Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado (Part 2)

Niall McKinney: If you think about how we learn at school or college, we don’t expect children to learn on their own at their own pace. We send them to school. We send people to college to learn with other people. There is a social normative effect that you want to keep up. You want to be able to participate in group discussions.

In most of our deployments, we create cohorts of people who go through the learning at the same time. When most online education companies are created, they saw the opportunity for scalable learning, but what they lost was that human motivation for learning together, to be able to share the insights you’re getting, and the motivation of keeping up.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado (Part 1)

Avado is a $100M online learning company that focuses on group learning for enterprises. The discussion includes several exciting open problems that are ripe for new entrepreneurs to step in.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as Avado to our audience. 

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting topic that you bring up. There are some observations I have on that. One is that some of the rock star teachers at top universities have their very popular courses on edX and Coursera. Then you have platforms like what LinkedIn is doing. Soon after they named me one of their top influencers, they invited me to do a course on entrepreneurship.

I did a course on bootstrapping. This course has been distributed extensively. In the bootstrapped entrepreneurship audience, it’s a very popular course. It’s got well over 100K views. People who know how to teach a subject well and are good performers – this is now changing a teacher to not just an educator but really a performer because it’s entertainment almost. But it’s not entertainment. It’s delivering education in a highly engaging way. >>>

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. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are we talking? When I talked to you five years ago, you were about a $10 million company. You had bootstrapped the company with a little bit of outside financing to almost $10 million in revenue in 2014. In 2018, what range are we talking?

Andrew Grauer: In 2018, we’re in the range of $50 million to $100 million in revenue. We’re growing fast in 2019 to reach over $100 million.

Sramana Mitra: What have you done financing strategy-wise since we talked?

Andrew Grauer: In 2014, we raised a little over $15 million with GSB as our lead investor. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The bulk of your revenue, however, is coming from subscription. It’s a pure subscription-based business model at this point, right?

Andrew Grauer: Correct. Our belief is that over the next decade, we believe that hundreds of millions of people will need to be able to learn and prove that they learned what they learned. That’s something that we believe will not change over the next 10 years. That’s really important for us because it’s something that we can hang our hat on – that we can dedicate our human capital or our cash capital to invest in it.

What we think might change in that framework is the institutions. Some may stay the same. Some may evolve. Some may disappear and many will come to new existence. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click on what you are doing to address this situation?

Andrew Grauer: We’ve evolved in building this learning platform. It’s a collection of millions of study resources. These are learning and teaching resources that are helping students in whatever they’re studying. The library has now grown to over 28 million resources. They’re either tagged as specific courses at school, specific subjects, or specific books. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 1)

We interviewed Andrew on the Entrepreneur Journeys series five years back when Course Hero was at around $10 million in revenue. In 2018, the company’s website had 300 million visits. Revenue is approaching $100 million. And as for comparables, Pluralsight has gone public and has validated the business model of all-you-can-eat subscription-based online learning.

Read on to deep dive into the trends for the sector.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to a bit of a recap. We had you over five years ago and you told us your entrepreneur journeys story. Give us a little recap and then let’s catch up. >>>