He Acquired a Company - Now It's Disrupting 200+ Universities
Disruption and Innovation Podcast
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
Guest: Samir Penkar, CEO of Simulation Powered Learning
Kumar Dattatreyan: Hi everyone, Kumar Dattatreyan here. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Disruption and Innovation Podcast. Today's guest is Samir Penkar. He's the CEO of Simulation Powered Learning. Samir basically acquired a company, a simulation company in 2019, and transformed it into a platform that's disrupting traditional education. While most classroom learning has ten percent retention rates, his simulations achieve eighty to eighty-five percent retention. That's amazing.
You know, for someone that does a lot of training and coaching, I'm always trying to ensure that retention of the material that I'm covering is pretty high. And so I do a lot of simulations in classrooms, but I'm really curious how you get to eighty-five percent retention rates. That's amazing. So from Java developer to Agile trainer to educational disruptor, Samir is also tackling preventative health with his RuckFit startup. So we'll be talking about that as well. Welcome, Samir. I'm so happy that you're on the show. Thank you for being here.
Samir Penkar: Hey, thank you. Thank you, Kumar.
Kumar Dattatreyan: All right, so let's get started. So you acquired Simulation Powered Learning in 2019. The founder was planning to shut it down, I believe. What did you see that others missed? What was your aha moment, if you will?
Samir Penkar: You know, at that point in time, project management training was mostly about instructor-led training. So an instructor goes and delivers it live, or it was video training where someone recorded the video and you actually watch it. What I liked about this business was that it was based on simulation. So you actually have to plan a project and execute a project, and you have to deal with the consequences of your decisions. And that is where the retention actually comes in. And that's the unique selling proposition that I liked about this business. And that's why I went for it.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Interesting. So how do you go from ten percent retention to eighty-five percent? Tell me more about the method, if you will, because that's really disruptive.
Samir Penkar: Yeah. So if you listen to something, you know, over time you will forget—you'll retain some part of it. If you read something, maybe there's incremental retention. But if you actually do something, that is where the real retention comes in. And not only that, if you go one step further, if you make a mistake, you think about a mistake you made, you will remember that mistake very vividly sometimes.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah, for sure.
Samir Penkar: And that is what really kicks in the learning process. So in our simulations, there are these scenarios that we present to the students and participants where when they fail on those scenarios, they will remember that. That retention of "I did not manage risks well" or "I did not manage this budget or the conflict well, which resulted in my project getting delayed" is a very good indicator of how they can retain the knowledge. So it's not just the knowledge. I mean, project management, as you know, is sometimes a very dry subject to sort of go through. But then to put it into action is where the real action is.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. It resonates with me because the training that I have delivered where retention has been—maybe not eighty-five percent, but certainly more than ten percent—is where attendees are doing something right there through tools like self-correcting worksheets, meaning they have to fill out something on a worksheet and they get instant feedback from me or from their little cohort that they're working with. They tend to retain more and do more with the learning than, to your point earlier, I was in those classes. I was the one teaching those classes for two days or three days, whatever, you know, sort of bootcamp. You hit them with the fire hose of information and you hope that they retain some of it, and it just doesn't work.
Samir Penkar: Oh, we used to have sometimes even four or five day classes like bootcamp, right? The whole week.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Right. And people were so exhausted by the time you finished that. Yeah, you're right. Actually, I was doing that myself. I had a five-day bootcamp for coaching and facilitation. I still do. But I've shifted that model to more six to eight weeks where there's partial video instruction and the lecture parts are in video. There are exercises for the cohort to do. Some of them they have to do together as part of a case study. They have to fill out some surveys and things which give them instant feedback. So I think that model is better and certainly more enjoyable for me. And I think it's a better experience for them. I haven't, though, measured how much of that they retain. That would be an interesting thing to find out more about.
So here's a thought. Professors tell you that your simulations help prevent AI cheating because students just can't plug scenarios into ChatGPT and get the answer. Do you agree with that? Is that how it's designed, sort of?
Samir Penkar: Yeah, I mean, today no conversation is complete without the mention of AI, right?
Kumar Dattatreyan: Right.
Samir Penkar: But in this context, it's a very peculiar problem that the professors are facing in colleges, especially when you think about the ways in which the professors try to give real-life experience to the students—either through case studies or internships or even projects that corporates bring in. The last two, which are getting corporate projects and internships, are time consuming and expensive. Not every student gets an opportunity to even do that. So then you come with the case study approach. And today the case study approach is really struggling because of ChatGPT and AI. These students are plugging in these case studies into these tools and getting the output. So the professors are actually struggling, and some of the colleges even have—you know, in the past they had these plagiarism detectors to see if they copied this from somewhere else—and now they are trying to figure out how can they detect that this student did not actually do the work but they took someone and took the output from a ChatGPT.
So that's the challenge that the professors are facing. The other problem with the professors and the case study approach today is that case studies, if you keep them constant year over year, students are very likely to cheat and they will ask the students from previous years and they will get the answers. So there's also the effort for the professors to keep the case studies updated and things like that. So that's what we've heard from the professors: that in our simulations there's a level of randomness that comes in, and that level of randomness actually throws people off, and you cannot actually predict that randomness in the simulations.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Right. Interesting. So if you dive a little deeper into that randomness, does your simulation react to how the students, the attendees respond to certain stimuli and that creates the randomness, or is it something designed? I guess it's part of the design, right?
Samir Penkar: Yeah, I mean, it's at multiple levels, but essentially we have a decision tree. So there are multiple scenarios that you will be presented with, with a series of cascading decisions that you make. So let's say, you know, you are presented with a scenario whether you want to select either person A or person B to be on your project, and you select person A—that will have a cascading effect on how this person is going to perform and the output of the project. So the decisions that you actually take in the simulation are going to impact the output of the simulation. So that's one level of randomness.
The second level of randomness is the conditions that we have. And we are adding more and more features to make this more random because if you run a single run and you try to run a second run, we want to make it more different for each student. So in that sense, each student is not getting the same conditions or scenarios. It's like a game. It depends on what you do in the game that will determine the output. It is not predefined in some sense.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Interesting. So are you using AI to generate some of these scenarios, or is it more of a plain decision tree and it randomly chooses something?
Samir Penkar: We have started working on AI to generate the decisions and scenarios on the back end. So that is definitely on our roadmap. And this is also to make it more feature-rich for the instructors. So they have a whole list of scenarios to go after.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Interesting. So you're using AI to combat AI cheating.
Samir Penkar: On the back end, yes.
Kumar Dattatreyan: It's like a bigger fish eating a smaller fish or something. I don't know. All right. So I suppose in this example, AI can both be a problem but also a solution for education. Can you expand on that a bit? To me, and before you answer, but to me, it seems like AI, even for students that are using it to cheat, they're learning something, right? Is there a way to test what they learned from using ChatGPT and the answers it gave them to at least reinforce the learning, the little bit of learning that they got to make it maybe a little bit better?
Samir Penkar: I think that depends on the modality of how you want to assess. Yeah. You can give a test at the end of it. Some instructors can ask them to write a paper or a lessons learned after the simulation. That's one thing. I think the best example that I have found recently is a school called Alpha School. And the school is a private school focused on trying to present hyper-personalized learning to students. And their model is they do instruction only for two hours in a day. And for the rest of the day, the students do projects, teams, and work with other things. So that is the model.
And what they have found is—and the way they present this two-hour content to the students is through a hyper-personalized AI tool. So they may learn about geography through the lens of Taylor Swift and the concerts that she's had all over the world. Things like that, which are very hyper-personalized to their interest.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Interesting. Yeah, that is fascinating. And I wonder how much of that is—not creeping in, I wouldn't say creeping, and that's probably not the right word—permeating the corporate training landscape. I know you're working with universities, but I see something like that could be super useful for the corporate employee trying to, you know, the training that we have in corporate... I'm a consultant, but I still have to go through some security training and, you know, sexual harassment, all that kind of stuff. And wouldn't it be nice to have that be a more fun experience? I dread it. I dread the two hours that I have to spend watching a bunch of videos. Yeah. I try to have the videos go as fast, you know, play them at 2X speed and then, you know, so I can get to the questions because I kind of know the answers, you know, and it doesn't really test you anything. It's just sort of this time that you have to spend sitting in this chair and suffering through this training. What are your thoughts there?
Samir Penkar: You know, in the corporate side, we used to do, in the past, instructor-led courses for project management. But now we've sort of shifted that into creating simulations for corporate, which are very specific to their domain and their context of work. A lot of training that you see in the corporate world is very generic. Yeah. And that generic content does not jive with the policies that you have or the scenarios that you have or even the domain that you have in that company. So what we have been trying to do and move away from, instead of instructor-led and video generic coaching, we are actually customizing our simulations to their context. So it is their roles, their scenarios, their challenges, and their projects. And then when the participants go through that and employees go through that, they can actually relate very well to what's going to happen. This reduces onboarding. This makes the training even more relevant. And of course, because of simulations, it's much more engaging than just watching a video and maybe answering a quiz at the end of it.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Sure. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So are you in the corporate field as well?
Samir Penkar: Yes, we do corporate, but now our focus on corporates is to customize the simulations to their context.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Got it. Okay. So you're not just doing university-based training in Agile and project management, but it's also in corporates. I didn't know that. That's great. I mean, we have three segments of customers. One is the universities. Corporates is the second one. And then we have the government sector where we train project managers.
Samir Penkar: The universities is the first one. Corporates is the second one. And then we have the government sector where we train project managers and they go through our programs.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Okay. And you're doing Agile too, right? You're teaching Scrum through simulations. Tell us about that. I mean, that seems like it would be—well, any of these would be right for simulation to be able to simulate a scenario. And people have to think about how to solve that issue, that problem, ideally with a small group of people that, you know, almost like using Scrum or Agile or whatever, or project management, traditional, to go through the scenarios, the simulations together?
Samir Penkar: Yeah, you know, Agile is very peculiar and we have developed an Agile simulation, which is based on Scrum. And in this Agile world, you know, if you look at, let's take a Scrum Master course or a Product Owner course today—in that there are these small exercises that you do, you know, maybe something around story pointing, maybe something around prioritization and things like that. But these are very disjointed one-off exercises. What we have integrated into the simulation is an entire experience of what it is to be an Agile team. You have to go through four sprints, and the student here in our simulation plays the role of a Scrum Master. They have to go through four sprints and deliver a minimal viable product. And during this entire four sprints they have to go through the entire cycle, you know, with the sprint planning, the stand-ups, the retrospectives, the backlog refinement, demos—all of those things. And you have a virtual team that you work with. And when you actually go through these four sprints, you get to experience this entire cycle holistically.
Yeah, it's not just a one-off activity like doing a prioritization activity or even a story pointing—that's a one-off. We have those things in a simulation, but they are within the context of how an Agile team operates.
Kumar Dattatreyan: No, that's great. I mean, that's exactly how I think it should work, right? I mean, when I—the courses that I've developed, and I don't have the simulation software that you do, but in the live online and the video courses that I do, it's all simulated, right? So the attendees, I hope, get a feeling of what it would be like to be on an Agile team working through creating a product and creating a backlog and all of those things. So that definitely resonates with me. And what happens is sometimes I've seen trainers where they will form teams within the class. And then say, you know, you're the Scrum Master, you're the Product Owner, you're the team, and you kind of simulate that. But what happens is you cannot come up with on-the-fly scenarios which are very relevant and have depth which will challenge you.
Samir Penkar: That's right. You're right about that. I mean, you can only have what's in the class, right? And you would have to design something for every class that's a little different. And even within the class, sort of tailor it to the experience level of the attendees. And I suspect that your simulation is robust enough to do that kind of tailoring or that kind of randomness to make it really effective for them. That's pretty impressive.
Kumar Dattatreyan: So you started with Agile, you're getting into project management. What's on the horizon? It seems like this is an area that's ripe for innovation.
Samir Penkar: So on our product roadmap, we have more simulations around digital marketing, around construction, healthcare, because these are areas—construction is a very unique thing. Construction has a lot of technicality. There are so many factors that affect construction. And it's hard to get hands-on experience on a construction project. Sometimes it's very long in terms of duration—these are long projects. The sites may be not very close. But you still need to get the entire spectrum of what happens in a construction project as a project manager to manage workers, weather, government permits. There are so many architects, changes made by owners. All these are project management concepts. But when you actually cascade them and surround them with the construction domain, they are a very powerful tool for actually learning construction project management.
You know, you're working with a professor and trying to develop a construction project management simulation.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Interesting. That's interesting that you're looking at academics to develop this and not industry like, you know, a professor with maybe some representation from a builder, for instance, you know. Is that something you're considering, or do you think that the professor will have enough real-world relevant experiential knowledge to be able to influence a good simulation?
Samir Penkar: No, I mean, we are getting input from a number of stakeholders, I would say. Yeah. But this professor that we are working with also has a background—he was in civil engineering prior to teaching. Okay. So he has that background, and then there are other stakeholders that we are working with to get input.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Okay. That's awesome. Is there a common thread in terms of picking the industry, if you will, as you expand? Are there some that are more ripe for this type of disruption than others?
Samir Penkar: I think if you look at the common thread, it is where it is difficult to simulate a real-life project for the students. Either it is difficult, or it's time consuming, or it's expensive. Those are the kind of places where the simulations would really work well. And it's hard to do that. We would love if all the students could job shadow a project manager in a corporate world and see every day what they do. But that's very hard to pull off. There are some universities who are trying to bring in corporates to do projects with the students. But even that, it's hard to match the projects, the timing of the class and the students. All of that has to come together at the same time. It's a challenge.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah, I bet, but it sounds like you're up for that. I mean, the software that you're building seems robust enough to be able to handle those kinds of things and especially with the AI capabilities on the roadmap or maybe already being developed to help you develop the scenarios or at least flexibility in the scenarios based on where people are.
I'm going to shift on this—on RuckFit. That seems so different, Samir, from the work you do with this educational software company. What is RuckFit and how did you get into that?
Samir Penkar: So RuckFit, you know, in 2019, my mother was detected with triple negative breast cancer. She went through all the surgery, chemo, and she's fine now. And my father has Parkinson's disease and now dementia. And my brother-in-law passed away because he had severe diabetes in his forties. All of that sort of culminated and directed me towards looking at preventive health. You know, why are people getting so sick so early in their lives? And that led me down this path of preventive health.
And when we explored all the things around preventive health, I teamed up with one of my MBA buddies, Jay, and we said, what is it that we can start people off with, which is easy, accessible, and they can integrate this into their daily lives? So RuckFit was a culmination of that. And our first product out of that is a ruck pack. It's a weighted backpack that you put weight in it and walk. Many people walk, but walking, just walking is not enough. You have to load and you have to exert yourself to an extent. So we are actually developing a program around rucking and also how you walk. The quality of your movement matters too. Especially, you know, if you see runners, they run marathons, half marathons, even more, but their form is very bad. And at some point they get injured and these people should not even be running. And so we are developing a program which is focused on rucking, which is focused on biomechanics so that your movement quality is really optimal.
Kumar Dattatreyan: And how do you analyze that? Does it take video? What do you do to analyze their movement, their gait, if you will?
Samir Penkar: So we have tied up with a company called Kinotech. Kinotech has a scan where you just do an overhead squat just through your iPhone. And there are a couple of other exercises you do. And that will detect the quality of your movement. It will give you a report, and it will detect the imbalances in your body. It will also detect your mobility impairments. And that is—it's a very simple thing because you can do it on your phone. You can do it multiple times at home. So you can see whether objectively you are improving in your movement quality.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah. Very interesting. So it's very attainable too because everyone has a phone. Does it work on Androids as well or just iPhone?
Samir Penkar: Android, iPhone, any phone.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Okay. And so you just analyze your performance, your movement, and it's going to give you a score and you can do things to sort of improve it. And that's fascinating. You're comparing the movement to the standards, the orthopedic standards. And so, you know, how much you are off.
Okay. Is this app live? Is it available?
Samir Penkar: Yeah, yes, it is available. It's through our program. We offer it as part of our package. And that is how we objectively measure, you know, because we can have you do a number of modalities and exercises. But at the end of the day, if it's not improving your form, you are actually not in a better position.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Sure. So I don't know if I have the information for this venture, RuckFit. So please share that with me and I'll share it in the show notes so that people can learn about it. I'm interested. I'd like to be part of it.
Samir Penkar: Yeah, I'll send you the scan. You can take it, a simple scan.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah, because I do a lot of walking, hiking, biking and stuff. I'm curious. I know I have some imbalances because my joints tell me that I do. But it would be good to sort of scientifically validate that in some way.
Samir Penkar: Definitely.
Kumar Dattatreyan: All right. You know, these ventures are so different. What would you say is a common thread or the common theme between this educational disruption and RuckFit and sort of the disruption? Not disruption, really. It's really providing a simple, easy way for people to get fit, right? To take preventative measures to improve their health.
Samir Penkar: Yeah, I mean, these are two very different businesses. RuckFit is a B2C business. Simulation Powered Learning is principally a B2B business. But even with that, there are many common threads. And in fact, you know, when I sort of studied through these two businesses, there are so many things that cross over. You know, marketing is a good example. Positioning is important. How you position the products, whether it's to consumer or to the corporate world or a business, it's different. So that positioning is definitely something that applies to both these things. The other thing is your team. In both these cases, you realize how important the team is and how far they can take you and how you need to take care of the team in that sense. And I think lastly, I would say just the infrastructure. You know, if you set up one business, the entire infrastructure in terms of everything from accounting to taxes to, you know, website, email, IT, all of those things—if you have stood up a business and sort of gone through it, it's just easy to replicate. Yeah. And, you know, share resources that way.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah, that's a great answer and, you know, sort of analogy for two very different businesses. So my last question, or maybe not my last question, I have a few more, but really it's around your kite flying hobby. So I know kite flying is big and especially in your part of India. I used to do it as a child when I lived in New Delhi. What lessons from kite flying apply to building companies? Do any? I mean, is there a lesson that you can apply to building a company? And you know, I think for the audience we should qualify what kind of kite flying you're talking about here. This is competitive kite flying. So if you and me are flying, our goal is to cut the string of the other person so that you lose your kite. Yeah, that is the level of competition.
Samir Penkar: And of course, I love kite flying. I go to India every year to fly kites. I get them here in the US. But in kite flying, if you ask me what in kite flying can translate into business, it is—in kite flying, it's a very competitive world. If your kite is up there, it is up for game. Anyone can come and engage and actually cut your kite. So you have to be very alert. You have to look left, right, back, forward. The opponent can come from anywhere. Not only that, you cannot rest on your last win. If you cut someone else's kite, that doesn't mean that the next person is so easy. And so that's the same in business. You cannot rest on the laurels of your last project win. There are so many things that are changing, changing so fast. You have to be constantly alert to actually just stay alive sometimes.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah. I love that analogy. And I should have qualified it. Thank you for doing that. Kite flying is a competitive sport. At least in India it is. And the string is sort of glass, right? So when you're flying your kite, it cuts the others. If you have the right angle and the speed and all that, it'll cut the other kite flyer's string and their kite is gone, right? So they lose, you win. And I love the analogy of having to be alert and nimble and just aware of your surroundings when you're—the surroundings of the kite in a three-dimensional space. And your business is the same way. It exists in a three-dimensional, multidimensional environment. You know, we've got customers and vendors and suppliers and you name it, right? All of these things have to be balanced. And so I think the lessons are appropriate.
All right. So some quick-fire questions and we'll call it a show. Agile or waterfall for kite flying?
Samir Penkar: Agile.
Kumar Dattatreyan: If you had to simulate one day in your own life for others to learn from, which day would it be and why? Like a day in a week?
Samir Penkar: Yeah, maybe. Probably my Sundays.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Okay.
Samir Penkar: Because I have a lot of free time on Sundays with my dog and I get my best ideas on Sundays when my mind is open.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Okay. So that will be a good thing for others to simulate. Find time to think, right? To detach and think. And that's your Sunday. It's your time to detach and think. I love it. ChatGPT or human? Who's better at teaching conflict resolution?
Samir Penkar: Conflict resolution. I would say for the moment it is human, but you never know how fast ChatGPT is catching up.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah. I have a comment here on LinkedIn. My daughter works for the company that has the best preventative breast cancer diagnostic questionnaire available and my brother is chief scientist at the Parkinson's Foundation if those connections might help with your family's health. Okay, so it's in the comment. Reach out to Adam—he's a friend of mine. I've known him for a long time. So very nice. Thank you.
So say you're creating a simulation for entrepreneurs. What's the first crisis you throw at them?
Samir Penkar: The first crisis you throw at them in entrepreneurship. Well, you don't have any customers. Usually people start there. You have lots of ideas, but no customers. Find your customer and find your customer niche. That positioning is very important.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah, absolutely. Identifying what your niche is and being able to connect with them at an emotional level. One last one, rucking or running, which builds better leaders?
Samir Penkar: So I'm thinking because I was a runner and running taught me a lot of things, but now I've transitioned to rucking. I would say in this case, I think both, both in different ways. Rucking loads your form and actually makes you more aware of how soon you're going to lose your form and running really tests your limit.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Great answers. All right, Samir, thank you so much for being here. Do you have any final thoughts or questions, perhaps?
Samir Penkar: No, no. I think, you know, as you said, that question about what's your ideal day, you know, getting free space and free time, I think is important because that's what frees up your mind and it allows you to explore and think and project into the future and dream to some extent. Yeah. I think the more we can build that into our routines, the better it is. For me, it's my dog because I take him out and that is my time to do all these things.
Kumar Dattatreyan: Yeah, same here. I enjoy my walks with my dog, sometimes dogs, because we frequently dog sit my son's dog. So he's as much my dog as he is his dog. All right. Well, thanks again for being here. Really fascinating, all the things that you're doing. Quite impressive. And thanks for watching, everyone, and listening. And we'll see you back on the show in another couple of weeks. Bye, all.
Samir Penkar: Great. Thank you.
