1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity (Part 5)

Heather Hiles: The problem with community colleges is, even after you have AA and even after Bachelor, they don’t get themselves hired. They don’t find themselves having industry capabilities. One can earn $100,000 being a Salesforce Administrator. I can teach you in probably four months. You can’t learn that at a community college. You could get an AA degree, but you still don’t have a way to earn a good living.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s my point. You can learn Salesforce Administration through Udemy.

Heather Hiles: It can be supplemental. We do serve a number of community colleges and state universities. We also serve a lot of governments where people in different departments need to learn the latest in cyber security. Cyber security is growing. You’ve got to have fresh skills all the time. Udemy is a great supplement to foundational education for the government as well as for enterprises. That’s why we have over 8,000 companies paying for their employees to have seat licenses at Udemy so they can keep upskilling.

As every entrepreneur understands, you’ve got to learn new things. You got to have a place where you can go that’s easy, quick, and affordable. Most institutions are not set up to meet the needs of entrepreneurship.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve had a lot of conversations in the last six months with deans of universities and colleges. Especially on the business side of technology entrepreneurship. In One Million by One Million, we happen to have the largest collection of case studies in technology entrepreneurship in the early stage. Nobody has this.

We are looking for a way to work with these universities with a pricing model which works for them. You brought up the issue of community colleges not having a budget. Outside America, people are paying a lot less for their degrees. Pricing becomes an issue. This is a market where we would be very interested in working with Udemy because we do know how to teach technology entrepreneurship really well.

Heather Hiles: We’re seeing different kinds of communities get through subscriptions and various clustering of content in Udemy. As you’re saying, having talked to and supported thousands of entrepreneurs now, there are certain things that everybody faces. Product-market fit is one of the first big walls that every person hits. You got to get over that or you just have to shut down. There are things that are really muscle memory and just what happens to startups. There could be really nice well-curated channels for a lot of the tech entrepreneurship content.

Sramana Mitra: Just to close out on that train of thought, we also work with other minority communities. My nugget on that is if you bootstrap first, get to product-market fit, get some ARR, you can raise money. That bootstrap first and raise money later wisdom has to be ingrained and there are mechanics in doing that. It makes a real difference.

Heather Hiles: It is the only way that people of color and women can raise money. We just have to start from what we know is fact and help people succeed. One of the things that I’ve seen that has been detrimental, especially to black women is, there was a time when there were so many pitch competitions. I started seeing entrepreneurs who were living off of pitch money rather than sales.

Sramana Mitra: Very bad habit.

Heather Hiles: You could be a year down the road and you haven’t made progress. Those are the things we have to watch for in our community.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity
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