Helping Failing High School Students Pass: Revolution Prep Founders Ramit Varma and Jake Neuberg (Part 6)

SM: You have scaled to a $13 million business over the past seven years. What has been challenging in that process?

RV: The most challenging aspect has been our individual personal growth. When we first started the business we did everything, including the teaching. We went from a two-person team to a ten-person company with $1 million in revenue. Now we are running a 100-person organization doing $13 million in revenue.

The personal growth has definitely been the hardest. We had nobody above us to guide us through this process. We got our advice from each other. Our goal is to build this company into a billion-dollar company. For that reason, we have focused on bringing in top talent for the past two years. We have top-notch board members and upper management.

Our CFO has been the CFO of a $200 million company. We have brought in sales personnel from the publishing industry, and our marketing lead is the former chief marketing officer of Belkin. We are now working hard to get our management team to gel and drive the growth of the company.

SM: Who have you brought on the board?

RV: We have two official board members. Alan Arkatov was one of the pioneers in online education. He founded OnlineLearning.net, which he sold to Sylvan in 2001. He has deep experience with online learning and the world of education. He is on the board of several charter organizations and is very active with the new school movement.

Joel Kurtzman is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review. He was head of the Knowledge Management Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers and is now a fellow at the Milken Institute. He has been an active board member and advisor of ours. The nature of our business allows us to interact on a personal level with the children of some very powerful people. This has given us a broad, informal advisors’ network.

SM: Where are you headquartered?

RV: We are based in Santa Monica, but we make our way to the Bay Area a lot.

SM: What kind of success metrics have you been able to gather from your current online deployments?

RV: We are fortunate to be tied to the high school exit exams, because the pass rate of that exam is a very clear metric. For any district, there are have pass rates for students who do not use our program and pass rates for students who do. For kids who have already failed the exam, re-test pass rates for the eleventh and twelfth graders tend to be in the 25% range without us. We take that into the high 30% range.

SM: Are school districts primarily using this only for students who have failed?

RV: That is correct. That is a big area for our growth. Students are eligible to use our program once they fail in tenth grade. We are trying to get them to be allowed to start using our program in ninth grade so they don’t fail.

SM: How is your sales force organized to sell to the school districts?

RV: We have a VP of sales and five sales reps in California. They call on curriculum directors and they do direct sales. We do demos of the program and professional development. For the past two years we have only had two reps in California selling this product.

SM: How many school districts are in California?

RV: California has local education agencies. They are the ones that get the actual funding. There are 1,200 of them in the state. Our TAM in terms of the number of students is 2 million. There are 30 other states that have high school exit exams, so once we start continuing the push on this we will take our product to other states.

The new Secretary of Education has made a big push for national standards. We are keeping a very close eye on this national standards debate. As soon as something shakes out, we will tune our products to meet those standards.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Helping Failing High School Students Pass: Revolution Prep Founders Ramit Varma and Jake Neuberg
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