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 >>>

Serial Entrepreneur From Finland: Verto CEO Hannu Verkasalo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There are lots of lead customers, which is really important for a startup.

Hannu Verkasalo: You’re right. Let’s talk about the incident on mobile. Many of these companies including Google and Facebook want to support new innovations and new ideas. In many cases, they use you because they want to bring something new to the market. In Europe, people care more about the name and the reputation. They are more conservative. Big companies are less willing to spend money on a new product.

Sramana Mitra: 2010 was when the acquisition happened? >>>

Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Eventually, where did you raise money from?

Allan Wille: The Series A lead was from Canada. That was from OMERS. OMERS, of course, has a big history with Hootsuite and Shopify. They know that space very well. Our seed round had both Canadian and US investors. I don’t know if you know Maya Hayman at Converge?

Sramana Mitra: I don’t.

Allan Wille: She’s amazing. She was instrumental in helping us get the seed round together. She participated in all of our follow-on rounds. Just recently in January, we announced our Series B, which was fantastic as well. We closed a $12 million round. It’s a story of a lot of perseverance and listening to >>>

Serial Entrepreneur From Finland: Verto CEO Hannu Verkasalo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How many investors did you have and how much money did you raise?

Hannu Verkasalo: We raised $2 million.

Sramana Mitra: From investors in Finland?

Hannu Verkasalo: Yes, we had two investors from Finland and a couple of angels. I put in quite a bit of money. Knowing what I know now and through the experience of building Verto, I think we could have built it into a much bigger business. >>>