7y
Thank you for sharing your concern here. SkillTree has and will always stand for it's people. ‘Human First’ is one of our core believe and we have been standing by this since the inception. We respect your opinion but would like to share our side as well.
No organization which is growing have ever retained people and given them opportunity to learn by trying, at SkillTree we do. Certain employees have been given the chance to work under multiple business functions to find their calling and realize what suits them best to work in. Humanity comes first and therefore in last 7 years no one was asked to quit because we believe in the idea of "Every Employee is a Valuable Asset". We go out of our way to help each individual to discover and realize what they want to do. All our leaders are aligned with one goal that ‘every individual should love what they do’ and in this case if we have to help them to find a right place which may not be our organization, then why not. We truly believe that strengths and passion should come together. Therefore at any point if you have seen any senior motivating any individual for better opportunities, this is purely thought leadership. You need to have broader perspective to understand if you have come across such thing. We take it positively. We believe life is once and we need to give our best, live happily and stay connected with each other.
We did not even had any Glassdoor review until few months back. According to us, we have 3 set of people in our system; people who work because they need to, people who works because they believe in it and there is a small tribe who act as goodwill ambassadors. They cannot see anything bad happening to the brand. They are disruptors. Nobody asked anyone to go and post good reviews, (as an organization we hardly have done anything to gain fake smiles, whatever we have earned is on the basis of who we are and how we are) it is their own feelings and might be looking at something negative they couldn’t stop to express what they feel.
Copy-cat is the only word we stayed away from. In last 7 years some top investors came in and said that, "Wish you had products which are competitive and copy of others", it is easy to invest in something which is from now and not futuristic. Every product that we have built under each identity are unique in its own way. Coming specifically to GPTS Vs. GPTW, yes the name is almost similar, but we have our own believes and Values. We choose our people based on a very important fact that their ideology should match with one of our products atleast.
Uber couldn’t have come into existence if someone didn’t think of commercializing small cars, Airbnb won't have come into the picture if millions of years ago paying guest option won't have taken shape. So rating a school on the basis of student satisfaction is one of the most unique way of rating these schools and the similarity is that the other mentioned brand does it for corporate. We left behind many products and never launched them after discovering that something similar already exists. We are here to make a dent, inspire millions and help society to have clear perspective for education.
WRT to investment, 60% of our annual revenue is utilized for product development; be it our tools that recently got developed for students or teachers and we believe that our biggest investment is our people. You as an individual were our investment as well. There are 250+ schools rated and featured by GPTS and being an anti-ranking believer, we stand by that every school is great in their own way. Everyone need to look beyond few handful of names that even you would know and yes those handful of noted brands too work with GPTS.
In a country of 1.2 billions population, we need 7,00,000 good schools to educate 50% of the population which is below 25 years age group. SkillTree team (most of them) is too young to even have a partner, and by the time the team have their kids which will take few years, we are sure by then we will have our own curriculum. SB have conceptualized each product and specially rating is something he penned down 5 years back. Driving the entire system, it is not necessary to dive into everything and minor details. We believe in delegation and SB is well aware of everything through the reporting system. We have responsible leaders taking care of all the business functions under SkillTree.
And, lastly, We are really sorry that we don't keep track of what gifts our founder or other seniors give to each other personally, thought that doesn't fall under their yearly evaluation. Because of a flat structure all discussions are transparent that doesn’t mean to bind your own opinion and come to conclusion. Colombia is our expansion in partnership with an existing Colombian local organisation, where both the organisations have invested time and effort to launch our products in the Colombian market.
As mentioned above, all the teams have objectives to meet and internally they all know what is good or bad for the system. No one needs any pressure, we think everyone is responsible enough to understand what is best for themselves and for the organization.