Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I have a bunch of questions on that. These are, again, trend questions. One of the big problems with the Internet, in my view, is that it’s a free-rider and free-loader population. What percentage of your traffic are paying users as opposed to people looking for free courses? Karen Francis: The only way

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Thought leaders in Online Education: Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education, UC Irvine (Part 4)

Sramana: Are there other models that you could envision being successful? Gary Matkin: Another option would be to start selling advertising. Somehow they should use the names they have for advertising or marketing. Sramana: Everything you have mentioned works well for UCI. For Coursera, that is a scary thought that nothing monetizes significantly in the

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Codero CEO, Emil Sayegh (Part 1)

Cloud hosting, as companies scale, is moving from public cloud to hybrid cloud. More in this discussion. Sramana Mitra: Emil, tell us about Codero and yourself so that our audience can get to know you a bit. Emil Sayegh: I’m Emil Sayegh. I’m the CEO and President of Codero. By way of a quick introduction,

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you catalog Pluralsight and TrainSignal and all of these course providers? Karen Francis: Not everyone but if we don’t, it’s because we just haven’t contacted them yet. We’re really out there. We have a business development team seeking new course providers. You can also go to the site and

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Thought leaders in Online Education: Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education, UC Irvine (Part 3)

Sramana: You are making the claim that often people are looking for a specific piece of information and that they do not need to complete an entire course. It is not necessary to complete an entire course just to supplement a specific skill gap. Gary Matkin: We all have learning projects every day. Those learning

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Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your pricing model? Is there enough deal size to do field sales? Ali Behnam: We have deals ranging anywhere from $15,000 all the way up. Average deal size is five figures. Sramana Mitra: So talk to me about your business model and pricing model a bit. Ali Behnam: Right now, we’re

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Harvard Business Review Series on the Seed Capital Gap

Over the last few months, I wrote a series of articles for Harvard Business Review on the seed capital gap facing entrepreneurs. Below are links to the entire set: How To Reduce ‘Infant Entrepreneur Mortality’ How Startups Overcome The Capital Gap Can Crowdfunding Solve The Startup Capital Gap? The Problem With Incubators and How To Solve Them

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 2)

Karen Francis: We’re seeing the emerging trend of students saying, “This is why I want this track and this is what I’ll take. I’m not going to take the rest of it.” They are able to customize what they want either from a broad perspective of choosing colleges and institutions or saying, “I’m going take

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