Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is funded by Menlo?

Karl Mehta: Menlo was one of the investors, but the round was led by SoftBank Capital.

Sramana Mitra: What, in a nutshell, is the premise of EdCast?

Karl Mehta: EdCast is a knowledge network for anyone to develop lifelong learning as a passion. We have a knowledge economy and things are rapidly changing. In order to keep pace with whatever field that you’re working on, you want to get smarter every day. You need a network that is going to bring you the most personalized content in your field. Let’s say you’re into learning Big Data or even non-technology, you can go to EdCast and follow a channel on architecture, for example.

Everyday, we bring you the content from all over the web through our search and crawler technology. We also bring you content from some of the well-known influencers in that field of architecture. It empowers people to get smarter in whatever they’re working on. It empowers them for high performance, and also gives them the ability to become an influencer in their field. Ultimately, you can only be recognized if you are an influencer in whatever you do.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model? Who is paying? How does the royalty flow?

Karl Mehta: It’s a two-sided model just like PayPal. The consumer side is free. The influencer side is free. The enterprise side is a paid model. We have large Fortune 500 companies who use EdCast as their knowledge network internally for their employees and also for their external audience, like channel partners. Every enterprise gets their own private network on EdCast.

It’s just like Slack where you would could create your own private network. It has complete security of the four walls. It has single sign-on but you still have access to external influencers. If my enterprise clients have a channel on entrepreneurship, they can get access to an external influencer like yourself.

Sramana Mitra: Essentially, you’re doing corporate learning. You’re doing corporate training, let’s say, in a federated way.

Karl Mehta: That’s correct. We’re disrupting the corporate learning space, which is a $65 billion market, that is driven by old technologies and paradigm. It’s either instructor-led training or an LMS-centric. What we are bringing is an influencer-led and peer-to-peer learning in an informal style that keeps your user engaged.

Our philosophy is that if you take one or two courses in the whole year, that doesn’t make you effective. That knowledge can evaporate very fast. What you need is daily practice of 15 to 20 minutes. It’s like a tennis player. If you practice every day, you develop that muscle memory. We all need that same thing in whatever field we are in. It’s a new way of learning, which we call micro-learning.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast
1 2 3 4 5 6