Why are there no text based courses in Taro?

I agree that text is more efficient (and more searchable) compared to video. However, you also miss:

• The "relationship" between the creator and consumer is much less significant with text. For very talented tech leaders, we want Taro to be a place where you can peek inside their thinking and thought process.
• Video gives us a visual medium that can be extremely powerful. For example, Alex is very good at using memes and animations to make a point. This is much harder to do in text (e.g. this junior to mid-level course)

Good question! For Taro's particular use-case, it's an extension of our communal learning roots. Taro started off as a free community where Rahul and I would hop on a Zoom call (this was during pandemic times when people were stuck at home with nothing to do). That's a video-based medium, and when we organically spun that into a startup we quit our jobs for, video just made sense as that's what everyone in the community was used to.

You can learn more about the overall story behind Taro here: "How did you decide to quit your job and make a startup?" - 9/13/2022

On top of that, it's better to go with the market and what's established rather than against it as that usually involves training/convincing end-users to take on new behaviors, which is extremely hard. Coursera and Udemy are the biggest course players ever and they're video based. Even in our niche software engineer domain, websites like AlgoExpert and NeetCode are video based.

This "go with the flow" method is actually something we learned the hard way through many mistakes. For example, we did magic link login (similar to Slack) instead of password-based, which is pretty much by definition safer (it's also less work for the user as they don't need to create/remember a password). However, users are so used to the email/password model as it's been around for 25+ years, that many people are confused as to where to enter their password. There's a ton of value in making something familiar as it reduces cognitive load for the end-user by leveraging their existing mental model of the world.

Reading is generally a far more effective+faster medium to learn from.

I would actually challenge this, even though this is the case for me (I rarely use videos to learn something).

When it comes to learning, the challenge for most people isn't rate of information consumption, it's retention and motivation. The human brain is irresponsible by default - It's much more fun and tempting to binge Netflix than to consume a complex educational resource that makes you a more effective human, even though the latter is objectively better for you in the long run.

Taro is also built for people who already have a good job and are looking to level up (not just those interviewing), and for them, they are coming back to Taro after a long day of work and are tired, so they need the media they consume to be inherently more engaging.

This is where video comes in. Since video contains everything (text on screen, audio, and visuals), it's more engaging to the brain as it's stimulating far more senses. If the person behind the video is also someone you know/trust (as is the case for Taro as many folks in the community follow Rahul + personally), that adds another layer of stickiness and ease of deep engagement. This richness makes it far easier to both finish the resource and actually remember the information long-term so you can actually apply it.

It's true that with pure text, you can pragmatically consume all the raw information faster, but if I give the average engineer a 25-page wall-of-text essay with some graphics here and there vs. a well-made 2 hour video course, I'm very confident that they'll do better with the course. There's a reason why educational YouTube + course platforms are an order of magnitude bigger than stuff like Medium.