We started AlgoUniversity in our final year of college. Both Manas and I (Swapnil) were interested less in our academics and more in software engineering, products and things going around us. After securing internships/placements at Alphagrep and Apple respectively, we started working on side ideas/jobs. Manas taught a dozen students during college for interviews that helped them to land jobs, and realized that he could scale it. I had started working in an ed-tech startup where I was training students to get into Google through Google’s own program for these students called WTEF. After successfully placing 2 students at Google and helping the rest get offers from other tech companies like Microsoft, Gojek, Oracle etc., I realised that there was a gap between what edtech startups were doing and what could be achieved if proper focus were put on quality education, upskilling and first-principle problem solving. There is a better way to prepare for interviews and be a natural problem solver (and hence good at job) than mugging up GFG and Leetcode problems!
We went on to start AlgoUniversity, starting from one batch of 25 students last year from two tier II colleges in India, and achieved good placement results for our first batch: 100% placement, 21 LPA avg CTC (1.5x more than top universities in India), 3 people placed in Google, 3 getting Bytedance Intl offers. The international offers were big for us as students apart from tier 1 colleges in India don't have exposure to international jobs and their hiring process. We have now started to take in more students and multiple batches from this year onwards.
The thing that differentiates us from existing solutions in this space is our product-led approach: we have built a suite of microproducts that develop this problem solving attitude from scratch, simulate the actual interview experience and so on. We still have a lot to do in terms of scaling our teaching infrastructure to multiple batches, partnering with companies for hiring and hitting product-market fit. We have described some of our experiences here: https://www.algouniversity.com/blogdetail/, if anyone is interested.
Thanks for reading. We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences regarding the above, or finding jobs or interview prep or hiring candidates. We are also live on https://www.algouniversity.com. Please share your feedback with us!