Alumni Startup
How to Be Heard
With an entrepreneurial skill set built at Cal Poly, one alum launched an AI-powered learning platform that helps people communicate with confidence.
By Kaitlyn Knopf // Images courtesy of Yoodli
Esha Joshi appears on the Nasdaq Tower billboard in Times Square in New York City in June to celebrate Yoodliʼs wins at the GTM10 Awards.
Esha Joshi (Software Engineering ’16) arrived at Cal Poly intending to build software, but she said it was Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing philosophy that sparked her passion for entrepreneurship.
Her involvement with the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), Women Involved in Software and Hardware and the Society of Women Engineers gave her opportunities to develop confidence communicating ideas and working with others. Speaking at the entrepreneurship forum Cal Poly Ignite became one of her first experiences putting an idea in front of a room and asking people to believe in it.
The CIE planted a flag in my head that entrepreneurship was a legitimate path, not just something other people did.
Now she has helped build the AI-powered platform Yoodli, which provides more than one million users the opportunity to develop those same skills. Yoodli allows people to privately practice pitches, interviews, presentations and other high-stakes conversations through interactive AI role-plays, with real-time coaching and opportunities to track improvement over time.
“Part of what drove me to start Yoodli was personal,” Joshi said. “I knew what it felt like to have something important to say and struggle to be heard, or to not get the thoughts out the way I wanted. That experience shaped how I showed up at work, how I thought I was being perceived and ultimately which opportunities came my way.”
During her senior year, Joshi joined the CIE Hatchery, an on-campus incubator where students receive mentorship and support as they develop startup ideas. There, she and teammate Vivian Fong (M.S. Computer Science ’20) built Repay, an integrated mobile and web platform designed to simplify travel reimbursements for job candidates.
Yoshi (bottom row, left) with friends and teammates at Cal Poly’s Design and Dev Hackathon in 2016.
The idea came from a challenge they and their classmates were experiencing while traveling for interviews, when students often had to pay for flights and hotels upfront and navigate different reimbursement processes.
“What I took away was less about the specific product and more about the muscle it built,” Joshi said. “Talking to people about a real pain point, dividing and conquering as a tiny team, and learning the technology are usually the easy parts. The hard part is understanding the problem deeply enough that the solution feels obvious.”
But the path from the CIE to her own company was not a direct one. After graduating, Joshi spent nearly five years at Apple as a software engineer and product manager working across Apple TV+ and Beats by Dr. Dre. Outside of work, she continued exploring entrepreneurship through venture capital programs, startup scouting, writing and speaking opportunities.
She later left Apple to join the Allen Institute for AI as an entrepreneur in residence, where she met Varun Puri who became a Yoodli co-founder.
The Yoodli team.
“The CIE planted a flag in my head that entrepreneurship was a legitimate path, not just something other people did,” Joshi said. “When the moment came to leave Apple, it didn’t feel like a leap into the unknown. It felt like finally answering a question I’d been asking since senior year.”
Today, Yoodli has evolved from a communication coach into a broader experiential learning platform, focusing on how people learn best from dialogue, questions and iteration. Five years after its founding, Yoodli has raised more than $60 million in venture funding and surpassed one million users. The company works with organizations including Google, Salesforce, Snowflake, Databricks, SAP and Korn Ferry.
Its reach extends beyond corporate training. In El Salvador, Yoodli has been used to train roughly 2,000 doctors in high-stakes patient conversations.
Although Yoodli’s scale has changed, Joshi said its original mission has not.
“To anyone who’s ever been talked over, frozen in a big moment or doubted whether their voice belonged in the room, we’re building this for you,” she said. “That was true on day one, and it’s true today.”
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