Thought Leaders in Online Education: Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable (Part 1)

Blake discusses a unique area of online education: training for licenses of various kinds of vehicles, etc. using mobile apps.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Aceable.

Blake Garrett: I’m the Founder of Aceable. Aceable is focused on licensure and certification training. We created a mobile-first platform that allows people to take licensure and certification training every year. We want to be the platform that they go through for that training to help advance their careers. We started with a very niche area of >>>

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From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you go into corporate sales situations, whom do you see in deals?

Farnaz Ronaghi: That’s an interesting question. I was telling you that we don’t exist as a tool in the corporate landscape. That’s really true. There’s another tool called Intrepid Learning that we sometimes run into. They are similar to us in the sense that they are not a learning management system but they are a learning delivery tool that focuses on gamification. We are a learning design and delivery tool. First of all, we have a great UX and a great UI. That, by itself, makes learning a lot more interesting.

Second, we bring the community to the class. Teams and groups are embedded into the learning experience. We run into them once in a while. Most of the time, >>>

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your hypothesis was that you’re going to be selling to the corporate learning environment, did that pan out?

Farnaz Ronaghi: It’s too early to say if it has panned out completely, but it has. The mix of our customers in the past two years has mainly been universities. Then there are lots of non-profits. We have a lot of good offerings that could make a huge impact. There are lots of these non-profits that want to help others make an impact. They want to do it by offering online classes. The third has been corporations.

We work with Comcast, GE and a lot of different companies. It was interesting going into enterprises, though. Pricing wasn’t the only >>>

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The pivot story is very interesting. I actually think this is a very helpful discussion because the online education space is still struggling to find business models that work. Coursera and Udacity have had a lot of problems finding scalable business models. Could you work me through the other experiments you did and what you learned from them?

Farnaz Ronaghi: Even in the second year, it was mainly a course business. While we were doing that, we started noticing that inside the universities, we always get bought by Professional Education units. No university wanted to use us for their regular on-campus classes. Why? Because of several reasons. Universities like solutions that integrate well with their register’s system. >>>

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? >>>

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 >>>