A brief introduction last week to get this reporter familiar with the interviewee, Gordon Swaby, was met with rebuke. “Dashan, no need to be formal with me. I’m a fan of your work and now you are planning on interviewing me. I really like the stories you tell,” he said citing some articles done by this reporter.

But the story I was looking to tell was about EduFocal, the online teaching platform which was recently successful in raising $130 million to drive growth which has been nothing but phenomenal in the last few years. What I learnt in the interview was that EduFocal is very much Gordon Swaby and Gordon Swaby is very much EduFocal — a young man with a dream who created a Jamaican tech company in the education space, with the aim of shaking up the status quo.

“EduFocal was founded March 15, 2012,” Swaby started as he documented the journey his online learning platform took over the past ten years with his business partner Paul Allen, who shares his name with the former co-founder of Microsoft. Next Tuesday EduFocal will have been in operation for 10 years. Swaby said even though that date is recognised as the official start date for the company, it was actually registered on November 19, 2010, “just a day after my 20th birthday”.

“I had no idea what I was doing at the time. I had no business experience and to this day, I have never been formally employed other than to EduFocal,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

Swaby says growing up he was told he was going to fail, and when teachers wrote “Gordon has potential” on his report cards he interpreted that to be a euphemism for being considered a “dunce”. “I was never an ‘A’ student, I was never somebody who enjoyed school — and in the latter part of my life I started to understand why,” he said and shared the reason, but asked that it not be published.

He said his own learning challenges inspired him to develop the EduFocal platform, steering clear of his “dream job” to be a journalist. Swaby however dabbled in that dream job temporarily, writing for the Youth Link publication in the The Gleaner after he was given the opportunity to do so by former Editor-in-Chief Garfield Grandison. That would not be the only media name he dropped.

“I was introduced to Garfield after reaching out to a [ The] Gleaner reporter in the aftermath of asking them to write an article about my video gaming website: advanced-games.com,” he said while highlighting that as a young man from Christiana, Manchester, he was trying to get access to free video games. That was the only video gaming site in the Caribbean at the time and Swaby said he started to write video game companies in the US to get “free stuff”.

That gaming experience for the college dropout was key in developing EduFocal. Swaby attended the University of Technology, Jamaica where he started his studies in computer science, “but I wasn’t any good at it”, he proffered.

However he said his own learning difficulties and knowing that there are others like him who need some “individual attention” to learn, sparked the idea for the business. “I think we are being taught wrong,” he said. “Right now there are some very bright children in St Thomas and some great teachers in Kingston who can’t reach them in the traditional way,” he continued, adding that he wanted to leverage technology in a hybrid environment to help them to learn.

Worried that Jamaicans are not being properly educated for the jobs that are available and to come in the future, he said he had to do what he could.

“You can’t talk about wanting to have engineers and the Fourth Industrial Revolution if people can’t read and write.”

Swaby said he pitched his idea at an event held at Jamaica Pegasus called Kingston BETA, in the latter part of 2011, and this is where he met his future business partner, Paul Allen, who was interested in helping him to develop the idea which was still in the developmental stage.

“It was at that time he became my co-founder and the rest, as they say, is history.”

He said Paul wrote the codes to facilitate the platform to have it launched within a few months after his pitch was made.

“I was working on getting content and Paul was working on the platform.” Swaby said on March 15, 2012 EduFocal was finally launched with two subjects, mathematics and English language at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certification (CSEC) level, with 100 past paper questions per subject. “I wanted to make working through past papers fun and charge people for it.” He said he achieved that by the “gamification” of the past paper questions, which is basically allowing students to “level up” when they answer questions correctly at a lower level.

But the students exhausted the questions on the platform within three months after the launch and the momentum at the start was dying. Swaby said at the time he was worried and running out of money.

“I started the business with $5 million which came from a loan my father took, using a property he had as a collateral.” Swaby, who was 21 years old at the time, said while he was surprised that his parents took the bet on him, he was determined not to fail.

“The loan was in EduFocal’s name and the agreement was that I would service it. The monthly payment was $90,000 and I couldn’t find that money to pay the bank,” he said. “I wasn’t getting paid and Paul, luckily, was working. I was in school at the time as well and the business wasn’t going well, because the company wasn’t even generating the amount to be paid each month.”

He said after having a brief discussion with his father and telling him that he would drop out of school and focus on building the business “because I was struggling in school and the company was also struggling”, in 2013 he said luck was on his side and an investor offered the company US$13,000 to continue the operation. That investor was bought out in 2019 by the company’s Chairman Peter Levy for US$70,000.

He said that capital injection helped the company to expand from just CSEC and it launched preparation questions for the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT), also in 2013. Doing so, he said a deal was signed with the Jamaica Observer under which the newspaper shared its own GSAT content with EduFocal.

“That was what really saved the company in the early days,” he said. He name-checked Novia McDonald Whyte, senior associate editor, lifestyle and social content at the Jamaica Observer, who introduced him to then Managing Director Danville Walker, after which the partnership with the Observer was signed as having an influence on where he is as well saying she showed faith in his belief.

The partnership lasted two years and to this day Swaby calls 2013 “the landmark year” for the bank. “Now I was earning enough to pay the loans each month and get the bank to stop calling me or asking my parents to help.”

Swaby said he eventually started getting a salary from the company just four years ago. The company was growing and he took a small salary and ploughed everything back into the company.

At that time, revenues reached $8 million. A year after, revenues reached $12 million in 2018, then in 2019 it doubled to $26 million. In 2020 that grew even further, reaching $102 million. In 2021 the company’s revenues reached over $160 million.

Most of the growth he shared came with the company expanding into corporate learning content and providing the platform for it. BCIC, an insurer which is headed by EduFocal’s Chairman Peter Levy, was the first client.

Now as Swaby basks in the success of the recent capital raise, $130 million, and prepares to list on the Junior Market of the Jamaica Stock Exchange, he hails the power of partnerships.

“You know, Dashan, I’ve read ‘The Story of Spur Tree Spices’ that you wrote recently and see how Mohan [founder of Spur Tree Spices] talked about how partnerships helped him to build that company, and it resonated with me. I have a lot of people to thank for where I am today,” he said.

“Let me be clear, I’ve been talking about an IPO for EduFocal from the day it was started and people used to laugh at me.”

As he now prepares to expand with the proceeds, half will go to expansion and some of the rest will go to clearing the debts of the company, Swaby is confident.

“No business that is enjoying success today should think its future is guaranteed or secured. Everyday is day one and everyday you have to think about how you can continue to grow the company. No company is sustainable by chance, it is done by innovation. Where we are and where the world is going, Jamaica needs an EduFocal. The Caribbean needs an EduFocal.”

EduFocal has two divisions, Learn and Business. Learn is the division which deals with the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams which have replaced GSAT. CSEC was dropped in the early days but Swaby said he could revisit it. He said tertiary institutions will also be targeted for partnerships to develop online content or online learning needs. Financial literacy is also an area he wants to explore.

“People have moved from asking if EduFocal is a viable entity to asking is it sustainable, but as a tech company we will always innovate to ensure our survival well into future.”