Mr. Mohan Krishna Lakhamraju is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Great Learning, and the Chairman of Great Lakes Institute of Management. He earned his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from IIT Bombay in 1998, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000, and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2005.
Mr. Lakhamraju is very passionate about high-quality education and its transformational impact on one’s life, having experienced it personally. He has dedicated himself over the past 13 years to building and developing learning-focused organizations that have transformed the careers of over one lakh learners in India and abroad.
Mr. Lakhamraju founded Great Learning and grew it to become one of the leading global online higher education and professional learning companies. It has had over 10 million learners from 170 countries to whom it has delivered over 130 million hours of impactful learning through over 1300 free MOOCs and over 100 professional certificate, diploma, and degree programmes. Several of these programmes are developed in partnership with the world’s best universities including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Wharton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCL, Northwestern, NUS, UT Austin, Deakin, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, and IIT Roorkee.
Driven by a team of 2000 dedicated staff, Great Learning has pioneered its unique mentored-learning model where top university faculty are supplemented with a curated network of over 6000 industry expert mentors to deliver transformational learning outcomes to its learners and achieved industry-leading metrics such as an aggregate student satisfaction rating of 4.6/5 and a 91% completion rate.
He also developed the Great Lakes Institute of Management into a top 10 private business school in India. He founded the Gurgaon campus of Great Lakes and developed it into the youngest b-school in India to receive the AMBA (UK) accreditation and NIRF 52 ranking. Between the two campuses, Great Lakes has graduated over 25,000 alumni currently thriving in their professional careers across 30+ countries.
Mr. Lakhamraju founded a new business school in 2010 called the Institute of Energy Management and Research and, in 2012, merged it with the Great Lakes Institute of Management to become its Gurgaon campus. Today it is the youngest business school in India with AMBA, UK accreditation and ranked #52 in NIRF rankings of best b-schools in India. He served as Vice Chairman of Great Lakes Institute of Management from 2012 to 2021 and is currently serving as its Chairman.
Prior to founding the Great Lakes Institute of Management during 2006-09, Mr. Lakhamraju was the Managing Director, Tiger Global India, a leading New York-based investment firm where he initiated, led, and represented Tiger Global investment activities in India. Mr. Lakhamraju was Associate Partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson during 2005-06 where he initiated, led, and represented DFJ’s venture capital investment activities in India.
He is also the founding member of Stratify, Inc, a market leader in Electronic Legal Discovery Services that has since been acquired by Iron Mountain, a NYSE listed information services company, and then by HP.
Mr. Lakhamraju received the “Edtech CEO of the Year 2020 award” from EdTechReview and the “P. N. Singh Memorial Award 2015” for Academic Leadership from the Higher Education Forum. His company, Great Learning, also won the Best E-Learning Company of the Year 2020 award from EdTechReview as well as the “Best Corporate Training platform” Education Innovation Award by Entrepreneur India.
Any other interesting fact about yourself that you would like to share:
“I have a terrible memory and struggle to remember things like names, interactions, or movies. There have been times when I watched an entire movie and realized only during the climax that I had seen it before. The running joke in my family is that I can never run out of movies to watch since I can keep watching the same movies repeatedly and experience them as new. The only things I seem to remember are numbers, facts, and business metrics.”
Hobbies:
“I love travelling and have now been to over 50 countries. I made a resolution in the year 1999 that I must wake up in a new country every new year and have followed it over the past 23 years (except during COVID). Beyond that, I love driving and playing poker and use every opportunity I can get to enjoy both.”