How a side hustle started a $1 million+ passive income stream.

As mentioned, this article is based on a conversation with Chris Aaron, CEO and founder Of Aaron Education Ventures. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

After graduating from Columbia Business School, I worked here. Goldman Sachs for five years. Then, I switched to the hedge fund industry, and The fort Hired me and moved my family to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, I eventually turned to the venture capital sector. And I realized that my happiest day at work was always the first day. And then it went downhill, and I couldn’t figure out why. I did fine at work, but I thought maybe I was depressed or something. But that was because I hadn’t. Found my passion.

Over the years I’ve worked at other companies, I’ve found myself Annual reviewit was always uncomfortable for my bosses because they would say something like, “You’re doing a great job, you’re a top performer. Everyone loves working with you. But are you a little less Can spend time? guidance Other people on other teams?” And I always said, “I am who I am. I can’t change the DNA of who I am.” I love helping people. That’s why I started teaching.

In 2016, when I was still working. Venture capitalI started teaching evenings in East Palo Alto. I felt alive helping these students. I loved him. Then I started teaching at some MBA universities in the Bay Area. One week, I taught a course I called “MBA in a Day.” Limo Foundationwhich serves underprivileged student-athletes. And the next day, I just threw a camera at home and recorded myself for eight hours. Then I uploaded it to the online learning and teaching platform. Udemy.

The course has sold nearly 500,000 copies, creating a Passive income Seven figures in net profit after all expenses. And I continued to scale: Now, I have 72 other courses on Udemy and nearly two million students worldwide. And while the job may be relatively low-touch from a customer service perspective, the goal isn’t just to make money. It is to help others. I spend a lot of time helping students, jumping. Zoom calls and answers to questions.

The profits from what I make go to building schools. If you go Project MagoYou will see the first school I built with one of my students in Rwanda. And with another student of mine, I’m now building a second school in Kenya, about six hours from Nairobi. This is a girls school.

This is a great one A sense of purpose For me when I was at the LEMO Foundation, the founder of the charity told me something that changed me. “You can’t expect to achieve your dreams in life unless you help others achieve them,” he said. So we are all here. Tony Robbins Once told me, to serve others and help others. And that’s what I did.

The pandemic was tragic, but it really advanced my vision of the future of education by at least a decade. And I think only 50 universities will make it in my lifetime. I think what’s going to happen eventually, is that most will end their endowments, and then there will be a hell of a lot for alumni to save the schools, and then people will think to themselves, Why bother going to a university unless it’s a big brand like Harvard or Oxford? The system is elitist to the extent that many children enter top schools because their parents went there or because they donated money. Another problem is that you pay $100,000 for 20 hours of class per week, and you Graduates with no skills.

In my book 101 Important Lessons They Don’t Teach You in Business SchoolI outline the problem for MBA schools. They don’t teach you how to sell. They don’t teach you how to do it. Network They don’t teach you how to manage your money to get a job. They teach you how to manage other people’s money. They don’t teach you how to present. They don’t teach you how to start a company. Graduate and undergraduate business programs teach you theoretical concepts that were probably relevant in the last century. So I think that’s the field. Ripe for disruption. I think Udemy will be the catalyst to change this industry where more and more people are going to learn online.

Moreover, everyone has something to teach. For example, a woman’s name is Teresa Greenway Joe is a great teacher on Udemy—and she teaches how to bake bread. And here’s an amazing story: Years before she started teaching on Udemy, she was in a terrible marriage with an abusive husband. It was terrifying. And she found the courage to leave him and take her children with her. So she was living off food stamps, and she thought to herself, What can I do to help other people? What am I passionate about? And she loves to bake bread. So he installed a camera in the house, and he started showing people how to make bread on the platform. Again, everyone has something to teach you.

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