Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 1)

This interview is a great discussion about the various experiments going on in the world of higher education and how online learning is playing out there.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to what you’re doing at Sloan vis-à-vis executive education.

Peter Hirst: I’m the Director of the Executive Education program here at the MIT Sloan School. Essentially, what we do is run short, non-degree courses for individual executives and Senior Managers. We also do this for companies in a more customized >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You were able to build a minimum viable product, start monetizing it right away, and then, scale it from there.

Katya Andresen: Not right away. Most of the overnight successes have a five to seven years lag.

Sramana Mitra: That’s my point. How do you finance five to seven years of development?

Katya Andresen: We did it slowly with MVPs and self funding through our own growth. It was really hard work and that’s why we didn’t scale faster.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The concern is that it is complicated and expensive to build these programs. Then, if everybody wants everything for free, how do these businesses sustain themselves? That’s the real question that I’m extremely worried about.

Katya Andresen: I think no one ever jumps to the opportunity to pay for something, right? If it is incredibly hard to build, it’s a big investment, and if you’ve invested in high-quality learning that is not equally replicated, that has a lot of value and people do pay for it. I don’t know what the amazing, fabulous, and free learning experiences are out there that are as good as those other ones.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve taken seven years to build $17 million in revenue. That’s not a timeline that fits in the venture capital framework. The venture capitalists are looking to build hundred million dollar companies in seven years. This is what I’ve been really concerned about. For a long time, venture capitalists basically just decided not to invest in educational technology. Some sectors like adult education and for-profit universities got some money. But largely, educational technology was not a segment that people were willing to invest in.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’m very interested in the business model. That’s one of the issues that we’re seeing in the Edtech industry. The business models are weak.

Katya Andresen: I agree with you. It can be really hard to monetize a social network. That is not our model. Our model is that we have consumers – parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. They want to pay for their kids to have access to content and to be able to safely connect around that. That’s a proven revenue stream for us. The other side of our model’s emphasis is not that we have this relationship with Smithsonian. It’s just a nice thing that allows us to develop things and offer them for free in some cases. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to double-click down on some of these use cases and examples. Why don’t we pick three or four different scenarios, which are really interesting ways in which your customers and users are using the products.

Katya Andresen: I’ll give you a couple of relevant examples. We have a product coming out in about a week or two, which we did in partnership with a startup in Palo Alto called Kindoma. It’s an app that accesses your family graph. Again, it’s this idea of great digital content to read and share, and at the same time allowing family members to interact around that content with the child safely online. This is the one I referenced before. It’s called Story Bug and it allows me, in real time with video, to read a book together. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 1)

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It almost always is the case that Edtech companies don’t have solid monetization models. Cricket media is experimenting with models that are worth understanding. This interview also further elaborates on the issues raised in one of my articles, Are We In A Golden Age of Edtech?

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to Cricket Media. Tell us what you do and what trends you are aligning with.

Katya Andresen: We’re a children’s education media company. We provide award-winning content for learning on a safe and secure learning network. >>>

Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That’s not necessarily the only kind of companies that VCs back. VCs also back enterprise software that delivers that kind of growth. In fact, I would say the IT industry’s bread and butter success have been from enterprise software – not from consumer software.

Eric Burns: I guess the thing that may have stood out to some of these VCs is that our renewal rate was extremely high at 93%. When you have a SaaS business and you’re getting that revenue again every year and you devote the new spillover to new customer acquisition, you have a nice virtuous cycle.

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