categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How much money did you raise from this round? It sounds like it was a friends and family angels round. Michael Hughes: It was about $400,000. Sramana Mitra: What did you tell these people who invested that first $400,000? Michael Hughes: We used to be called Ring2 Communications back then. The original idea
From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: When you go into corporate sales situations, whom do you see in deals? Farnaz Ronaghi: That’s an interesting question. I was telling you that we don’t exist as a tool in the corporate landscape. That’s really true. There’s another tool called Intrepid Learning that we sometimes run into. They are similar to us
Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year did you guys come together to start LoopUp? Michael Hughes: We first met each other from 1995 to 1997 at Stanford. I had this fellowship, which meant that I had to go back to the UK. I went back for about nine months and then moved back out to California. I then joined
From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Your hypothesis was that you’re going to be selling to the corporate learning environment, did that pan out? Farnaz Ronaghi: It’s too early to say if it has panned out completely, but it has. The mix of our customers in the past two years has mainly been universities. Then there are lots of
Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 1)
An entrepreneur’s journey is often about survival and getting to profitability so that near-death situations do not threaten his venture’s existence. Michael talks about his team’s long, often treacherous, path through troubled waters. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and
From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: The pivot story is very interesting. I actually think this is a very helpful discussion because the online education space is still struggling to find business models that work. Coursera and Udacity have had a lot of problems finding scalable business models. Could you work me through the other experiments you did and
From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What was your hypothesis at this point about what was going to be the business model of your company? Did you have one? Farnaz Ronaghi: Yes. In the beginning, there were a lot of companies who started doing MOOCs but in different flavors. There’s Coursera who seemed like it was trying to replace
From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this? When did you start offering the course around which you did the first experiment? Farnaz Ronaghi: Mid-2012. Sramana Mitra: You said you had 30,000 people who came together. Farnaz Ronaghi: In the first Technology Entrepreneurship class, we had 40,000 enrolments. Sramana Mitra: What time window are we
