Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent (Part 1)

This is a terrific story of a European EdTech venture that has raised $600 million and is scaling extremely well after three years of not finding a monetization model.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Felix Ohswald: I grew up in the beautiful city of Vienna in Austria. Just one week ago, it was again named as the most livable city in the world. We also have the headquarters of the company here in Vienna. I studied mathematics first in Vienna, then in the UK, and then in Switzerland. The main reason for starting mathematics is because of my parents and grandparents. My grandfather always had a passion for mathematics and science. He shared his enthusiasm for mathematics and showed me what you can do with having knowledge around that.

I focused on financial mathematics. Seven years ago, the idea for GoStudent started. We believe every child deserves a great teacher as I had experienced. We wanted to build a platform connecting kids with awesome teachers all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: What were you doing between finishing your mathematics education? Did you work after that?

Felix Ohswald: I had a couple of internships during university. I worked for BCG for a couple of months. I worked for The National Bank of Austria for a couple of months. I worked for a hedge fund for a couple of months. I had some kind of typical work experience. Apart from that, I was always fascinated in solving problems and building a business out of it. Finding great teachers is a universal problem. We started our first test and they worked well. We decided to focus 100% on that. That happened straight after university.

Sramana Mitra: We’re talking about 2015.

Felix Ohswald: Right, the idea started in 2015. At that time, I had a younger brother who was 15. We didn’t have any capital available; my co-founder and I shared a WhatsApp number with the classmates of my younger brother. My younger brother was in high school. We told his classmates that if they had any questions, we can help them or connect them with other teachers.

This is how we tested out the hypothesis that there’s a market for helping kids directly. It turned out to be the case. In a couple of weeks, we had hundreds of questions that we received on a daily basis. From that moment on, we decided to raise some capital to build our own application around it and make a business model around it.

Sramana Mitra: Did that hypothesis check out? Were you able to raise capital based on that?

Felix Ohswald: We were able to raise capital with the idea of building this massive student community where students ask questions, and we connect them with teachers. The problem was, looking back at it, monetizing the student directly is impossible. It took us three and a half years to realize that. The company was basically incorporated in January 2016. We realized that we needed to pivot the model at the end of 2018.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent
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