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ABG, an Adayana company, addresses the performance needs of the Food, Agriculture, and Life Sciences market.

Adayana Automotive, a unit of Adayana, Inc., provides comprehensive training and learning solutions to all segments of the automotive service industry.

VERTEX Solutions, along with subsidiary DT2, is an Adayana company focused on training technology and performance enhancement for the federal government.

Those Who Teach, Can

Reprinted with permission of The Collaborative © December 2001

Rajiv Tandon is on to his 2nd e-Learning Start-up after a Ph.D. in Entrepreneurship, by Dan Carr

Rajiv Tandon, fresh off the sale of the e-Learning start-up, LearningByte International, is at it again. He started Adayana in October, the day after the sale of LearningByte closed.

My first question was, "Why so soon? No time off?" To which he replied, "It's fun! I can't wait to start again with a clean slate. Think of how much we've learned from the first one that we can put in practice with Adayana."

Learning from mistakes. That's the entrepreneurial way. The trick is not having to make as many and learning not only from your own mistakes, but also from those of others who went before into the perilous journey that is Entrepreneurship.

Learning is also central to Tandon. He was the first in the country to earn a Ph.D. in Entrepreneurship. He then went on to spearhead the development of St. Thomas' Entrepreneurial Curriculum along with Daryl Erdman. He lent segments from his doctoral dissertation to The Collaborative's early publications in the late 80's and early 90's, and served as one of our senior editors.

In 1997, he decided it was time to go out and do it himself. So Minnesota's most learned entrepreneurial student and teacher joined a fledgling enterprise spawned from the old Control Data and went on to build LearningByte into a 180 employee emerging leader in the nascent industry of e-Learning.

Their success at knocking down the big corporate customers and perfecting a technology for independent e-Learning over corporate intranets was hot enough to get the attention of the big boys, leading to their acquisition by DigitalThink out of San Francisco in August for in excess of $60 million of DigitalThink stock.

Rajiv learned a lot in the e-Learning space and in building his team. LearningByte exercised a competitive advantage in software development with a third of their employees in India which provided them faster and more effective customer-focused software development and empowered the sales force to go to big corporate customers with an infinitely customizable suite of interactive training options for their staffs.

This led to a tidy valuation and profit for all the LearningByte shareholders and employees with the eventual sale to DigitalThink. Initial investors in LearningByte's first round are said to have made a 15 times return on their investment.

The new company will also leverage Tandon's experience in e-Learning, but this time in a market he sees as even more ripe for opportunity - non-profit and educational institutions. Adayana seeks to become a leading provider of e-Learning for the non-profit and educational institutions. Tandon's business plan highlights the e-Learning quote of John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, "The next killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error." The education and non-profit market is ripe for the efficiencies e-Learning can deliver. Because they won't be in corporate markets, Adayana also won't be in competition with DigitalThink.

What - not returning to teaching? "No, it's too much fun. We've already got Adayana funded for its first two years and within the one week we've been out there, we've already signed a contract with Cisco Learning Institute as our first customer."

The other bonus of getting back on the entrepreneurial horse so soon is Tandon will be able to bring many of his LearningByte team with him who had been displaced after the merger. Not even seven days since they were founded, Adayana already has 13 employees and $4 million in seed capital commited. There are plans to acquire some companies in the space to get a fast start. Tandon's continued passion for learning is also evident in an interesting wrinkle of the new company's business plan. Adayana plans to donate 10% of pre-tax revenues to literacy programs throughout the world. These programs will be chosen at the discretion of each employee.

Those that teach, can. And do.

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