Edit: The Student Whisperer: How Karan Goel Built Two Edtech Exits by Recognizing That College Students Need More Than Better Tests

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When Karan Goel was 30 years old, his adaptive learning company PrepMe was being acquired by Ascend Learning. On paper, it looked like a win. His team had built the first platform to actually personalize test prep for college readiness exams—SAT, ACT, PSAT. They'd served hundreds of thousands of students. Fortune Small Business had run their photo on the cover. The Chicago Innovation Awards had recognized them.

Goel should have felt accomplished. Instead, he felt like he'd solved the wrong problem.

"Everyone says dropouts are the biggest problem in higher education," Goel said in 2014, looking back at those early years. "But academics isn't the only thing in higher education."

It's a simple sentence. The kind of insight that seems obvious the moment you hear it, impossible the moment before. And it became the seed that would take Goel from one exit to a second one—this time not by improving how students study, but by changing who they become.

## The First Bet: Smarter Tests

In 2001, Goel was working at Boston Consulting Group when he saw a problem. Millions of American high schoolers were preparing for college entrance exams the same way they'd done it for decades: expensive tutoring companies, dense textbooks, practice tests that treated every student like a clone. If you scored a 650 on the math section, you studied the same practice problems as everyone else who scored a 650, regardless of which specific topics actually broke your reasoning.

It was inefficient. And technology could fix it.

Goel co-founded PrepMe with Avichal Garg and Joe Jewell. They built an adaptive platform—one that diagnosed a student's specific weaknesses and tailored the curriculum around them. If you struggled with probability but crushed algebra, the platform didn't waste your time on algebra practice. It zeroed in on what you actually needed.

The results spoke for themselves. PrepMe students improved SAT scores by an average of 305 points. Their ACT scores jumped 4-5 points on average. By 2008, the company was working with hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students annually. The business model was simple and worked: sell subscriptions to students, sell bulk licenses to schools, keep the tutor cost low, keep the margins healthy.

A decade in, it felt like a success story. Ascend Learning saw the potential and bought the company. Goel was 30. He had an exit. Most founders would have taken a consulting role or invested in startups.

Goel did neither. Instead, he started thinking about the students PrepMe had served—and realized something uncomfortable: test scores weren't actually predicting whether those students would graduate.

"Of the students who do take advantage of advising and counseling services, many tend to be straight-A students or on the opposite extreme," Goel recalled. "Often, a lot of first-generation college students don't believe they can find support because no one they knew went to college."

A student could raise their SAT score by 300 points and still drop out in their first semester. Why? Because the problem wasn't academic. It was psychological, social, and existential. It was doubt. It was loneliness. It was not knowing if you belonged.

## The Pivot: What Colleges Actually Need

In October 2012, Goel reconnected with Eric Bjerstedt, an engineer he'd worked with at PrepMe. They decided to research the actual dropout problem in higher education. What they discovered shifted Goel's entire understanding of the market.

The conventional wisdom was that colleges lose students because of academic struggles. Remedial math classes. Reading comprehension. Study skills. So colleges hire advisors and tutors and run support programs. They spend millions.

But when Goel and Bjerstedt actually looked at the data on who drops out—and who doesn't—the academic piece was almost secondary. The students who persisted, who graduated, were the ones who felt connected. Who had a peer group. Who believed, on some emotional level, that other people like them had succeeded in that environment.

This was behavioral science, not pedagogy. It wasn't about teaching them better. It was about making them feel like they belonged.

"Students who publicly share tips and advice are rewarded with karma points," Goel explained, designing what would become GetSet. "While GetSet can be loosely defined as a social networking tool, the app is meant to function more as a conversation starter that leads to in-person connections."

The platform was deliberately small and intimate. No algorithms designed to maximize engagement. No endless scroll. Just a structured community where first-year students could see that other first-year students—students who looked like them, from neighborhoods like theirs—had figured it out. Had made it through the hard part. Were on the other side.

Peer influence works. Decades of social psychology research confirm it. And colleges have plenty of straight-A students and crisis cases. But the majority—the wavering middle—they don't know if staying is even possible for someone like them.

GetSet made it possible to show them.

## The Second Bet: Scaled Connection

Unlike PrepMe, which sold to schools and students directly, GetSet was designed from the ground up to sell to colleges themselves—as a retention tool. The pitch to university administrators was clean: your first-year students are your vulnerability. Many of them are first-generation. Many of them don't feel like they belong. This platform creates that sense of belonging at scale.

Early adopters saw results. Student retention improved. Graduation rates ticked up. The economics worked out: even if a college retained just a few more students per cohort, the tuition revenue justified the cost of the platform.

In 2013, Michael Nyren, a banking and finance expert who believed in Goel's insight, joined the board as an early investor. Nyren had been thinking about the dropout problem too, and he recognized something in Goel's approach that others were missing: it was durable. It wasn't a feature; it was a fundamental shift in how colleges could support students.

Goel spent the next decade expanding GetSet. The team grew from a tight founding unit to a full organization. Robert Feldman, a behavioral scientist, joined as Chief Scientific Advisor. Eva Prokop came on as Chief Operating Officer. They expanded to hundreds of institutions. Thousands of students were going through the platform every semester.

The company ran lean. No flash. No hype. Just steady growth, improving metrics, and customers who kept renewing because retention numbers don't lie.

Goel's approach throughout this period was characteristic of someone who had learned from his first exit. With PrepMe, he'd solved a problem that schools wanted solved (better test prep) but that students didn't actually need solved (the academic part was fine—they could ace the test and still drop out). With GetSet, he was solving a problem that both sides cared about: colleges wanted higher graduation rates, and students wanted to feel connected.

The business model was working well enough that Goel never felt the pressure to chase hype. GetSet wasn't in the news. The founder wasn't doing TED talks. The company just got better at what it did.

## The Second Exit: Horizontal Thinking

By late 2024, Yellowdig—a platform focused on active learning and social engagement in higher education—had built a successful business. They had the relationships with universities. They had the trust. But they recognized something: their strength was in the classroom. GetSet's strength was in the first critical weeks, when a student decided whether to stay or drop out.

In September 2025, Yellowdig acquired GetSet. The deal integrated GetSet's early-lifecycle engagement tools into Yellowdig's broader platform, creating what Yellowdig called a "full lifecycle learner engagement" system: from onboarding through graduation and even alumni engagement.

For Goel, the exit wasn't about the valuation. It was about impact. GetSet was going to reach millions more students through Yellowdig's relationships with major universities. The work would continue, but at a scale he couldn't have achieved alone.

"We are proud of the community and expertise we've built over the years to help learners thrive in those early, critical stages," Goel said in the announcement. "Joining forces with Yellowdig ensures our clients and learners not only continue to benefit from that foundation but also gain access to a richer, more comprehensive ecosystem."

## The Lesson in the Silence

What's remarkable about Goel's story is how little noise he made while building it.

He didn't broadcast his founding of GetSet. He didn't appear on a "30 Under 40" list (he was over 30 when he started it anyway). There was no Shark Tank pitch. No viral TikTok from GetSet explaining what they did. The company grew because the product worked and universities kept buying it.

This is a different kind of founder success story than the one that dominates the media. It's not the explosive growth narrative. It's not the "we raised $10M to disrupt an industry" story. It's the "we realized what we actually needed to build, we built it carefully, and we made it matter" story.

And it's increasingly the story that matters most in education technology, because edtech failures tend to be catastrophic—not for the investors, but for the students. Byju's promised students a world-class education and over-promised on outcomes. The company collapsed in 2024 and 2025, leaving millions of students mid-course with no support. Coursera promised job placement and charged students enormous sums based on that promise. The outcomes never materialized.

Goel's two companies both survived because they solved real problems that universities and schools were willing to pay for. Test prep actually works—PrepMe delivered that. Community and belonging actually reduce dropout rates—GetSet delivered that. No false promises. No growth-at-all-costs narrative that depended on future events that would never happen.

## What Comes Next

When GetSet was acquired, Goel transitioned into an advisory role with Yellowdig, helping integrate GetSet's platform into the broader system. He's no longer grinding through 18-hour days trying to land the next university client. The work has moved into Yellowdig's hands.

At 52, Goel has done something that most founders never do: built something twice. Solved it. Exited. And did it again.

What he learned from the first time—that the real problem isn't what you think it is, and that you don't know until you listen to the people you're trying to serve—shaped everything that came after.

In a field where edtech companies fail because they build for abstractions (the "student," the "classroom," the "education system"), Goel built for reality: the actual kid from a first-generation background who walked onto a college campus and wasn't sure they belonged. The actual college dean who needed to know that her freshman retention rate could improve. The actual learning scientist who understood that behavior change is the bottleneck, not content delivery.

That's an unseen story in a field full of visible ones. It's easy to miss. But it's exactly the kind of story that lasts.

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