AI Innovation in Global Education - Fastlane Founders with Ashish Fernando - Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard

Ashish Fernando talks with Jason Barnard about AI innovation in global education.

Ashish Fernando, CEO and Founder of iSchoolConnect and EDMO, was the first edtech partner with Google Cloud and created an AI-powered platform that matches students with the right institutions. He is a member of the Forbes Council and speaks on education, AI, international student life, leadership, and future skills.

Ashish talks about his journey, from earning a full MBA scholarship to creating an AI-driven platform that supports millions of students in pursuing international education. He also shares valuable insights on securing investments, and the philosophy of prioritizing employee well-being to ensure business success.

Having faced the difficulties of applying to US universities, Ashish leveraged his viral YouTube success to launch a mission-driven business. In this episode, he discusses how his perseverance and focus on customer-centric innovation helped him navigate investor skepticism and build a thriving edtech company.

What you’ll learn from Ashish Fernando

00:00 Ashish Fernando and Jason Barnard
00:58 Ashish Fernando’s Brand SERP
01:10 What is Missing in Ashish Fernando’s Knowledge Panel?
02:41 What Does Ashish Think About His Own Personal Brand?
02:55 Where Has Ashish’s Focus Been Lately When it Comes to His Personal Brand?
03:47 What is the Inspiration Behind Ashish’s iSchoolConnect, EDMO, and His Career?
03:53 What Inspired Ashish to Pursue an MBA in the US?
04:06 What Challenges Did Ashish Face When Trying to Afford an MBA in the US?
04:42 What Was the Outcome of Ashish’s Efforts After Three Years of Research?
04:50 Where Did Ashish Go After Receiving a Full-Ride Scholarship for His MBA?
04:56 What is the Title of Ashish’s First Video on YouTube?
05:09 Why Did Students Start Reaching Out to Ashish for Advice?
06:38 How Did Ashish Transition so Quickly to Becoming a Leader and Start Looking for Investors?
08:01 How Did Ashish Leverage His First Investor Beyond Just Their Recommendations to Friends?
09:56 What Did Ashish Find About His Team and His Role in Driving the Company After Getting Investors?
12:29 Why Do Profitable Bootstrapped Businesses Get Less Recognition Than Funded Startups?
13:01 What Do Founders Need to Prioritize in Their Businesses?
13:39 Which Industry Was the First to Be Hit When COVID-19 Hit?
15:06 How Can Founders Bootstrap Their Businesses?
17:05 How Did Ashish’s Failures Along the Way Help Him Move Forward?
18:43 How Can Unexpected Product Pivots Lead to Greater Business Opportunities During Crisis?
19:33 How Does Prioritizing Employee Wellbeing Drive Sustainable Business Success?

This episode was recorded live on video January 14th 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://youtu.be/ayI1T5KRwm4?si=UFrUi8WUs8wyX1yk
https://youtu.be/AiFq3TcvyyQ?si=CbaedyrKCxKx9jXD
https://youtu.be/JDS2pljhObQ?si=Mb8PnutgZjtheP5V
Ashish Fernando

Transcript from AI Innovation in Global Education – Fastlane Founders with Ashish Fernando

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy, A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody. Welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m here with a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Ashish Fernando.

[00:00:45] Ashish Fernando: I think that’s the nicest way I’ve ever started a podcast. Good. Thank you so much, Jason.

[00:00:51] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Yeah, I think the singing is something I do quite well and it’s a really nice way to introduce people, but a lot of people are introduced through Google. What happens when we search your name? We get this result and the Knowledge Panel, the thing outlined in blue on the right hand side, which is Google’s understanding of the facts about you. It’s got some photos, it’s got some of your social media profiles, doesn’t have a description, doesn’t have much information about you, but that’s a really good start. Google understands who you are, but it doesn’t understand very much about you. Then I thought I’ll look in Google Learn About and I don’t know if you’ve looked at Google Learn About and you’re doing really well there. Google Learn About is Google’s research tool and for entrepreneurs like yourself and like myself, due diligence is going to be done this way in the future. We will ask AI assistants and agents such as Google Learn About, what do you think of Ashish Fernando? And here we have a reasonable explanation, a reasonable representation of you with some interesting questions that I’m going to ask later on.

Then I dug deeper and asked specifically about you in the context of iSchoolConnect and EDMO and I got this, which is brilliant and it’s absolutely nailed. The questions I need to ask you during this interview, so I’ve cheated. I use Google Learn About but I had to be quite specific about you. In Google Learn About, Google Gemini, Google Search, you aren’t sufficiently famous or notable for Google to instantly tell me all about you. I have to actually dig down. How do you feel about your own personal brand? Do you feel you’re out there enough or do you feel you can do more?

[00:02:33] Ashish Fernando: Interesting question, by the way. I learned about Learn About right now, so I’m going to go research a little bit more. Yeah, but I used to be obsessed about cloud scores and social cloud, not just personal cloud, but also the company’s cloud. Right. So we did a lot of that work and research initially, but I feel right now a lot of my focus has just been LinkedIn. I think it’s a great place to start to do some work and everything I’m doing there starts showing up on Google kind of trying to find ways of, of doing that. But yeah, LinkedIn is primarily what I’ve been using till now to grow my personal cloud.

[00:03:18] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. I mean, my guess with AI is that we’re going to be going to ChatGPT, Google Learn About, Perplexity as assistants and saying, what do you think of this person and their opinion? And it’s an opinion the machine will be giving an opinion about people is going to be absolutely key to the future for personal branding for entrepreneurs like ourselves, but also for our company. But the question today is iSchoolConnect and EDMO and your career. What was your inspiration?

[00:03:48] Ashish Fernando: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I Jason, in like 10 years ago, the MBA bug bit me and I was like, I want to do my MBA in the U.S. you know, I want to travel, learn about people. Business is about being global. So I didn’t want to be stuck in India. So when I got on a plane and came to the U.S. everything changed for me. And that’s because I come from a financial background. My family wasn’t really, you know, ready to spend 75, 100,000 a year on an MBA in the US and that was just not going to happen.

And taking that big a loan for my education did not seem like the right thing to do. Right. So I did a lot of my own research. I went to consultants. I failed, they failed. And it just wasn’t the right thing. And then after three years of consistent research, I actually got five offers, out of which on four I got scholarships and one out of those was a full ride. So I went to Bentley on 100% scholarship.

10 month MBA, started telling my story on YouTube and I created my first video which was how I got to the US on 100% scholarship. Went viral. I think in a couple of weeks I hit a million views on it and students started reaching out to me, asking for advice and guidance on how I did this. Right? And that’s what turned into a business. So I was working for an employer back then and I told him, listen, I have to do this. Look at how many people need help, how many students globally need help with finding the right fit. And that’s how I went about.

[00:05:33] Jason Barnard: So like a lot of entrepreneurs, you lucked into a business opportunity through a lot of hard work.

[00:05:42] Ashish Fernando: Yeah, you know, I. Yes, I’d slightly tweak that. I feel like, you know, once you’re persistent at something, it feels like luck. But a lot of times it’s just opportunity meeting persistence. Right.

[00:05:55] Jason Barnard: I put inverted common around the lucked into because it is that thing is, people say to me, oh, you’re working in. I was working in cartoons before. Now I work in managing personal brands and corporate brands in AI and Google. And they say, that’s a brilliant job. You lucked into it. And you go, no, I didn’t. I found the opportunity, I saw the opportunity, I identified it and then I was consistent.

And that’s not luck.

[00:06:19] Ashish Fernando: You’re right. Yes, I saw the double inverted. So that’s why I was like, I know this is coming because you’re an entrepreneur. You know that like when you, when you become successful and suddenly a lot of people around you start saying, oh, you are lucky. Yeah. So.

[00:06:32] Jason Barnard: And you switch very quickly to become a leader and looking for investors. How did that happen?

[00:06:37] Ashish Fernando: Yes, because, you know, especially when you’re in a consumer business with students like you, you’re talking getting at least 20 million hits a year on your website. It’s not possible, unfortunately, to bootstrap that kind of a company. Right. You could do it. You’ll have a small boutique business. Then you probably help like 10, 20 students a year. No, I was thinking of a business that scales globally.

Right now my goal is to hit a million students a year who are getting help through iSchool. So the only way was to get investments. Yes. There again, I was very persistent. I was pitching. I got booted out of the office by at least a thousand investors, not even exaggerating. But in the end it was, it’s that first investor. You gotta, you gotta play it hard till you get that first investor.

And then I got the first and then, you know, they called up their friends and then I got the second. And that’s how we kind of started. But yeah, it was a hard start for sure. It was hard at the beginning.

[00:07:43] Jason Barnard: So in terms of investment, it’s that first one that counts. And it’s a lot of insistent dedication to keep going and keep going, refusal after refusal. But once you’ve got the first one, how do you leverage that first one beyond them simply saying to their friends, this is a great opportunity.

[00:08:01] Ashish Fernando: Yeah, sure. You know, I. What I realized, Jason, after talking to so many investors and them saying, no, I realized it’s not actually about us as an entrepreneur, it’s not about our product. In most cases, a lot of entrepreneurs were so persistent. If you’ve talked to a hundred investors, I feel like you really believe in your idea. If you’ve gotten rooted out a hundred times, you really believe in your idea. At that point you got to realize that a lot of investors by design are just risk averse. Right.

And it’s not really sometimes about you, it’s just about them saying, man, it’s a brand new idea. Nobody’s done it. Well, yeah, that’s why you’re going to make billions out of it if you invest in me. But no, nobody’s done it. I don’t see the stats. And so for me to get that first investor was hard, but then using them to say, hey, can you please open up your Rolodex? Like you know, you’ve invested, which means you trust me. And then they made a few phone calls and I got the second and the third, like that’s at that point I already knew a lot of the investors in the market. Some of them had said no to me.

But one of the friends calling them and saying, man, listen, there’s something in this idea and there’s something in this team. More importantly, right? It’s what count is, is the founder and the team, in my opinion, more than the idea and the product, especially in your pre seed round. And so once I got to that, then, you know, life was stable after all.

[00:09:28] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I love the idea that even those who have said no, if a friend rings them up and says, actually this is a good idea, they can turn around. I also love the idea that the founder and the team is the most important. I think for Kalicube, we can bear that in mind. The team and the founder are going to drive the company forwards. I mean, once you got started with the investors, is that what you found for the, the product and the company or is it different once you actually start running the company?

[00:09:56] Ashish Fernando: You know, one of my investors is one of my best investors advisor’s friend. And I asked him, I said, why did you drop, you know, half a million in my idea? And he said, I didn’t drop it in your idea. I don’t even care what your idea is. I don’t even care if you pivot tomorrow you change the name of your company. I put my money in you because I have seen you, I’ve seen your grit, I’ve seen what you do for the companies you work for. I actually work like I worked for his company. So he was my boss, so he’d seen me, right? And, and he said, I’ve seen how frugal you are with dollar, with a dollar. Right.

I put, you put a dollar in, you’re going to make sure it becomes two or five or ten. And that’s the reason I put the money in. Like, those are the people you want to find. I feel like that’s where I think luck plays a part is. I, I, I feel like it was a blessing that the investors I got really care about me, the initial investors I got, because then that laid the groundwork for who I bring in next, like for my Series A, you know, like, I’m not first looking at what your brand is. You might be the best. You might be like SoftBank. I don’t care.

How are you going to treat me as a founder? Do you respect my ideas? Do you respect how I think? Do you respect my team? Do you understand education as a business? It’s different than every other business. Right. It’s not a slow, slower growing curve, but then once it gets there, it’s much more stable than other industries. Like, do you get all that? That mattered to me more. I’ve said no to money, even though I was desperate for it.

[00:11:39] Jason Barnard: Okay. And that’s, that’s the key then, is to stick to your beliefs and say, well, this is where I am, this is who I am. This is where I want to go. And I need people on board who can support me and believe in that.

[00:11:53] Ashish Fernando: Absolutely. Just, I think founders should know this, that, you know, the markets created this sort of a false, it’s like a faux pas. Right? A founder who’s raising money gets patted on the back. Brilliant job. Company is now valued at a billion dollars. You raised so much money, you raised 400, 300 million. Great job, successful. But the guy was actually building a profitable EBITDA positive business.

And who’s not raised any capital? Bootstrapped it to 100 million in revenue. Nobody even talks about that founder. Why? Because the company doesn’t show up on Crunchbase as a valuation of so and so. Right. Because you’ll only see valuation on Google and Crunchbase and all these places if you raise around the funding. Because then it’ll say, oh, company X raised $20 million at a valuation of this. But guess what? If you’re building a really good business and it’s profitable from day one and you’re not raising money, people will think you’re a failure. Like, that’s kind of how it’s become of the market, which is a very interesting thing.

So my suggestion to founders is if you can bootstrap, Bootstrap, raise a little bit of money at the start. Do not go run after money. I was that guy for, you know, the first two, three years of my life. I was like, oh my God, I need more money. I need more money or else I’m going to just run out of business or whatever. But I’ll tell you this one very quick story, a true story, right? In our initial days, this is like year two of iSchool and we’d raised a couple of million dollars and we’re going strong. And we were doing international student admissions, right. And then COVID hit and guess which was the first industry to get hit.

International student travel.

[00:13:47] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:13:49] Ashish Fernando: Everything stopped. Everything stopped. So I went from like year one of, I think year one, we didn’t make any money. We were building product. Year two, 300,000. Year three, COVID hit when we were like, oh my God, we’re going to grow. Let’s hire, let’s hire people. So we went to like 150. Our investors, even though they’re really, you know, smart people, they believe in us, they trust us, but they said, Ashish, yeah, I think it’s, it’s time to wrap up.

Right. We’re probably gonna, we’re probably gonna have to shut down because this thing doesn’t seem to stop, COVID. It’s like it’s gonna be there for, for some time. Our revenues went up by 15x.

[00:14:36] Jason Barnard: Wow.

[00:14:38] Ashish Fernando: Right. And that’s because, like the founding belief of the team was it doesn’t matter what, we’re going to survive. And that opened up all sorts of avenues. Now I have investors coming to me. I don’t even pitch, I don’t go out, I don’t talk to investors. But I haven’t raised in the last two and a half, three years. Why? Because we’ll close this year at 22% profit. Like, I don’t need to.

Right. And that’s my one lesson I learned that I want to give to founders is there’s always a way to bootstrap. Yes. Raise your initial bit of money that you need to raise, but don’t wait. Build your business, Create a plan. Work hard on it for three, four years if you can. Don’t try to say every six months I’m going to raise because then in five years, you’re going to be diluted to single digit numbers.

[00:15:31] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:15:32] Ashish Fernando: Forget about your team. You personally are not going to be motivated to fail.

[00:15:36] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

And so as you build that business over three or four years, in the end investors will come to you.

[00:15:45] Ashish Fernando: 100%. Because investors are hungry, thirsty for companies that have shown product market fit for three to four years in a row, have been consistently quarter on quarter, EBITDA positive, profitable. Right. For three or four years, haven’t had to raise money. I have had so many investors who had said no to me initially meet me at a random conference and say, Ashish, man, I’m hearing so much about you. You guys haven’t raised in three years. I’m sorry, I did not believe in the business three years ago. You are one of the very few companies and founders that we see have not even need to needed to raise money. You’re not talking to any investors.

You guys are showing consistent profitability. We want to come in. And they’ll now come in at your terms instead of you being on their terms. Because there’s very few companies that fit that three to four year consistent product market fit, growth in revenue or EBITDA and profitable. If you can get to that in three to four years with the least money raised, do just that. That’s my one lesson.

[00:16:53] Jason Barnard: Right. And for the investors, that’s relatively low risk. The other question is to what extent have you failed along the way and how did that help you move forward?

[00:17:05] Ashish Fernando: Yeah, we failed a lot, honestly. But fail fast is an important philosophy that we have. And I’ll tell you key examples of failure. There’s been at least three occasions where I have like a hundred plus people in the team and at some point it was closer to 200 and like a day before, like end of month and I don’t have money to make payroll. Right. Those are hard situations. Like times like COVID, it’s like everything’s dead. What do you do? You know, the beautiful thing is there’s always a way.

I always tell people this. Like, it starts with even my. Before I started the company, right when I was here, I did my MBA. I had like one shot at a work visa, H1D to stay in the United States. And everybody around me would be worried. And I’m like, no, this country is built in a way in which it will give back what you give to it. So when you work hard, it somehow happens. Every time when I thought I couldn’t make payroll, somewhere from somewhere, the money came, we made payroll, COVID hit and everybody said, oh my God, this business is dead.

Guess what? In the middle of COVID we had created something beautiful with AI that it was kind of like, you know, I always joke about it, I call it the Viagra moment. Right. People were trying to build this medicine for something else and it turned out to be Viagra. Right. It’s like, it’s completely different use case. So like we were building AI for student enrollment, but turned out that that AI did so well with proctoring, you know, exam proctoring, invigilation or how you’d call it. And it did so well. And we’re like, man, this is like we were trying to build something else.

It’s doing something else. I’ll show this to a few companies. Guess what? We sold it to a large public company. We sold all of that AI to turn it in. It’s published. You’ll find that on Google. And that was my non dilutive Series A capital. I got way more money than founders would raise on a Series A and give away 25% of that business.

I gave away nothing and I retained my whole company and I sold this product that I was anyways not going to use because it was like it was for a different use case and I made that money. So, you know, these are moments where I realized that yeah, for a moment you as a founder would be like, yeah, there’s no other way out. We’re failing, we’re failing. But the one thing that keeps me going is my team. You know, a lot of times we, yeah, we forget about everything and we’re just going about building product, building products and making investors happy. No, like focus on the team. We’re a very employee first company. We believe in the employee first customer second philosophy.

You take care of your employee, they’ll take care of your customer.

[00:20:08] Jason Barnard: Right, right.

[00:20:10] Ashish Fernando: And so when things like that happen, I’ll get on a call myself as a founder and I’ll be like, listen, guys, salary is going to be delayed, but it will come. Not a single person left during COVID Not a single person left during our delays in salary or whatever happened. No one left. In fact, people would send me emails saying, thank you for getting on a call yourself on video and telling this to us. We believe you. Right? And now you have an important pivotal moment in life as a founder. Now you’ve made that commitment, you’ve made that promise. Now you better hit it.

If you tell them they’re going to get their salary, they better get the salary because they’re not going to trust you the next time if you don’t.

[00:20:56] Jason Barnard: Yeah, yeah. That whole story for me brings be calm, be persistent, be confident, be flexible and keep moving forward with immense optimism and it works out. And that’s been your experience. And in fact, it’s been my experience too. That was brilliant. That was a really, really delightful story. Lots of great ideas and inspiration in there. Thank you so much.

Ashish, you get the outro song.

[00:21:23] Ashish Fernando: Thank you.

[00:21:24] Jason Barnard: A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Ashish.

[00:21:28] Ashish Fernando: Fabulous. Thank you so much, Jason, for having me on your podcast.

[00:21:36] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.