1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures (Part 4)

Deborah Quazzo: Andrew removed friction. Going back to the dark ages when I was in college, note sharing among students has existed forever but what Andrew did was move it online and allow students to grade each other in terms of the quality of their delivery.

He developed a tutoring module so that strong academic students could then tutor other students as peers. It’s now a subscription-based product that offers all kinds of supplemental study support for students.

It’s all about student success. Andrew would see where they would get stuck and help them get unstuck and move to a successful academic outcome. They’ve also seen tremendous growth during the COVID crisis as students have all gone online.

The other piece of the business that he has added in more recent years is bringing faculty onto the platform. He has over 40,000 faculty members from all over who are sharing information, sharing their materials, and benefiting from the elevation that this platform gives.

He created this frictionless layer that hovers above the university not unlike the K-12 system selling into the higher education system in a traditional way. Sometimes you can sell to the university itself into a procurement area at the university. But often you have to sell professor by professor or department by the department which is very laborious and a very expensive sales investment. It’s what the traditional publishers had always done.

Andrew has no salespeople. He had campus champions in various places to support Course Hero on campus. He created this frictionless layer that hovers above the university and allows students to tap in successfully.

Also, it’s a premium model and a lot of students use it and get the benefit of it for free. They can also get three benefits by contributing to their products. It’s a mix of free and paid utilization on the platform although conversion to pay is quite robust.

Sramana Mitra: It’s an awesome company. My last conversation with Andrew was I think last fall. We had coffee in Cafe Borrone and I think the company was already at $50 million. 

Deborah Quazzo: It’s well above that. It would have been more than that in the fall. It’s a very successful business. It’s also very capital efficient. I went in as an angel investor in the one institutional round that they did and when we raised our fund.

I put the angel investment into the fund by buying shares from founders because no capital was needed. They have recently gone into unicorn status and raised capital for different purposes like M&A to give employee liquidity. In addition to everything else, he built a highly efficient business from a profitability standpoint. 

Sramana Mitra: That’s when I first met him – when he was still bootstrapping the company. He went very far bootstrapping that company. It is a wonderful case study of Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later which has been our mantra more or less in this platform. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures
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