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
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
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
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
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
Donald Trump wants to restrict immigrants, especially those from Muslim countries, and especially from Iran. Well, read this Iranian entrepreneur’s story. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and in what kind of background? Farnaz Ronaghi: I was born in Tehran, Iran. I