Gagan Biyani

Biyani was born to Indian parents in Fremont, California.^[4]

Biyani attended the University of California, Berkeley, and received a bachelor's degree in Economics. He began his career working at Accenture before transitioning into technology entrepreneurship and journalism. As a journalist, he covered mobile applications and technology at TechCrunch.^[5] While there, he wrote a number of investigative journalism pieces, including one about a PR firm that was writing fake reviews on the App Store.^[6] He broke the story in TechCrunch. According to The New York Times,^[7] the findings led to an FTC investigation and Biyani's findings were quoted by the FTC's official documents.

In 2009, Biyani co-founded Udemy,^[8][9] one of the first MOOC platforms.^[2] Courses are offered across a breadth of categories, including business and entrepreneurship, academics, the arts, health and fitness, language, music, and technology.^[10] Most classes are in practical subjects such as Excel software or using an iPhone camera.^[11]

At Udemy, Biyani focused mainly on marketing, instructor acquisition, investor relations, finance, business development, and public relations.^[12] As of 2018, the company claims to have over 24 million students and offers more than 80,000 courses^[13] from thousands of teachers. As of 2019, Alexa counts Udemy among top 500 most-visited websites.^[14]

After Udemy,^[15] Biyani spent six months as a Growth Advisor at Lyft.^[16] He soon left Lyft in 2013 to begin new ventures.

Biyani founded the Growth Hackers Conference in 2013.^[17] The event was in San Francisco and featured a number of well-known growth hackers, including Chamath Palihapitiya, Sean Ellis, Keith Rabois, and others.^{[18][19][20][21]}

While at Lyft, Gagan came up with the idea for Sprig. While speaking with friends, he came up with the idea to start a food delivery service.^[22] He left Lyft in 2013 to begin the venture into healthy home-cooked food. He partnered with a number of chefs, including Nate Keller, a former Executive Chef at Google's headquarters,^[23] and Michelin-starred chef Kyle Connaughton, who served as culinary advisor.^[24]

The concept for Sprig was to provide home cooked food via delivery.^[25][26] The startup claimed to allow users to order a “balanced meal”, which was prepared in Sprig's industrial kitchen and delivered in 15–20 minutes. Sprig's chef was Nate Keller, Google's former executive chef.^[27]

In March 2014, Sprig raised $10 million in Series A funding from Greylock Partners with Battery Ventures and Accel participating. As part of the funding, Greylock partner Simon Rothman joined Sprig's board.^[28] A year later, the company announced it had raised $45 million via its Series B funding round.^[29]

In 2016, Biyani and his co-founder Neeraj Berry were named by Forbes in its 30 Under 30 list for Consumer Tech entrepreneurs.^[30] Gagan was also part of the Fast Company's Most Creative People list around the same time.^[31]

Sprig raised a total of $57 million and had over 1,300 employees^[32][33] at its peak, but announced in late 2017 that it would no longer be operational.^[34][35][36] In his closing e-mail, Biyani cited challenges in the complexity of the operations as reasons for the closure.^{[37][failed verification]} According to Biyani's Twitter story about Sprig, one of the causes of Sprig's failure was the rise of Uber Eats.^[38] According to TechCrunch,^[39] a number of other startups in the same industry also closed in 2017, including venture-backed SpoonRocket and Maple.^[40]