In 2023, we partnered with the team at Augment – a Paris-based startup with a bold ambition to reinvent business education for the modern world.
Founded by Ariel Renous and Roy Wellner, Augment offers a global, online alternative to the traditional MBA. It is designed for ambitious professionals who want to build or run companies but don’t have the time, money or desire to step away from their careers for two years.
We backed them early in their seed round and have been proud to support them on the ground in Paris ever since, watching them grow from a scrappy, passionate team to a fast-scaling company serving students in more than 50 countries.
In this Q&A, we sat down with co-founder and CEO Ariel to talk about what’s broken in business education and what it takes to scale a global company from day one.
Hi Ariel! So why are traditional MBAs ‘broken’ and how did Augment set out to fix it?
When it comes to the traditional business education system, MBAs are too expensive, too constraining and too time-consuming. They take two years, often require you to move cities and don’t fit into the lives of people who work. And they’re taught by academics – really smart people who’ve read a lot of books, but haven’t actually built businesses.
Roy and I both went to business school and realized it wasn’t built for entrepreneurs or operators. It’s great if you want to go into consulting or finance but not if you want to build or run a company. So we set out to build the MBA we wished we had.
Today, we have a lot of technical people – software engineers, data scientists, designers, architects and even airline pilots – doing the program! We got our second A380 pilot just yesterday. So really successful people who have not had a business education.
Of course, these people will never leave their jobs to go down the route of the traditional MBA, but they still need to understand the fundamentals of business. Whether that’s strategy, marketing, leadership, sales, entrepreneurship, finance and more. So that’s what we do!
And how did RTP come into the picture?
For us, it was about finding people we liked. It wasn’t about picking a VC firm but rather picking good people. We chose RTP because we loved the people. Louis, who’s based in Paris, spends a lot of time with us and sometimes he’ll just swing by and work from our office between meetings.
Since starting the company, what’s been the highlight so far (other than hanging out with Louis)? And the biggest challenge?
The highlight was definitely when we started recording content. We teach business fundamentals through some of the greatest entrepreneurs and operators of our generation such as the founders of YouTube, Wikipedia, Shazam and leaders from OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Google.
The first big moment was getting a “yes” from Chris Barton, the founder of Shazam. He became the first instructor in the Augment MBA program. That was amazing. Seeing the idea turn into a real product – with 30 people on set, production days full of adrenaline – that was a huge milestone.
The biggest challenge? Learning how to do great marketing. It took us two years to figure out how to reach our audience effectively. It’s not easy to clearly explain your value proposition and find the people who are likely to convert. But I think we’ve cracked that now.
What kind of marketing worked? And what didn’t?
We tried so many different things from webinars, newsletters, lead nurturing, phone calls etc. But what ended up working was so simple and obvious: running ads on social platforms. Meta, YouTube, TikTok. No fancy funnel. Just clear messaging that explains the product and lets people sign up themselves.
We recently started running ads in Australia and, within a month, over 30 new students had joined. There’s something really cool about seeing your product grow in countries you’ve never even visited.
How did you choose your instructors for the platform? And convince them to get on board?
Choosing was very easy. We went after big, recognizable brands – especially ones people outside of tech know and love. Shazam has 2 billion downloads… It’s become a verb! YouTube is the second most popular website in the world. Wikipedia has 5 billion users. These are companies people have an emotional connection to and they use them every day.
As for getting them onboard, we didn’t know anyone in Silicon Valley so we cold-emailed a lot of founders. Chris Barton responded. He said, “This looks interesting…let’s have dinner.” So we flew to San Francisco, had dinner with him, shook hands at the end and he was in. He’d gone to business school himself, saw the value of making the MBA more accessible and was at a point in his life where giving back was important.
And which instructor seems to resonate most with students?
It’s funny, it depends so much! Everyone has a different favorite and it depends on their personality and goals. Some instructors who come off as quiet or understated have really passionate fans. It shows that people connect on a human level, not just based on content or delivery style.
What’s surprised you most about the community you’ve built? Any standout stories?
We’ve had amazing profiles go through the program – airline pilots, pro-athletes, an NBA player, an MMA fighter. We’ve had a 16 year old entrepreneur building a CPG brand from Portugal and a 70 year old entrepreneur building a startup… the diversity is incredible.
One alumnus recently sold his company to Uber. One of our students is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of a company that’s raised $400 million. Obviously not all because of Augment but it’s still cool. I love how varied the community is in age, geography and life stage.
How do you keep the community engaged outside of the core program?
We host weekly live sessions and run in-person meetups twice a month around the world. In the past few weeks, we’ve been in Boston, Miami, LA San Diego. We’re doing London and Riyadh next. It’s a great way to bring people together and throw Augment parties for local communities.
Despite being based in Paris, most of your users are outside France. How did you approach building globally from day one?
Yes, so less than 1% of our users are in France. We always knew we wanted to build a global company. MBA content is already international – it’s taught in English and applies everywhere. Everything we do, from our website to our content and instructors, is designed for a global audience (no French anywhere!).
We’ve now worked with students in over 50 countries. We focused from day one on English-speaking markets like the US, UK, Canada and Australia and we’re also growing fast in the Gulf – Qatar, Saudi, the UAE, Kuwait. It’s a question of ambition: we wanted to reach the most people possible and most people don’t speak French.
Is there any advice would you give to other founders building global-first companies from Europe?
It’s funny because we didn’t expand from France. We just built for the US from day one. That’s a big difference. If you build with the US in mind, you can absolutely succeed there.
More than 60% of our revenue is from the US market, and we’re running it all from Paris. Early on, we were like “of course, we will need to do production in the US because these guys will never accept to come to Paris”. Wrong. And, “of course we will need to be in the US to hire international people”. Wrong again. At the moment I really don’t see why we could not build this massive business from Paris.
We love the ambition! So, finally, what’s next for Augment?
Scaling our content portfolio and community. We just filmed our 15th instructor and we’re adding a lot of AI-related courses. We just filmed with Zach Kass, former Head of GTM at OpenAI, for a course on “AI for Business.” We’ve also got a course on prompt engineering from someone who’s worked at Meta AI, Microsoft AI, and Google AI. They’ll go live in July.
Beyond content, we’re growing the community – more live sessions, more meetups in more places. We just launched in Australia and it’s going really well. I’d love to host some meetups there too.
If you want to learn more about what Augment is building, or take part in the program, you can visit their website here.
