Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting topic that you bring up. There are some observations I have on that. One is that some of the rock star teachers at top universities have their very popular courses on edX and Coursera. Then you have platforms like what LinkedIn is doing. Soon after they named me one
Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch the line of questioning from what you are doing to more of the industry trend question. What open problems do you see in the industry right now where a new entrepreneur would be starting a company today? Instead of being 12 years into Course Hero, if you were starting
Sramana Mitra: What are we talking? When I talked to you five years ago, you were about a $10 million company. You had bootstrapped the company with a little bit of outside financing to almost $10 million in revenue in 2014. In 2018, what range are we talking? Andrew Grauer: In 2018, we’re in the
Sramana Mitra: The bulk of your revenue, however, is coming from subscription. It’s a pure subscription-based business model at this point, right? Andrew Grauer: Correct. Our belief is that over the next decade, we believe that hundreds of millions of people will need to be able to learn and prove that they learned what they
Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click on what you are doing to address this situation? Andrew Grauer: We’ve evolved in building this learning platform. It’s a collection of millions of study resources. These are learning and teaching resources that are helping students in whatever they’re studying. The library has now grown to over 28 million resources.
We interviewed Andrew on the Entrepreneur Journeys series five years back when Course Hero was at around $10 million in revenue. In 2018, the company’s website had 300 million visits. Revenue is approaching $100 million. And as for comparables, Pluralsight has gone public and has validated the business model of all-you-can-eat subscription-based online learning. Read on
Sramana Mitra: You focused on getting to a business model. Part of the problem at the Valley right now is that people just go and build things without figuring out a business model. As a result, they have huge burn rates and no monetization model. That doesn’t create a sustainable company. That whole model is
Andrew Grauer: Then, moving on to the other question on the engagement level, engagement is quite high. I think the difference between other online education sites like Coursera and edX is that their users are looking just to learn for learning sake. Our supplemental resources are really focused on helping students who are already enrolled