Built by: Arman Hezarkhani, Nikhil Choudhary, and Jason Zhu — Parthean
As a young professional, it can be daunting to have so much flexibility and freedom to dictate your own personal and professional growth. For a majority of my life, school has defined the next obstacle for me, leveling up from K-12 to graduating college. While some people pick up hobbies or go back to school, it’s often difficult to navigate all the resources available and figure out how you can continue to progress and advance your knowledge. Especially with the pandemic, I’ve been trying to find ways to feel productive, but it’s hard to know where to start, how to maintain consistency, and have the motivation and community to keep going.
Arman Hezarkhani, Nikhil Choudhary, and Jason Zhu are trying to solve this challenge with Parthean. Parthean’s goal is to make learning a habit with a community-based platform, providing daily, curated content and progress tracking. Arman, Nikhil, and Jason went to Carnegie Mellon, with experiences across tech and consulting companies including Google, Palantir, and BCG. As a fellow Carnegie Mellon alum, I was excited to catch up with Nikhil and share the story behind Parthean!
Interview with Nikhil Choudhary, co-founder and CTO of Parthean
To begin, how does Parthean work?
Every weekday, you’ll get a bite-sized lesson in your inbox. Our value add is in figuring out the best pieces of content for you and making sure they’re 5 to 10 minutes long, across multiple form factors, such as videos, articles or interactive experiences. Afterwards, you read a prompt that invites you to reflect on a specific aspect of the content, or discuss some way in which you might have seen this in your own life. It’s a very minimal way for you to digest what you are learning without taking a quiz or reading an entire essay to understand a topic, because people usually mull over the prompt throughout the rest of the day. Currently, we’re teaching topics in design and tech, but are actively adding new content every week.
What was the idea behind Parthean?
If you want to study something really in depth, you can go to get a PhD. If you want to study something practical for a new job, you go to bootcamps. But if you’re just curious about something casually, what do you do? How do you become conversationally knowledgeable about these things?
One way in which people solve this problem is by listening to podcasts from, say, NPR, or reading more on the NYT Best Sellers list. Others may choose to commit to hobbies like woodworking or surfing. But pause for a moment to think back to the last activity you were keen to try out, or the last topic you wanted to learn more about, that you never got around to doing. First, you struggle with knowing how to get started, where to search, and if you figure them out, the entire process can feel overwhelming. There’s a lot of friction. Second, it’s hard to find a relevant community to help motivate you. Finally, it can be demoralizing and unfulfilling if you do not have beginner’s luck. We’re trying to solve these with Parthean today.
Backing it up a bit, how did you, Arman, and Jason meet?
The three of us are from Carnegie Mellon, and Jason’s still finishing up senior year. Arman and I were both teaching assistants for the introductory Python programming course (15–112) at different times. He came to visit me in Singapore in August 2019 and that’s when he pitched me the early version of Parthean. Since then, I’ve been ramping up my support and joined full time in November 2020.
Jason actually came on Arman’s radar when he started building the product. We were really impressed by his abilities; he’s got a lot of design expertise and has made phenomenal designs, but he’s also got experience with marketing and growth. We decided very early on to bring him on as a co-founder.
Why did you decide on daily, curated content versus providing users with access to an entire library of content?
We struggled with this question for some time. When we first created the platform, we gave people access to the entire library. We then heard a user describing the experience of being overwhelmed by the amount of content they have access to. We also noticed that it was actually encouraging people to binge on content like they do with Netflix, rather than build learning as a daily habit. Cramming your learning into a short time span is a bad habit we’ve picked up from school. When you cram for the test the day before, how much of that knowledge do you retain a week out? Probably not much.
We’re not training people for tests here, we’re training them for life.
We don’t mind if you fall behind, though, because that happens to all of us. That’s why you get to see all the past lessons, so that you can catch up.
How do you think the pandemic has influenced people’s behavior with the platform?
I’ll start the answer with a more abstract take before making it more concrete and tangible. It’s my personal belief that we all are yearning for progress. I think it’s because we’ve been conditioned that way for a lot of our life, whether it’s through moving up grades at school or titles in our jobs. That, plus a lot of social comparisons, is a large part of why determined young professionals are gunning for the next promotion or finding a better job somewhere else.
However, the social isolation during the pandemic has forced more of us to think harder about what we want in our own lives. The two examples of woodworking and surfing I gave previously were real ones that prompted me to reflect. When I saw my friends Insta posts, I wondered what I was doing to fulfill my own goals.
We’re seeking fulfillment, and for the curious person who wants to learn more about the world, our platform helps them grow and improve.
How does Parthean provide users with that sense of progress that they’re seeking?
It’s hard to do with education, because a lot of learning requires time. But we don’t have the time, as professionals, to work through a topic from bottom-up over years before seeing its applications. We need to deliver quick wins.
For that, we carefully curate the lessons, ensuring that they’re well produced, don’t assume prior knowledge, and leave interesting takeaways for the user, in no longer than 10 mins. That is a tall order. But that’s the only way you’re going to be engaged. Frankly, in a world where you’re drowned out by the deluge of information and resources online, having a way to filter out the noise and receive only the best, is a huge draw. We also focus on making people feel the growth by including an interactive activity as one of the 5 lessons you get assigned each week in a module. Of course they’re fun, but more importantly, they make you realize how much you’ve picked up.
Finally, we draw inspiration from game design. They’ve cracked the nut on how to provide exactly the type of progress people need to stay engaged. But we’re careful with gamification. Using leaderboard, badges, levels, points, and the likes can become gimmicky very quickly, and a significant turn off.
What have been your biggest challenges from building Parthean?
Our strategy, product, or go to market changes almost weekly, based on feedback.
That’s a crazy pace that I’ve not experienced before and I’m still getting used to it. I also have personally struggled with the funding situation that we’re in. Our runway was slated to end in January, and we’ve managed to push that back multiple times, to now be at a point where we’re able to breathe a little. But for some time, it was a real possibility that I would have to pack my bags and head back to Singapore.
Another big thing I’ve been struggling with is uncertainty. I believe that humans are able to deal with pain and pressure, but we really struggle with uncertainty.
That was something that I was taught in the army when going through officer training. The most valuable thing you can give your men when out in the field is not an easier life, but information and clarity on what’s ahead for them. Early stage ventures are filled with huge uncertainty, and that eats away at you in a different way. Most of us who attend college have generally been trained to work hard, but we don’t develop the muscle to deal with things that don’t have a clear, straightforward answer. And that’s exactly what searching for product market fit is like, messy.
But all said and done, I want to end off by counting my blessings. I have immense privilege to be able to work on this when I felt compelled.
So much had to go in my favor for the past 27 years and I won’t even attempt to list them out. Also, there’s unlikely any other time in my life where I can take this much risk in my life, so I’m grateful to have taken the plunge right now.
A huge thank you to Nikhil for sharing his experiences building an EdTech platform and journey as a founder!
To learn more about Parthean, visit their website https://www.parthean.com/ or follow Nikhil on LinkedIn
If you’re a founder looking to share your story, feel free to reach out to me at sophiacheng.me@gmail.com
