The Disruptors: Jolt, Home Of The NAMBA — ‘Not An MBA’

P&Q: How does someone sign up with Jolt?

Roei Deutsch: You apply online and you schedule an interview with our admissions team. Then after you pass the interview, you’re issued a pass and given your credentials. Then you can start using. You go to your next class at your convenience. You literally choose a seat in the classroom, sort of like choosing your treadmill at the gym or choosing your bike, this whole cycle.

When you get put on the class count, you go to the class, an actual physical campus, and it’s just like a small, intimate group-learning experience: highly conversational, highly interactive, with a world-class expert joining remotely through video. Class can be 90 minutes, three hours. It can be a four-continuous-weeks class. Every class has a submission and some sort of a project. Actually, you get credit for every class separately. You get points for that and you accumulate those points toward a final diploma, but you can get micro-accreditations along the way. If you finish a negotiations course, you will get a certificate saying you finished a negotiations course in this-and-that hours and this-and-that topic, which allows you to have a more flexible learning path.

Now many of our students are coming in not to get the full accreditation, but rather to have the skills with the skills they need currently in business. You will see behaviors like people coming in for a few months and grabbing the courses, leaving for a few months, coming back for another two courses. The point is not the graduation. The point is the actual progression.

Can you walk us through your admissions process, how it actually works? What’s your acceptance rate?

We don’t currently publish that, but it is not how you usually get into business school. It’s a training mechanism to actually get you to the education high end. To the majority of the population, what happens is, our admissions process includes when you’re found to meet the prerequisites you get a one-hour interview or a 30-minute interview with an actual person from our admissions team to confirm that you meet the unique criteria of what Jolt looks for. This process that has been more light, more easy, has helped us to allow admission to people who wouldn’t have normally gone into a business school. Come in and look at the student body here in London, the diversity is incredible.

We see people who would never have considered an MBA otherwise because it would not be accessible to them, either by how much it costs or by how selective and sometimes skewed the admissions process is. We think this self-selective process of learning, where the commitment comes from you and the only thing stopping you from succeeding is yourself, actually allows more parts of society to get a great education.

If I were interested in graduation, though, if I wanted to do the whole thing, how long does it take?

If you work really hard, you can do it in seven to nine months, but that would require you to pretty much go every day. Normally, if you take a class a week, do it flexibly on an ongoing basis, it can take you anywhere between two and a half and three years to complete. You complete levels based on the points and the accreditation you need, but we have a lot of people getting to that point level and then just continuing to learn because we keep adding more classes. So it’s a monthly payment and then you can just keep learning. The way we see things from where we’re standing is, we’ll just add more and more stages. You can just continue to progress forever.

What do you offer in terms of breadth of courses?

What we’ve done is we’ve built a program modeled along the best business schools. We’re currently taking it and copying it like Amazon and Google and Netflix and Tesla. We’ll be able to build a whole community curriculum of what’s needed to even reassess what they’ve learned in their programs at Harvard and Stanford. The main thing we do is let them build a program that you would want to hire its graduates, and also that is highly, highly relevant today.

It’s kind of like me building an MBA from scratch. What happened was that finance, which is usually the biggest part of an MBA, has shrank to be like 7% of the program, I think. Then you have personal skills and leadership management and marketing, retail customer success, and products — these are currently becoming a very big part of the program. You have classes which handle different subjects, from basic project management to building a brilliant team, how to hire the right people. There’s also super effective things like designing powerful presentations or how to get ready for a job interview. It’s a lot more immediately effective with an immediate outcome, rather than strategy, where you go into a few months of learning this very high-level concept. We’re much more focused on the skills that you need in an effective learning course.

Who’s teaching? Where do you find your teachers and are any coming from business schools to work with you guys?

You have to be a hands-on practitioner with experience to be a Jolt instructor. Our content is all proprietary. We built our entire curriculum. We’ve had top experts building every single class and then they vet it and get that research. Then we hire singular experts for every class. We will have a few people from different places on the planet delivering every single class after having been vetted on it and trained on it, so you would have a marketing director from New York teaching a class about marketing. Then you will have a project manager from YouTube in San Francisco teaching a class about project management. You have people from all over the world.

We have this very, very selective process for teaching. We only accept about 2% of the candidates, and most of our teachers we just headhunt from the best and most interesting projects or companies, either people who work for those companies now or have worked with them recently, so we can get the most up-to-date experience.

This is something that I think differentiates us from traditional schools, having put most of the focus not on researchers and professors but rather on hands-on practitioners who teach from the most current experience. Learning like this can be highly immediately effective.

Is online something that you’ve considered? Why did you go the in-person route? Are you looking at doing anything that’s strictly online?

The learning that’s most effective is the learning that you actually do. We’ve had years of experience with e-learning — enough to see that online learning isn’t really working in the sense that it’s making people complete things and making people actually effectively be tested and learn. According to our data, it works for 24% of the people, but 76% of the people would not be able to actually complete or commit to an online course, even if they have the intention, not to mention a lot of people would not have the intention.

It’s difficult to give you skills and networking — obviously we can’t compete with the Harvards and the Stanfords with the networking, but we definitely compete with non-Ivy League MBA in terms of of giving better skills. We know we give better skills. We have invested millions of dollars in development with the best experts on the planet. We can make better networks — really it’s a global network of high-end individuals with a lot of additional tools to connect them together, but also these very, very diverse learning centers and having them on premise in these classrooms.

It’s no secret the state of the MBA degree is troubled. Do you think that you see a continuing decline, and that Jolt is maybe an answer to that?

I hope so. I think with or without Jolt we’ll see a dramatic change in the way people acquire higher education in the next 10 years, because the way higher education is served by the old establishment, it just makes no sense. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that. You stop your life for a few years to get mediocre training by people who have been stuck in their position training for multiple, multiple years, and who are speaking from experience that may not always be relevant.

Again, there’s a strong bias here because I talk and you imagine Harvard, but 900 people a year go to Harvard Business School. The vast majority of people do not even imagine themselves applying to an Ivy League school or to a higher education institute of that level. What we actually need to imagine is the schools that most of the population go through, and you don’t have to ask me. Look at the surveys. Look at the data. People are graduating from these institutions and they feel that they didn’t get what they wanted to get.

I see the core definition of a bubble as something that’s over-invested, overpriced, and doesn’t actually deliver the value it promises, so I would say it’s a higher-education bubble because people are investing their life’s savings and getting something that does not guarantee the value that they wanted to get. It doesn’t matter if Jolt has this way of doing it or if it’s 10 other players, this cannot last for more than a few years into the future.

$2.3 trillion a year is invested into higher education even though data shows 79% of graduates don’t see it working as it should. We are creating a high-end, in-person, widely global, and affordable higher-education platform that people can actually see as an alternative to traditional higher education.