The Long Road to Edutainment: Tabula Digita CEO Ntiedo Etuk (Part 7)

SM: At this point it does not seem as though it would be difficult to raise more money. Are you going to be raising more money?

NE: The answer to that is maybe. I will definitely raise money as I see the consumer side take off. There are a lot of VCs who are interested in the consumer side, but we do not have all of the proof points and conversion rates on some of our programs because the textbook deal is just going out. I am not going to overemphasize that.

SM: I think that your district model is very scalable. If I had to guess, I would say your district deals are in the $500,000 range. That is enterprise sales and I do not see a problem with that.

NE: That is probably a good guess. You could put a lot of our deals in the $150,000 to $500,000 range. VCs do not understand the school system. It is a model that VCs get very concerned about because the money is coming from a school district instead of a business.

I have come to conclude that K-12 is the issue. They are very comfortable funding college and online universities. But VCs are especially skittish about content or instructional software at the K-12 level. They are more comfortable with something like a school network enterprise sale that is made to a state or a district that is looking to gather data on every child for No Child Left Behind.

SM: How does your actual business model work? Do you charge a flat fee for a certain number of students or do you have a SaaS model?

NE: It is an annual license per student, per subject. School districts will not make a commitment to future points in time because they could lose funding at any point. In many ways it is like a SaaS model. We have now split the model between school districts and business partnerships.

SM: You are in a proven business model stage. There is absolutely no reason that VCs, especially those here in the Valley, would not fund this company.

NE: I am willing to listen to VCs who understand what we are doing. The key for me is to find VCs who are going to join our team and be a part of it. If we cannot find the right partnership, then our company has the ability to do it ourselves.

We know the demand. We are talking about educational achievement as a lifestyle. We are talking about creating these games in different form factors. If DimensionU is where you have your educational personality, then all the points you get from our games come back to DimensionU. You get badges, so post them on Facebook where the kids are. If you move it into the cell phone space and other areas such as the xBox, it works there as well. It all comes back to an area where the kids sit. If they can start boasting about their achievements then it can become a lifestyle. It becomes global. Business companies in this space get it, and the schools get it.

SM: I think you could do this yourselves, but it would be a bit slower. You certainly have an enormous number of options. Congratulations, you have an amazing story and deserve your success!

This segment is part 7 in the series : The Long Road to Edutainment: Tabula Digita CEO Ntiedo Etuk
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