Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of other vendors that you compete with, whom do you see in deals?

Eric Burns: Initially, we were quite afraid of what seemed like the incumbent player in the lecture capture market in the higher education, which is a company called Tegrity. I think it’s safe to say that we badly disrupted their market. We came in with what we believed as a superior technology, a better workflow and data model, and particularly support organization. We went after their core business, which was software-based lecture capture using web cams and cameras. Over the first couple of years, it was very much trench warfare, trying to win deals, and flying places for presentations. >>>

Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So roughly speaking, it is end of 2007. How much venture capital did you raise at that point and how long did it take you to get the first product out of the door?

Eric Burns: We had an extreme advantage here, which is that we have the opportunity to research that market to understand what classroom capture required under the CMU umbrella for several years.

Sramana Mitra: You did all the research and validation work before the company was founded. It was all happening on a different clock – not on the venture clock.

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Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are you assuming that there are three parallel streams being picked up? Where is the mixing happening? If you say there’s no post-production, is the technology determining how to do the mixing or which stream to use in the edited version or are you showing all three screens in different windows?

Eric Burns: It’s a bit of both. One of the things that we tried to do is infer as much as we can about the content that should be shown based on the instructor’s behavior. For example, if you’re presenting PowerPoint and you begin capturing your screen, we’re going to automatically switch and show you the screen even if the slide is still up. >>>

Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: They basically asked you to become the CEO of this entity that was already funded?

Eric Burns: I actually became the Chief Technology Officer because my competencies at that time were that of an engineer. I’m now the Chief Product Officer and I’ve done a lot of the CEO duties. We have this unorthodox operating structure that ended up working very well for us. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Kurt Kirstein, Dean of School of Management, City University of Seattle (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other major trend in online education that you are observing that is worth discussing?

Kurt Kirstein: We’ve talked about online education from an academic perspective. The one thing that I’m also seeing is that online education is now being utilized more and more for corporate training. We’ve done online corporate training quite often. What we’re seeing more and more is the online model being offered by training companies and universities. There’s a reason why this could really be a much bigger force than it is. >>>

Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 2)

Eric Burns: I got to work on some interesting things like building a search engine from scratch, designing a large-scale storage system, and building a UI—basically, building an entire system from the ground-up. One of the other projects that I got involved in, even as early as 1998, was capturing lectures in a classroom. CMU [Carnegie Mellon University] is a teaching institution where a lot of great presentations are given every day. Initially, e-commerce wanted to experiment with online class delivery. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Kurt Kirstein, Dean of School of Management, City University of Seattle (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This discussion is interesting in terms of paradigms of how online learning is going to progress. This is the paradigm that is going to be desirable across the board. It also helps people engage better when you have a combination of self service which offers flexibility and then you have the interactive session which simulates the experience of working with instructors in real time. That captures all the different best practices that human beings need to learn. That’s my assessment. Is that in synch with what you’re thinking? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Kurt Kirstein, Dean of School of Management, City University of Seattle (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What we hear from people is that the flexibility of the web self-service mode curriculum is very attractive to them because it’s something that they can do at their own time. Many of our entrepreneurs are practicing entrepreneurs. They will do the curriculum at their own time. In any case, the flexibility is very attractive. I imagine that is the case in your audience as well because they are working professionals. But there are now technologies to do interactive stuff online as well with actual instructors. That brings the online teaching experience full circle.

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