Patel scored 2400 in his SAT exam.
AB Wire
An Indian American entrepreneur, Shaan Patel, struck it rich on ABC’s reality show ‘Shark Tank’, as he successfully made a deal with billionaire Mark Cuban for $250,000 and a 20 percent take in his test preparation company, ‘2400 Expert’.
Around seven million viewers watched the exceptionally qualified Patel pitch the investment panel about his educational test-prep startup, 2400 Expert.
Patel’s testing preparation company 2400 Expert runs 6-week SAT & ACT prep courses online and in-person in 20 cities around the country. It will open an office in Tysons, Virginia, on Feb. 2, reported Patch.com.
Patel started the company after he improved his own SAT score from average to perfect while in high school, and then decided to teach other students how to improve their own scores.
Patel’s first SAT prep book, McGraw-Hill’s SAT 2400 in Just 7 Steps, has sold over 20,000 copies and has been a #1 bestseller on Amazon for SAT Prep. He is currently an MD student at USC and MBA student at Yale simultaneously, according to 2400expert.com.
Jezebel.com reported that only 3,000 people have gotten perfect SAT scores in the last decade, and Shaan Patel is one of them.
On Shark Tank, it was not totally smooth for Patel. The other sharks had jumped out of the equation, questioning 2400’s scalability and citing Patel’s split ambitions. “Do you want to be a doctor?” Lori asked, a question that turned into somewhat of a gotcha when, after Patel answered in the affirmative, she added, “…or an entrepreneur?”
Patel wavered on that point: one of the most oddly riveting aspects of Shark Tank is the opportunity it provides to watch an ambitious person lose their footing while simultaneously experiencing one of the best financial opportunities of their life. “I’m so used to preparing for everything,” Patel said. “But the Sharks always ask questions you’re not ready for, and it was one of the hardest parts, getting thrown off by that.”
He recovered smoothly, though, promising, as many in the Tank tend to, that you’ll never meet anyone who works so hard in your life. For credibility on this particular point as well as on the thrust of his business, Patel has his insane double degree situation, as well as a persuasive life story: the pre-roll for his segment showed him talking about his immigrant parents, who ran and raised him in a budget motel; it was his perfect SAT score that lifted him into new strata, he said, reported Jezebel.com.