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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
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
Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 7)
Sramana: What are some of the metrics of the business today? Chris Gladwin: We are doing many tens of millions of revenue. We have 130 employees and have raised over $100 million in total. We have built a very large patent portfolio. We have 186 patents. We had six issued last Tuesday. We typically get
Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 1)
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
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
Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 6)
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
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
Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 5)
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
Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 4)
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