Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This journey of getting to profitability happened on a total of about $2.5 million?

Michael Hughes: All in all, it was a little bit more than that. It would probably be about $4 million. I would need to go and check.

Sramana Mitra: Now we are in 2010?

Michael Hughes: Yes. We’ve got to profitability. In 2011, the business was doing pretty well, but the growth rate had gone way down. With the team that we had, we hunkered down. We didn’t hire anybody else. We didn’t spend a dime on marketing and cut everywhere we could. In about 2011 as we got to profitability, we were able to invest a little bit of that money that was left over into experimenting with our sales team and doing various other things. We >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Timeline-wise, from when you started with the initial investment and went through these pivots, how much time has passed?

Michael Hughes: We started in 2003. We realized we were running out of time in late 2005. We pivoted in 2006. We started selling with this Blackberry bit. We had very strong growth in 2007, moving into 2008. We had a little bit of money that came from Andy Scott who was a friend from school who had made a lot of money doing GSM licenses in emerging markets. He came in and invested about $1 million.

We had another friend of ours who was someone I knew from my time in Spain. He went on to start one of the two VC funds in Spain. They invested about >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you raise from this round? It sounds like it was a friends and family angels round.

Michael Hughes: It was about $400,000.

Sramana Mitra: What did you tell these people who invested that first $400,000?

Michael Hughes: We used to be called Ring2 Communications back then. The original idea we had was to basically turn your computer into a giant speed dial. If you send me an email and if your signature had your phone number, we enabled dialing on double-clicking that number. >>>

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 6)

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 in the sense that they are not a learning management system but they are a learning delivery tool that focuses on gamification. We are a learning design and delivery tool. First of all, we have a great UX and a great UI. That, by itself, makes learning a lot more interesting.

Second, we bring the community to the class. Teams and groups are embedded into the learning experience. We run into them once in a while. Most of the time, >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you guys come together to start LoopUp?

Michael Hughes: We first met each other from 1995 to 1997 at Stanford. I had this fellowship, which meant that I had to go back to the UK. I went back for about nine months and then moved back out to California. I then joined a European-led startup called Pagoo. Pagoo was an early-stage VoIP player.

Back in the day when everybody was using dial-up to get on the Internet, you could not answer people calling you. What these guys built was a very simple system which basically redirected your incoming phone call, answer that call in the cloud, take a voice message, and then send that voice message back to a little app that would pop up on >>>

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. >>>