Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

The white-labeled education services business is scaling rapidly, and institutions of all sizes are building online programs. Learning House operates in the small, regional college and university segment, and has built a nice business.

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

Todd Zipper: I was born in New York. I went to University of Pennsylvania for my undergraduate and studied History and Economics. Like many people from Penn in the mid 90s, I made my way to Wall Street – to the Equity Research Department of Solomon Brothers, which eventually became Citi Group. >>>

Bootstrapping an Education Company: Tod Browndorf, CEO of Coggno (Part 2)

Tod Browndorf: I ended up moving back to California. I went into a consulting business with a friend of mine. He was basically in high-end contingent workforce business. This is in the late 90s. We placed all sorts of different types of contingent folks inside companies. As a result, we placed instructional designers into companies that were looking to create training initiatives.

For instance, a company like Washington Mutual, which doesn’t exist anymore, might want to train their 5,000 bank tellers on something. We would find the instructional designer or course developer. We would put them all together and find someone to deliver it. We deliver these packages to these organisations. That’s how I got into what I’m doing now.

Sramana Mitra: When was this company founded?

Tod Browndorf: Coggno was founded in 2007. >>>

Bootstrapping an Education Company: Tod Browndorf, CEO of Coggno (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Tod has built an interesting online education company focused on specific niche course types. Read on to learn more.

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

Tod Browndorf: Wow! We’re really going way back. I’m originally from the east coast. I was born in South Carolina but was raised in New York and New Jersey for most of my life. I lost my father when I was 10 and a half years old. I started working very early in life. He was in the manufacturing business. I started working early through school. I travelled the world pretty extensively. I lived in Australia for quite a while. I lived in the Middle East and eventually started my career in Finance. I started off as a trader on Wall Street, then later here in San Francisco.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for school? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: All right. I’m going to switch to my last question. Based on the trends you see on online learning, where do you see opportunities for entrepreneurs to start new companies?

Bharat Anand: Let me step back a bit. Technology is allowing us to create all sorts of new and interesting offerings. I wanted to focus a little bit on learners and their behaviours. What we’re seeing is that there are, at least, three kinds of things that individuals look for in online experiences. The first I’d probably describe as a question of relevance. It’s one thing to offer content. The content might be of terrific quality, but as a learner, I want to know why it’s relevant or important for me. That’s a question that I think is becoming increasingly important. It’s a trend that’s caused by the confluence of many things such as scarce time and greater competition. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t buy that this is going to scale necessarily.

Bharat Anand: Yes, go ahead.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying, it works to a point. I don’t think it’s going to, necessarily, scale to millions of numbers – the kind of numbers with which edX is working with right now. I don’t think the model you’re talking about is going to scale at those levels because for all the factors with which you are trying to preserve quality – the price, grade, and expectation of the interaction level. I think that works like an elite conversation mode. That does not work in a mass crowd mode.

Bharat Anand: I think i disagree with that. When we think about peer conversation, obviously, you can’t have ten thousand people on the same platform asking each others questions. We’ve experimented with the right size of the cohort. Where we’ve converged to is somewhere between 300 to 500 people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ron Olsen, CEO of Remote Learner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Any other trends that you want to highlight?

Ron Olsen: What we’re seeing from our clients is really a stronger push towards the user experience and identifying this learning solution as ours. Particularly in the corporate space, how do our training and learning solutions directly tie in to our own brand? How do we make it easy and accessible for our folks? We have a fair amount of clients where we’re building near-custom applications around the needs of specific companies and their training needs. We’re seeing a straight grab-it-off-the-shelf, and the deploy it approach just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Sramana Mitra: In the portfolio of clients that you’re serving and the kinds of scenarios that you’re discovering where you need solutions to, are there specific tools and technologies that you see the need for that is not in the market that you would encourage entrepreneurs to develop? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on that selection process? If it’s an open crowd, this is not going to happen. Unless there’s some sort of a screening criteria that selects a group of people of a certain intellectual level, background, etc, I don’t think you will get that. What is happening in the selection process?

Bharat Anand: Selection is actually happening on three different levels. It’s not just the admission selection that you’re referring to. Clearly, that’s one bit of it. This is online so we have the luxury of being a little more flexible in terms of how we think about who qualifies for taking the course versus a residential classroom where there’s a real hard constraint. If you take in one person, it comes at the expense of taking in another person. In online learning, in some sense, there’s no capacity constraint so we can afford to be flexible.

I don’t think the admissions selection is what actually drives this necessarily. I think there are two other things. One, which we’ve probably learned about over the last several years, is price. You’re offering these courses for a fee. It actually is a selection mechanism as well which is, “If I’m going to spend $1,500 for a program, that implicitly is indicating some kind of commitment or motivation that I have.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ron Olsen, CEO of Remote Learner (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you give us an example of some of these additional technologies beyond Learning Management Systems that are coming into play in that context?

Ron Olsen: Some of it is technology-based and some of it is services-based. From a technology standpoint, it’s not just enough to have a Learning Management System, but the reporting and analytics are one of the big buzzwords over the last couple of years with respect to really getting a deeper understanding of what’s going on with your learners. In the corporate space for example, being able to report compliance and demonstrate success of delivering the learning has been critical. There’s a big push right now on the analytics side.

How can you take the data that’s being gathered within a learning management system about specific user activities? How often are they on the system? How much do they participate in discussion forums? What level of understanding do they have about what they’re talking about in those forums, and how to translate that and help educators really understand that true learning is happening, and not necessarily just simply check-a-box assignment? >>>