He Failed 5 Subjects in School
Then Built a Multi-Million Dollar EdTech Company

Vaibhav Sisinty's Small-Town Beginning in Berhampur, Odisha

Vaibhav Sisinty was born on September 4, 1993, in Berhampur, a small town in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. His story does not start with privilege, technology, or connections. It starts with an ordinary family and one very hard moment.

When Vaibhav was just in the 4th grade, around age ten, his mother passed away. For any child, losing a parent that young reshapes everything. He was raised after that by his father and his elder brother, Vineet, in a household that suddenly had to adjust to a painful new normal.

Even as a young boy, though, Vaibhav showed small flashes of business instinct. At around age eight, long before he knew any of the words "growth hacking" or "marketing," he was already buying and reselling Beyblades — the popular spinning-top toys — at a solid markup. It was a tiny, almost invisible clue about the kind of adult he would eventually become.

Vaibhav Sisinty: The School Exam Failure That Almost Changed Everything

Here is a detail that most successful founders never admit publicly: Vaibhav Sisinty once failed five subjects in a single school year.

For a student already dealing with the loss of his mother, this kind of academic failure could have been the final blow to his confidence. According to accounts of his life, this was a genuinely difficult period — people around him began to doubt his ability, and he began to doubt himself too.

What happened next says a lot about his character. Instead of giving up, his father gave him an unusual kind of support. Rather than punishing him harshly, his father offered him an honest choice: keep studying, or quit and run a small internet shop instead. That moment of trust, instead of pressure, seems to have unlocked something in Vaibhav.

He went on to score 77% in his ICSE board exams — a result nobody around him expected after his earlier struggles. It was his first real, public proof that setbacks were not the end of his story. After school, like most Indian students of his generation, he chose the one path almost everyone pushes you toward: engineering. He enrolled in a modest, relatively unknown engineering college in Visakhapatnam.

Vaibhav Sisinty's First Business: 1 Million Views, Then a Google Ban

In college, at around age 19, Vaibhav started a website called Discovering Android — a blog focused on Android phones and technology news. It was a simple idea, but he executed it well enough that the site pulled in more than a million views in a single year.

Then, in 2012, Google banned the site. For a young student who had built his entire early online identity around this one project, this could have been devastating. Many people would have quietly walked away from the internet altogether after a setback like that.

Vaibhav didn't. Within a year, he had already started building something new.

CrazyHeads: Vaibhav Sisinty's First Company and the Workshop That Almost Failed

In his second year of engineering, Vaibhav co-founded CrazyHeads, a digital marketing agency, together with three college friends. Their first major move was bold for a group of students: they planned a large ethical-hacking workshop to put their new company on the map.

They pre-sold 450 tickets at ₹1,000 each over two months — real money, real commitment from real people. Then, just three days before the event, a political crisis broke out: the state of Andhra Pradesh was in the process of splitting to form the new state of Telangana, and the unrest led to colleges shutting down across the region.

Instead of cancelling, the team improvised. They reached out to everyone who had already bought a ticket and turned them into a referral army — offering rewards for anyone who could bring more people in. The gamble worked. Attendance didn't shrink, it grew — reaching roughly 750 attendees, well above their original ticket sales.

But success at the event didn't automatically translate into paying clients. Businesses were hesitant to hire a group of college students, no matter how good their workshop had been. So Vaibhav made a decision that would define his whole career: he worked for free for six months, purely to build trust and a track record.

That patience paid off. CrazyHeads eventually worked with more than 100 clients around the world and won the "Fast Emerging Digital Media Startup" award in 2014. Vaibhav had cleared his own education loan before he even finished college — an unusually early financial win for a student-run business.

Vaibhav Sisinty at Uber: From City Coordinator to Marketing Manager

After college, CrazyHeads had become steady but repetitive work for Vaibhav. He was craving a bigger challenge, and money alone wasn't enough motivation anymore. The opportunity that changed his path came in a very ordinary way: a friend was applying for a job at Uber, and Vaibhav decided to apply too, almost as an afterthought.

She didn't get the call back. He did.

Vaibhav joined Uber as a City Coordinator, helping the company launch and grow its ride-hailing operations across India and, later, Latin America. Over roughly four and a half years there, he watched the operation scale from around 100 rides a week to more than a million rides a week in the markets he touched.

Vaibhav Sisinty at Klook: Scaling Revenue From $6 Million to $27 Million

After Uber, Vaibhav joined Klook, a travel and experiences booking platform, as Head of Marketing for India and the Middle East. His job was straightforward on paper and extremely hard in practice: grow the region's revenue as fast as possible.

He pulled it off by leaning on exactly the same growth-hacking instincts he had been sharpening since his CrazyHeads days — creative acquisition tactics, sharp positioning, and a willingness to test things quickly. It was, by any measure, a huge corporate win.

But behind the scenes, Vaibhav went through two unexpected layoffs during this stretch of his career. Rather than just being a footnote, those layoffs became a turning point — they pushed him to stop building other people's companies and start building something that was entirely his own.

How GrowthSchool Was Born: Vaibhav Sisinty's $5 Million Seed-Funded Startup

In 2020, like millions of people around the world, Vaibhav found himself stuck at home during the pandemic. Almost by accident, out of pure boredom, he launched a small LinkedIn growth-hacking workshop online — just to teach people what he had learned scaling Uber and Klook.

He didn't expect much. Instead, the response was massive. Over the next six to seven months, more than 25,000 people went through his workshop. He soon left his job at Klook to focus on this full-time.

After seven or eight months of building and refining his teaching format, Vaibhav and his small team launched three more programs. The response was strong enough that they decided to formally build a company around it. That company became GrowthSchool — a cohort-based online learning platform teaching practical, real-world skills in marketing, growth, and product.

When GrowthSchool officially launched to the public, it crossed a million views across platforms, organically, without paid promotion. Soon after, Vaibhav closed a $5 million seed funding round with backing from Sequoia Capital India, Owl Ventures, and more than 80 individual angel investors — a strong signal of trust from experienced founders and operators who had seen his work firsthand.

GrowthSchool and OutSkill: Scaling to 10 Million Learners Worldwide

Once GrowthSchool had funding and momentum, the company grew quickly. The founding team of 6 people expanded to more than 38 within the first year or two, and has since grown past 150 employees.

GrowthSchool later launched a sister platform called OutSkill, focused specifically on AI and future-of-work skills — a natural next step as artificial intelligence tools became central to how modern marketers and professionals work.

Vaibhav Sisinty's Personal Brand: Teaching Growth Marketing in Public

Unlike many founders who stay behind the scenes, Vaibhav Sisinty built a large part of GrowthSchool's reputation through his own personal content. He posts regularly on LinkedIn, where he has been recognized as a Top Voice for his insights on marketing, growth hacking, and entrepreneurship.

He also runs an active YouTube channel and Instagram account, sharing practical lessons on AI tools, automation, and business growth — the same real-world, no-fluff style of teaching that first got 25,000 people to show up for his pandemic-era LinkedIn workshop.

This is not just personal branding for its own sake. For an education company, the founder's own credibility as a teacher is part of the product itself. Every post, video, and talk doubles as proof that he can actually do what he teaches — because he has already done it, at Uber, at Klook, and now at GrowthSchool.

Vaibhav Sisinty and GrowthSchool: The Full Timeline, Year by Year

Five Business Lessons From Vaibhav Sisinty and the GrowthSchool Story

• Bad grades don't predict your future

  Failing five subjects in school did not stop Vaibhav from building a multi-million dollar company later in life. Academic struggles are a moment, not a life sentence.

• Give away your skill before anyone will pay for it

  When no client would hire a college student's agency, Vaibhav worked for free for six months to prove his value first. Trust had to be earned before revenue could follow.

• A crisis is a chance to get creative, not to quit

  When a political shutdown threatened to cancel his first big event, he turned ticket holders into a referral engine instead of cancelling. The event grew bigger, not smaller.

• Your side project might be your real business

  A "just for fun" pandemic workshop on LinkedIn quietly became the foundation of a company that now reaches over 10 million learners.

• Setbacks like layoffs can redirect you, not ruin you

  Two unexpected layoffs pushed Vaibhav to finally build something of his own instead of continuing to build other people's companies.