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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 2)

Peter Hirst: From an education standpoint, the input doesn’t look that dissimilar from a cost base. The other approach is the MOOCs. Often, they are free and are low-cost courses. We’re beginning to see some executive education versions of those. As I go around and talk to my peers in other schools and in schools developing those larger scale offerings, at the moment it’s still quite early days. They are still seeing significant investment of time and effort to produce really high-quality versions of those massive courses.

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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 entrenched. To some extent, these vendors that provide curriculum materials to the schools are quite entrenched. If you look at the financials of those companies, they are not attractive financials.

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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 three to five every week. We have many, many more in the queue. That is where we are in terms of growth of the company. >>>

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 program here at the MIT Sloan School. Essentially, what we do is run short, non-degree courses for individual executives and Senior Managers. We also do this for companies in a more customized >>>

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 Andresen: We did it slowly with MVPs and self funding through our own growth. It was really hard work and that’s why we didn’t scale faster.

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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 lost, damaged, or compromised. In our case, we virtualize the data as a way of storing it. That allows us to disassociate the properties from what happens in the physical world. That enables greater efficiency. Our competitors create reliability by creating multiple copies. We make reliability by not making multiple copies. It’s just a different way to storing data at a very fundamental level. >>>

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 is incredibly hard to build, it’s a big investment, and if you’ve invested in high-quality learning that is not equally replicated, that has a lot of value and people do pay for it. I don’t know what the amazing, fabulous, and free learning experiences are out there that are as good as those other ones.

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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 relationships with investors and a track record of making them money or they have been able to bootstrap using services to prove domain expertise. What is your opinion here? Is there another way to do it? >>>