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?

497th Roundtable Recording on August 6, 2020: With Mike Edelhart, Social Starts and Joyance Partners

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: August 6 – Covid-era Startup Trends

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Mike Edelhart, Managing Partner at Social Starts and Joyance Partners. Mike shared some fascinating developments from their portfolio, especially a healthcare startup that is thriving in the Covid-era.

QuiDeli
As for entrepreneur pitches, this week we had Avijnan Gupta from Kolkata, India pitching QuiDeli, a company that is less than two months old and is already in revenue. Excellent entrepreneurship.

DrPrax
Vinita Navadgi from Pune, India, pitching DrPrax, also a revenue-generating company.

Krisin
Gowri Sinha from Gurgaon, India, pitched Krisin, an idea-stage venture that needs some positioning work.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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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.