Going Global: Ashwin Damera on scaling your startup in new geographies

“What I think is supremely important to succeed from a business perspective is just the people who you get on board to run that operation,” says Ashwin Damera, Co-founder & Director, Eruditus Executive Education

He also advocates the three-box approach to manage your business effectively. Box one will help you manage your present effectively, box two is all about selectively forgetting the past, whereas the third box will make you imagine and build your future. He believes this approach will balance out resources across the three boxes, while giving you a clear picture of what to create and what to disinvest from.

He uses the same approach when it comes to going global, while making decisions on hiring in different countries. According to him, scaling geographies is always about the people. If a startup can find the right hire, it’s easy. Suggesting that sometimes the hardest thing is to not apply your dominant logic to that market, Ashwin goes on to say, “Once you start realising that every market is different, and so kind of embrace that, it becomes a lot easier.”

The thought of making education accessible and affordable for all is what drove the expansion strategy for Eruditus across multiple geographies and languages. Also, the opportunities in the education sector are immense, so the expansion took place in a short time. “For example, students in Latin America may not have access to the MITs of the world. Therefore, as the demand keeps growing, so does our business across the globe,” he says.

In this episode of Building it up with Bertelsmann, hear Ashwin’s expert take on the highs and lows of establishing a quality-driven business, and the problems that the online education ecosystem faces across geographies.

Click here to hear the full podcast.