This interview is a great discussion about the various experiments going on in the world of higher education and how online learning is playing out there. Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to what you’re doing at Sloan vis-à-vis executive education. Peter Hirst: I’m the Director of the Executive Education
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
Sramana: If you were to pinpoint the key positioning points in your approach that are dramatically better than your competitors, what would that be? Chris Gladwin: To summarise it succinctly, they don’t virtualize the data. They make actual copies of data, which means the data inherits the properties of the physical world. It can be
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
Sramana: How much money were you able to raise before you had revenue? Chris Gladwin: Something to the order of $10 million. Sramana: I talk with a lot of entrepreneurs and I have found that those who build capital intensive products requiring substantial capital investments were able to do it if they had either prior
Sramana Mitra: You’ve taken seven years to build $17 million in revenue. That’s not a timeline that fits in the venture capital framework. The venture capitalists are looking to build hundred million dollar companies in seven years. This is what I’ve been really concerned about. For a long time, venture capitalists basically just decided not
Sramana: You said you funded the seed round yourself. What were the milestones and accomplishments of that seed round? Chris Gladwin: I used not only capital but in the early rounds I was also able to use equity as a way to compensate initial employees. You can provide equity to people when you form the
Sramana Mitra: I’m very interested in the business model. That’s one of the issues that we’re seeing in the Edtech industry. The business models are weak. Katya Andresen: I agree with you. It can be really hard to monetize a social network. That is not our model. Our model is that we have consumers –