Last week I visited an event organized by Forbes Club Russia.
Tons of amazing speeches and even more people to catch during coffee breaks.
One of the strongest moments of the evening for me was a chat with Dave Waiser, the founder of Gett.
While everyone else was caught up in unicorn talk, Dave and I went deep into something less flashy but far more relevant, from what I've seen.
We talked about what really breaks when you push for 10x growth, and why chasing scale without solid quality isn't just a risk, but a quick path to blowing everything up.
Two insights from that talk have stayed with me, and I've since applied them to how I approach building an education business.
First off, scaling isn't a marketing issue. It's an engineering one.
Dave had to set up a system where thousands of cars arrived on time, in the right spots, all over the world. That's not about ads—it's algorithms and data.
In EdTech, it's the same deal.
If you're teaching real programming to thousands of students, you can't count on luck or one teacher's charisma. That just doesn't hold up.
What you end up creating is essentially Learning Engineering.
The product goes beyond a simple course or curriculum. It becomes an adaptive system that adjusts each student's path in real time, based on what's clicking and what's not.
Dave and I boiled it down to what he calls the Quality Loop.
In his world, operational efficiency hinges on how tightly you close that loop. In mine, it's no different: scale in a global business depends on your control system.
In education, this leads to a straightforward equation:
Q = Engine × People / Chaos
Engine shows how well your loop is built and automated–from transferring methodology into architecture to collecting and analyzing feedback to adjusting the system afterwards and so on.
People variable represents how fast you can hire and onboard your team according to your standards. It's a filter, like the one for drivers in premium services, but tuned for academic skill.
And Chaos accounts for everything that can stagger the education process, e.g operation hell, taxes, timezones and, of course, the good old human factor.
At the end we get our Q, the quality delivered at scale.
If you're expanding your business (in my case–into Southeast Asia or Latin America) you need an educational operating system.
Get the architecture right, and scale follows naturally.