1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s the conversation I had with Andrew in the context of Course Hero. He was trying to figure out a strategy for leveraging that trend of the celebrity teacher or the superstar teacher as you called – leveraging expertise, creating, and giving people a platform to teach on the Course Hero platform by riding on that trend. I think that is a major trend as well.

Deborah Quazzo: Everyone’s a teacher. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are some other success criteria and failure criteria in your pattern matching? You talked extensively about teacher adoption and viral spread and then monetization through parents as one of the pieces of success versus the failure criteria of trying to spell one by one to professors or teachers or school administrations. Are there any other such patterns in either direction that you have synthesized?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures (Part 4)

Deborah Quazzo: Andrew removed friction. Going back to the dark ages when I was in college, note sharing among students has existed forever but what Andrew did was move it online and allow students to grade each other in terms of the quality of their delivery.

He developed a tutoring module so that strong academic students could then tutor other students as peers. It’s now a subscription-based product that offers all kinds of supplemental study support for students.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can I stop you there for a second? I have a few questions. You’re looking for free distribution to teachers and students and monetization through parents. How do teachers, students, and parents find out about the product?

Deborah Quazzo: It was a viral adoption. In the case of Class Dojo, it was seated amongst teachers. They develop certain champions within school buildings. It’s a product for K-8, not K-12, but it was very viral.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Our interest is primarily in actual seed and Series A. Let’s focus on that discussion. What do you like to see by way of proof points before you’re willing to write a check?

Deborah Quazzo: It’s interesting because we’re sector experts and we’ve been working in education technology for well over 20 years. I have a partner in Silicon Valley, Michael Moe, who wrote the original thesis for a Wall Street investment category around digital education in the mid-1990s.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Deborah Quazzo was recorded in June 2020.

Deborah Quazzo is Managing Partner at GSV Ventures, a fund focused on online education ventures. This is a very good discussion on patterns of success and failure in the sector and what investors are gravitating towards.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vincent Diallo of Interlace Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think COVID has changed the dynamics to weigh heavier on e-commerce and online shopping. If you had to choose one channel, you need to be digital more than the local and physical.

I think this is a very big shift and as you said rightly, I think this is a five-year shift that has happened in five weeks. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vincent Diallo of Interlace Ventures (Part 3)

Vincent Diallo: I could also mention Singuli, which is an investment we did in January. They’re active in forecasting with the first end goal in fashion that is also touching FMCG somehow. We suffered this pain as an operator. We know the risk in that inventory in terms of performance of the company.

One of the permanent questions was, “How do we improve the quality of our forecast?” What we did for them is exactly in line with our approach and positioning. Something I did not mention is that Interlace is not only focused on the investment space but is also verticalized in a way.