say that, like, you know, a specific kind of talent and people come if they have those qualifiers, if they go to certain universities, if they've worked at certain companies. But I think over the past few years, having worked with a lot of diverse set of people, I don't think that is something sure shot. Like, you can, like, I think there are some folks in our team as well who are by far the most phenomenal people that I've ever worked with. And they don't come from the top schools. They don't come from the top 10, 20 schools. They've not worked at the top firms, but they are, they have great ownership. They have insane amount of insights into what they're doing. They're extremely passionate and hardworking. And I think five years, 10 years ago, I would have probably said that, no, I think a qualifier is that, like, if somebody has gone through some of these top schools and institutions, but I don't think that's true at all.

Brian Bell (1:15)

Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we are thrilled to have Yuvraj Singh on the mic. He is the co-founder and CEO of Arusto, a company rebuilding how organizations create, govern, and distribute learning content in the AI era. Thanks for coming on, Yuvraj.

Yuvraj Singh Shergill (1:29)

Thank you so much, Brian. Pleasure to be here. Very excited to talk to you.

Brian Bell (1:32)

Well, love to start with your origin story. What's your background?

Yuvraj Singh Shergill (1:34)

Well, I was born and raised in a small town in India. I come from very humble beginnings. I was a very ambitious kid. I was one of the first kids out of my hometown to get admitted into one of the top tier schools in the US.

And I saw that as an opportunity to start a company as well, to help other kids kind of do the same. So at 17, I launched my first company while I got admitted into Georgia Tech. Ran that for about five years. I took it to about a million dollars in revenue over the span of five years and eventually sold it out. When I was at Tech, met my best friend and now co-founder, Kane Padma, in freshman year. We were in the same fraternity. I got excited about working with each other, worked on multiple different projects. Though we took very different routes, we always kind of wanted to like, you know, come back and discuss ideas and explore things together. After Georgia Tech, I worked in consulting for a couple of years in Washington, DC, got, went to grad school for my masters, worked with McKinsey for about four years, and then I was also one of the youngest advisors to the office of the president in UAE.

I think one of the coolest things which kind of got me interested into this space is, when I was at McKinsey, I was essentially helping large sovereign wealth funds, turn state-owned enterprises into private companies, and all these organizations really did not have any kind of learning academies or structured growth and talent development programs kind of set in. So for about two to three years, I was literally building corporate academies in different parts of the world for different companies. And that's when I discovered that this is such a fundamentally broken system. From the outside, it looks that, oh, it's going to be very easy. People have these repositories of courses, or they subscribe to these libraries, and you just kind of assign these trainings to certain employees and certain business functions and roles and they will go ahead with it, complete that, make a checkbox, and that is it. But actually, when you go about building something from scratch, when you have to prove that it works and it can actually help the talent within an organization, it's actually a very difficult and complicated and expensive process. So we knew that that was a problem, and I felt quite excited about it having gone through the pain myself and decided that, you know, we wanted to fix that problem. And that's what we're trying to do with Arusto.

Brian Bell (3:47)

It's really fascinating, that's a good founder story too, right? You know, I love the kid from the village, first of his village to go to a top tier school and start a company, and it's such a great founder story. You know, what's interesting is the privatization of state assets.

We just had a political economy episode right before this one. Well, it'll be, I don't know, six episodes before yours airs, but what was in it for the state to do that? Is it just to increase competition, lower prices, create consumer surplus kind of thing?