AI Investor Forum: Gus Tai on AI in Education (Part 1)

Gus Tai, Investor, Board Member and Retired General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses ideas and opportunities in Education with an AI-augmented framework.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Strategy-wise, it’s still large accounts selling and just bigger deals? No major change on that front? John Baker: Not at that stage. We’re just accelerating that work and putting in place the infrastructure to grow faster. We did another round a couple of years later for another $80 million.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, Build an EdTech Unicorn from Canada: John Baker, CEO of D2L (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about a bit of metrics so we can pin the journey all the way to bootstrapping before you got a funded company model. How far did you get from a revenue point of view, customer metrics, employee metrics? What were the vital statistics? John Baker: We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you try to build a business that is selling to schools, that’s an incredibly slow cycle. I have companies in our portfolio and I know a lot of educational entrepreneurs who have become frustrated trying to sell technology or content to schools. It’s a long sell cycle. The textbook vendors are quite

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You were able to build a minimum viable product, start monetizing it right away, and then, scale it from there. Katya Andresen: Not right away. Most of the overnight successes have a five to seven years lag. Sramana Mitra: That’s my point. How do you finance five to seven years of development? Katya

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The concern is that it is complicated and expensive to build these programs. Then, if everybody wants everything for free, how do these businesses sustain themselves? That’s the real question that I’m extremely worried about. Katya Andresen: I think no one ever jumps to the opportunity to pay for something, right? If it

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Rick Blaisdell, CTO Of ConnectEDU (Part 8)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: Are there other thoughts you have on entrepreneurship and how cloud computing could make a difference in the field of education? Say, from an administrative system’s point of view, the area that you are working on, related to the process of finding a college that is

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Rick Blaisdell, CTO Of ConnectEDU (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: There are several companies working in the area of skill gap analysis. Many of these solutions are starting to penetrate the education sector. But the people who are dealing with K-12 educational technology, primarily in the case of online learning management systems, are having difficulty penetrating

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