Enabling Anyone To Create an Online School, with Ankur Nagpal

And what the next phase looks like for Teachable

Li Jin

Nathan Baschez

Sep 30, 2020 · 2 min readUpdated Jan 20, 2026

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Our guest on Means of Creation this week is Ankur Nagpal, Founder & CEO at Teachable!

Teachable is an online platform that enables anyone to sell courses online. Ankur started building Teachable in 2013 shortly after graduating US Berkeley. He had been instructing a course that he was publishing on another platform when he realized he could build something better. Something that enabled instructors to monetize their audience directly instead of relying on another platform for distribution.

The subjects on Teachable range from computer programming to drone flying, and over 100,000 instructors have used the platform to date. The courses on Teachable have generated over $500 million in sales for instructors and have transferred knowledge to over 30 million students. In 2019, Ankur was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, and in March of 2020 Teachable was acquired by Hotmart Technology (a Brazil-based education platform) for a rumored $250 million.

In this interview, we talked to Ankur about:

How Teachable attracted their first creators and what makes them stand out
How creators have responded to Discover by Teachable
If Teachable is looking at other formats beyond video courses, and what those might be
Why students are willing to pay hundreds or thousands for a Teachable course
The role of community in online education
Ankur’s take on Li’s 100 True Fans article
And more!