What happens when a technologist daughter and educator mother join forces? Urvashi Keown is harnessing a “secret sauce” to turn a family business into a global test-prep juggernaut with customers in 40 countries and growing.
“I have big dreams for this company, for how we can positively impact families all over the world. We’ve built something amazing, but we’re just getting started.”
—Urvashi Keown, CEO and cofounder of TestRocker, Inc.
Photo of Urvashi Keown, CEO and Co-Founder of TestRocker Inc., standing outside and smiling.
Jessica Pliska: Your career path—as a tech founder, a woman tech founder, and a woman of color tech founder—has me curious about confidence in the face of barriers. Do these things come naturally to you?
Urvashi Keown: I’ve always been a pretty confident person. My parents raised me to believe I could do whatever I wanted, which was unusual compared to others growing up around me in India. It hasn’t always gone unchallenged, but it’s my nature. I’ve worked hard to not let anybody hold me back. I champion myself when I have to. And being a woman, and a woman of color, is huge to me, because I want to show the next generation what’s possible.
Pliska: When were those times your confidence was challenged?
Keown: Early on. I was born in India, but from age 11, we moved around the world every two to three years and I had to adapt to pretty dramatic life changes. We moved to In New Zealand, not many people move there from outside of it. On top of that, we were people of color. It was the first time I remember feeling different—I experienced blatant bullying and racism from teachers and students at my first school, and I would get detention for responding back. It was very difficult.
Pliska: How did you manage?
Keown: The hardest thing for me, but the best lesson, was learning I couldn't change people. I could try to inform and educate them, but I couldn’t change them. I worked hard to find my way—I found the right circle for myself and made a few friends who I still keep in touch with. The lesson was to surround myself with people who actually wanted to get to know me. That experience helped build my confidence.
Pliska: How else did that confidence and resiliency show up as a young person?
Keown: I had dreamt of attending university here. I wanted to go to Notre Dame, but I didn’t know how to convert my transcript into something that made sense because I’d moved so many times. When the Notre Dame admissions officer who was going to read my application came to my high school, I found him and followed him around all day to leave an impression, and it worked.
Pliska: In those dreams, in your early life and in college, I’m guessing running a technology-driven test-prep company with your mom didn’t factor prominently?
Keown: No! I majored in management consulting in college, which gave me a solid foundation in how businesses work. I fell in love with advertising. I interned at Ogilvy, where they thought I was just going to get coffee, but I forced them to give me real work. Out of college, I was hired back there for a digital marketing job. I didn't know much about digital at the time and they said, "Don't worry, your boss is going to teach you everything." My boss quit on my first day. I literally Googled my way through that job and I figured it out. And that’s where I started learning the digital aspects for what I eventually built at TestRocker.
Pliska: TestRocker has a unique, compelling origin story. Can you share it?
Keown: In Singapore, my mom tutored all of the kids in my school for the SAT, like she had done for me. There were kids just walking in and out of my house all the time. She started saying, "I'm really good at what I do, but I wish I could reach more kids." I knew the only way for her to do that was to be online. She said, "Cool, can you go figure that out for me?!" and I said, "Sure—but if we're going to do this, we have to do it right, because these are real kids’ lives, and we're not just going to throw something up.” So, I got started building in earnest.
Pliska: That was ahead of the curve at the time, wasn’t it?
Keown: When we first came to market, we were way ahead of the curve, because nobody believed you could learn online. There were no examples of what we were trying to do. Today, there are so many online learning platforms, but back then, none of those companies existed. People thought we were crazy. I took wireframe designs to a huge industry conference and no one understood: “Every student needs to have a computer for this?" That was the conversation then.
Pliska: Why did you have faith in it?
Keown: Because my mother had this magic formula. She understood what students needed. I sat her down and figured out her entire process. She told me everything she needed to know to understand a student. Most other companies will give you a bunch of strategies, but they don’t invest in understanding the student and their grasp on the fundamentals. She knew that if you don't get those, no strategy is going to help.
Pliska: As you were building, when did you decide to leave your job to do this full-time? Was there one moment of clarity?
Keown: I was on an airplane back to Singapore to visit my parents and this girl two seats down from me was staring at me really awkwardly. She said, “I'm sorry, but I just want you to know your mom changed my life." My mom had been her tutor. I asked her how she knew who I was and she said, “Because I sat on your dining table and stared at this picture of you behind your mom's head for two years.” It hit me that it was time—that we could do something really special.
Pliska: You must have realized at some point that you weren’t going to build a scalable business on your mother.
Keown: Yes, of course. She had the secret sauce, but it’s a codified and standardized pedagogy now, whether for PSAT, SAT, or ACT. It’s a learning model powered by technology, and then we brought on tutors. When we developed our go-to-market strategy, we realized digital content was vital for rapid scaling but not without a personalized touch. We wanted to appeal to families, to take a consultative approach, so we knew we needed blended learning with humans.
Pliska: What are you most proud of about the business you’ve built?
Keown: We've developed highly impactful personalized learning at a really cost-efficient price, half the price of competitors. We’re deeply results-driven. We offer a score guarantee—if your score doesn't go up by 200 points, we're going to give you your money back, no questions asked, as long as you did the work. If you make a promise like that, without a lot of asterisks like other companies do, it puts you on the same team as the families, where we’re all working toward the same thing, and that builds trust. We have strong parent engagement—relationships with families spanning six years and multiple children. We handle these relationships with care.
Pliska: You’ve also built into TestRocker a social impact aspect. Tell me about that.
Keown: Giving back has always been part of our family tradition. There is a huge gap in access, and we’re working toward closing that gap, providing high-quality test prep at low cost to low-income or average-income families. We partner with foundations to provide test prep to students served by their grantees and we provide services directly to non-profit organizations and schools at a lower cost. These partnerships matter to us and we’re very serious about ensuring we have strong impact there.
Pliska: What’s next for TestRocker?
Keown: We have a unique, proven, cost-efficient product, the potential for rapid scale, and demand in the form of a $22 billion market. We know it’s time to grow and I have a clear expansion plan for the next five years. We’re fundraising now, looking for the right partners who are interested in the same outcomes we are. I have big dreams for this company, for how we can positively impact families all over the world. We’ve built something amazing, but we’re just getting started.
