Building an AI EdTech Company: College Guidance Network CEO Jon Carson (Part 1)

Jon has identified a gigantic hole in high school college counseling and is plugging it with AI.
You have read interviews with the entrepreneurs behind Empowerly and Prepory, companies going after the same problem, but with more manual solutions. College Guidance Network is doing so with AI.

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: And what did you end up doing to address that itch?

Hanmei Wu: Well, it wasn’t very planned out, to be honest. I was still quite young, only a few years out of college. I was just kind of doing it on my own at first, maybe just charging an hourly amount. I was helping with essays and things like that. Then I decided that I want to get some other people to help me with this.

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How Should Colleges Be Kept Accountable for the Success of Their Students?

Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 1)

Mass customization has been the holy grail of fashion e-commerce for the longest time. Meet Kyle Vucko, CEO of Indochino, a men’s fashion company that has cracked the code.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Kyle Vucko: I grew up in Victoria. It’s a smaller town on the west coast of Canada. I ended up going to the University of Victoria where I met my good friend Heikal Gani, who is my co-founder. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You focused on getting to a business model. Part of the problem at the Valley right now is that people just go and build things without figuring out a business model. As a result, they have huge burn rates and no monetization model. That doesn’t create a sustainable company. That whole model is predicated upon some fluke acquisition. Otherwise, you cannot sustain that model. Your model is much more sustainable.

You said you were very conscious about the burn rate. Can you talk a little bit about how you built your team? What areas did you put in people?

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 6)

Andrew Grauer: Then, moving on to the other question on the engagement level, engagement is quite high. I think the difference between other online education sites like Coursera and edX is that their users are looking just to learn for learning sake. Our supplemental resources are really focused on helping students who are already enrolled in the course and there is a requirement where there’s a large incentive for them to complete and do well in the course. If they can really get an edge and make sure that they master the course, this will be a major motivation to use Course Hero.

Sramana Mitra: Are you saying that your 150,000 subscribers are all active users?

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ in Revenue Without Dropping Out: Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: From the end user’s perspective, is the end user using your platform largely in a web self-service mode? What percentage of that user uses self-service versus a tutor assisted usage?

Andrew Grauer: It’s probably going to be something like 70% to 80% self-service.

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to gauge how big the tutoring phenomenon is in this community versus people just using the materials and teaching themselves.

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