Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are we talking? When I talked to you five years ago, you were about a $10 million company. You had bootstrapped the company with a little bit of outside financing to almost $10 million in revenue in 2014. In 2018, what range are we talking?

Andrew Grauer: In 2018, we’re in the range of $50 million to $100 million in revenue. We’re growing fast in 2019 to reach over $100 million.

Sramana Mitra: What have you done financing strategy-wise since we talked?

Andrew Grauer: In 2014, we raised a little over $15 million with GSB as our lead investor. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The bulk of your revenue, however, is coming from subscription. It’s a pure subscription-based business model at this point, right?

Andrew Grauer: Correct. Our belief is that over the next decade, we believe that hundreds of millions of people will need to be able to learn and prove that they learned what they learned. That’s something that we believe will not change over the next 10 years. That’s really important for us because it’s something that we can hang our hat on – that we can dedicate our human capital or our cash capital to invest in it.

What we think might change in that framework is the institutions. Some may stay the same. Some may evolve. Some may disappear and many will come to new existence. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click on what you are doing to address this situation?

Andrew Grauer: We’ve evolved in building this learning platform. It’s a collection of millions of study resources. These are learning and teaching resources that are helping students in whatever they’re studying. The library has now grown to over 28 million resources. They’re either tagged as specific courses at school, specific subjects, or specific books. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 1)

We interviewed Andrew on the Entrepreneur Journeys series five years back when Course Hero was at around $10 million in revenue. In 2018, the company’s website had 300 million visits. Revenue is approaching $100 million. And as for comparables, Pluralsight has gone public and has validated the business model of all-you-can-eat subscription-based online learning.

Read on to deep dive into the trends for the sector.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to a bit of a recap. We had you over five years ago and you told us your entrepreneur journeys story. Give us a little recap and then let’s catch up. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the emerging trends in the space and what are the open problems? If you were starting a company today, where would you start one?

Dror Ben Naim: I’m a CEO of a company and I’ve got lot of people working for me. They would be very unhappy to hear that their CEO is starting another company!

Sramana Mitra: That’s not the question. The question is pointers for young entrepreneurs.

Dror Ben Naim: If I had to open another company, it would probably be the same company. In terms of what’s interesting in the market, that is a definition of what the market is. There’s a big trend in EdTech to evolve talent. They’re moving from K12 and higher education to corporate training. We >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are you seeing in terms of adoption in the school systems?

Dror Ben Naim: Everywhere we look, we’re seeing great interest in the area of personalized learning. It’s not just a buzzword. It’s a reality. What we also see is that certain schools are ahead of others. The classic example is to talk about ASU which is truly leading the pack in terms of their institutional adoption of innovative learning and teaching technologies and practices. It’s not just about adopting technologies; it’s mainly about changing your practice as an organization.

On the other side of the spectrum, we will see laggards who still don’t believe in digital learning. Professors are still upset that they’re expected to >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 3)

Dror Ben Naim: We can base adaptation on many factors. We can base it on how students are doing right now on the problems they are working on. We can adapt in a more complex way not only by looking at what they’re doing now but also by what kind of mastery level they have on the learning objective that they are currently dealing with.

For example, I’m giving you a quadratic problem. If you don’t know how to solve the quadratic problem, I can choose to give you an easier one. If I’ve got statistical information that shows that, overall, you’re doing poorly on quadratic, I may choose to take you down a different path which starts explaining in simpler ways how to solve quadratic. In this example, I talked about adapting the sequence of learning experiences. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it software or is it content that you’re delivering in a SaaS mode?

Dror Ben Naim: This is software. We’re talking about a tool for designers, developers, and subject matter experts.

Sramana Mitra: They are designing the content on your tool.

Dror Ben Naim: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a next-generation LMS. >>>