Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch the line of questioning from what you are doing to more of the industry trend question. What open problems do you see in the industry right now where a new entrepreneur would be starting a company today? Instead of being 12 years into Course Hero, if you were starting a company today, what problem would you go out to try to solve?

Andrew Grauer: First of all, I would start with a methodology. I truly believe that anyone should start with identifying a real problem in the world. Hopefully, it passes the toothbrush test. That is the problem that exists frequently in one’s life. When that problem comes up in one’s life, it’s a big problem. Then third, it’s not a problem just experienced by oneself but many people in the world.

Second, it tends to be quite useful at the beginning to be solving one’s own problem and be able to empathize with it. That is useful. If not, then really make sure that one gets to the root of understanding the customer who’s dealing with the problem and that it is real. Is it solvable? Above all else, that approach is true.

As we’ve evolved how we understand students and educators, how we approach articulating our mission and vision, and how we’re going to solve the problem changes over time. Generally, the high level problem that we’re solving is the same. That, above all else, is really important. Top of mind, outside of education, talent is the key to everything. People make the decisions. What are the three things we do out of the one thousand possible things that we can do?

Those decisions are the most independent of variables and defining how a company creates its vision, mission, strategy, and execution plan, and how it gets result. In the space of being able to identify talent, recruit talent, facilitate high-performance from people on a team. Where there’s a gap in talent, closing that gap. I think people are the most valuable assets that we have.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve provided a lot of best practices of entrepreneurship points of view. I’m looking for very specific. I’m looking for one or two open problems that you have spotted because you are immersed in the online education space. What are one or two open problems that deserve to solved?

Andrew Grauer: There’s a major advance in artificial intelligence. Whether you’re dealing with applications of machine learning or natural language processing, we have this trend of getting enough interactions between tens of millions of people, then individual pieces of content and tracks of content, understanding and processing that information to be able to help students learn more, better, and faster.

There’s a huge opportunity in education now that there’s enough data to play in the big data space. You can apply these technologies to this opportunity. In our space, we see that. There’s a very specific in our world but there’s a lot of data that exists outside of Course Hero. There’s a trend to be able to apply this technology to this industry. It’s extremely challenging. That’s something really important.

The second one is, there continues to be a huge gap in how valuable and how high expectations we have for our teachers in the United States and globally. We are not dedicating and allocating our resources accordingly. I believe it’s our job to allocate resources to better causes. I think there’s a massive arbitrage opportunity to allocate more and better resources in helping our teachers succeed.

There’s a great business opportunity as well behind this to be able to make more accessible great teachers and great learning resources from siloed places across levels and across geographies. That’s something that we see. It’s a huge space. We are dedicated to it a lot. It’s also very vast.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero
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