Why we invested: Oneday
Making entrepreneurship accessible to the many, not just the few
Ananda Impact Ventures has co-led a Series A investment round in Oneday, the first formal education system built for entrepreneurship.
Co-founded by Ranbir Arora and Taras Polik, Oneday enables anybody with a good idea — regardless of their class, gender or ethnicity — to develop it into a business proposition with help from professional entrepreneurs.
Inequality in entrepreneurship
Every year, more than 5 million businesses are started in the US, with 800,000 started in the UK. As satisfaction with traditional jobs and workplaces drops, more and more people are looking for ways to turn their business ideas into reality and achieve financial autonomy.
However, people’s backgrounds still play a disproportionate role in entrepreneurship. Caucasian males comprise around 40 percent of small business owners in the US and only 1 in 3 entrepreneurs in the UK are women.
This issue is symptomatic of the way that current business development platforms and programmes work, with most being prohibitively expensive to sign up to. Incubators and VC funds are also skewed towards investment in the tech space, and tend to ignore the potential of other sectors.
What this means in practice is that women, ethnic minorities and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have fewer opportunities to receive mentorship or access professional support networks. Potential entrepreneurs from less affluent or well-connected backgrounds therefore lose confidence, negatively impacting on their chances of success in business. The income gap between white middle-class men and other sectors of society also widens as a consequence.
Oneday: an accessible approach for all
Oneday is designed to tackle the issue of inequality in entrepreneurship and business development by providing a platform and service that makes professional mentorship accessible to all, not just the privileged few. Its mission is to enable a more diverse proportion of society — regardless of income level, gender, race or working background — to launch their own businesses, empowering a new generation of entrepreneurs and start-ups.
Oneday offers this generation access to experienced entrepreneurs, with subscribers matched with the most appropriate mentor. Users are mentored in 1:1 video sessions and receive the type of nuanced and personalised guidance that is not possible in a more traditional or academic setting.
In between mentoring sessions, users can also engage with Oneday’s online platform to learn, experiment and track their progress. Users can become a part of the Oneday community and interact with the type of like-minded people they may lack contact with in their everyday lives.
Oneday has recently moved into the second phase of its development with the launch of an accredited MBA. The platform will allow students to participate in an 18-month programme, where they will receive one-on-one access to a seven-figure entrepreneur mentor to assist them with the launch of their own revenue-generating business, and earn a fully-accredited MBA degree at the same time. Oneday’s ambition is to be an accredited alternative for students coming out of school who want to start their own businesses instead of going to university or doing a corporate job. They have brought on-board Stephen Kosslyn, ex-Dean of Harvard, as an academic advisor to make this a reality.
2,000 students have already built their businesses at Oneday, and the platform is well set to be the first real challenger to the higher education model in over a century. Oneday has already built an incredibly diverse community of subscribers since launch, with 51% being women and 57% from an ethnic minority background. And perhaps most impressively, 87% don’t have previous startup experience, showing that Oneday has already successfully tapped into a vast reserve of potential founders looking to create their first business.
Oneday has already shown that it has a good value proposition for founders and mentors, and that founders are willing to pay for its solution. To date, the company has raised £8.25M. The latest Series A funding of £5M, will primarily be used to grow the team and for Oneday’s marketing activities.
Ananda and Oneday: a perfect match
At Ananda, we believe in the power of education and impact entrepreneurship. Oneday combines both of these forces in a unique way, and in doing so is moving to break the elitist stranglehold that still stifles innovation in the start-up world.
We need to look beyond the small and largely privileged sector of society that founders are usually drawn from and instead encourage and support talent from all walks of life. For instance, a great start-up idea could be anything from a small, sustainable fashion brand to enabling a local ethnic grocery store to go online. For too long, VCs and business development programmes have focused on technology-based ideas pitched by white men, thus missing a plethora of potential opportunities coming from elsewhere in society.
By making entrepreneurship accessible to women, ethnic minorities, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, Oneday can deliver significant impact by increasing its members’ financial independence and autonomy. This promotes economic growth in sustainable industries and encourage a more equitable business world.
Zoe Peden, Partner at Ananda, first got to know the Oneday founders via her edtech network in London two years ago. We were immediately impressed and excited by what they were proposing, and told them to get in touch when they were ready for investment. Getting to know the founding team was one of the real highlights of our due diligence with them — it’s not often that we get to work with two 29-year-olds who already have 10+ years of successful entrepreneurial experience.
Ananda believes that everybody, no matter who they are or where they’re from, should have an equal opportunity to succeed in business, so we’re very excited to help Oneday achieve its objectives.
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