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 non-profits. We have a lot of good offerings that could make a huge impact. There are lots of these non-profits that want to help others make an impact. They want to do it by offering online classes. The third has been corporations.

We work with Comcast, GE and a lot of different companies. It was interesting going into enterprises, though. Pricing wasn’t the only >>>

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 in what kind of background?

Michael Hughes: I grew up in Wales, United Kingdom in a town of 170,000 people. I was there for the first 18 years of my life.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for your education? >>>

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 what you learned from them?

Farnaz Ronaghi: Even in the second year, it was mainly a course business. While we were doing that, we started noticing that inside the universities, we always get bought by Professional Education units. No university wanted to use us for their regular on-campus classes. Why? Because of several reasons. Universities like solutions that integrate well with their register’s system. >>>

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 college education. Coursera had a lot of classes at that level but on general topics all over the place. There’s Udacity who was focusing on Computer Science education.

Our classes in the beginning were similar. Because you can’t really teach soft skills like leadership and innovation, you can’t teach it without human interaction >>>

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 talking? How long from the time you launched this did it take for 40,000 people to come together? How did people find out about it? >>>

Serial Entrepreneur From Finland: Verto CEO Hannu Verkasalo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The first year of being in the market was in 2012?

Hannu Verkasalo: 2013 was when we started building the product. End of 2014 was when we launched the product. Now we have had two full years in the market.

Sramana Mitra: When did Cisco come on board?

Hannu Verkasalo: They came on board in 2014.

Sramana Mitra: How many such customers did you have in 2015? >>>

Serial Entrepreneur From Finland: Verto CEO Hannu Verkasalo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take this step by step. You had this conversation with Facebook and it triggered a thought in your mind in 2012.

Hannu Verkasalo: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground? You had capital, so you could start it on your own.

Hannu Verkasalo: That’s right. I put in a million dollars and started building a technical team. These were people I knew from the past.

Sramana Mitra: From Finland?

Hannu Verkasalo: From Finland. >>>

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 1)

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 came to the United States for graduate school. I was accepted in Stanford University for a Master’s degree in Management Science and Engineering. That is where I met my adviser and co-founder. After that, I started my Ph.D. My work was related to the intersection of computer science and social science similar to human-computer interaction but was more focused on incentives and game theory. One of the pain points that I had >>>