will the real masterclass please stand up?

What was the one thing everyone was doing in peak lockdown? Webinars. 

Talking about the 'new world' and how life was going to change, forever. We all attended a few and then zoned out pretty quickly. The need was there. We were all sitting at home, bored (or playing ludo - ah, the good old days!). It was easier than ever to organize and connect since it was all virtual. But the format was bad. I remember discussing with Ragini one day about how we should invite a few industry leaders and host huddles and masterclasses for leap.club members. After exchanging 132 voice notes, we decided to jump right in. And true to our style, everything needs to be done yesterday (we are extremely impatient. Ok, I am.) We decided to host the first one in a week, and if everything went well, host one every week. 

Btw, for those of you who are reading about us for the first time, leap.club is a community-driven, members-only professional network for women. This basically means - we help members 1) build a strong professional network 2) focus on learning & development. Visit our website to read more about what we do and why we exist. We are now 600+ members, 7500+ on the waitlist and onboard a limited number every month. 

Back to masterclasses. 

We reached out to Ankur Warikoo to host the first one. We had met him in early 2020 and had immediately liked him (who doesn’t?) 

He promptly replied back in 2 mins like he always does saying that he believed in our mission and agreed. But he wasn’t free for a few weeks so we ended up writing to Mohit Bhatnagar and Sakshi Chopra from Sequoia Capital. They agreed and we were super excited to host them as our first guests (Ankur was eventually the second). We had a very candid discussion about building a successful career in VC. 30 odd members attended and the session was rated 9.1. That's when we knew we had to double down on these. 

Fast forward to Dec 2020 - we have hosted 17 masterclasses/huddles.

A BIG thank you to all our guests and speakers who have shared their experiences. We now invite the best industry leaders to interact with our members every week. Members ask unfiltered questions and get unfiltered responses. These sessions are not shared with the public. Our speakers include Mohit and Sakshi from Sequoia, Ankur Warikoo, Suchita Salwan (founder - LBB), Archana Jain (MD - PR Pundit), Mukesh Bansal (founder, Cure.Fit, Myntra), Matt Abrahams (Stanford GSB prof and a popular podcast host), Abanti Sankaranarayanan (CSO Diageo India) and many more. We have Nikhil Kamath (co-founder, Zerodha) this week and one of my personal fav Sanjeev Bikhchandani joining us in early 2021. 

70% of our members have attended at least one session and 95% of members who register end up attending. On average, these sessions get a rating of ~9 from our members and are typically 60 minutes long. 

Here’s some member love we get (c’mon, we had to!) -

We now plan to host 100 of these sessions in 2021. Our members attend these with the right mindset as well - the speakers don’t tell you to do ‘x’ to achieve ‘y’. Overnight growth hacks rarely exist. But there is sooo much to learn from their experiences and ultimately we connect the dots in our own lives.

- Anand