Edtech Insiders

Gauthier Van Malderen is the co-founder and CEO of the University Digital Library Perlego. Gauthier decided to start Perlego as a Cambridge student after realizing how many people were having problems financing their textbooks. In 2017, he decided to found a subscription service to provide all the textbooks a student would need, in eBook form, at an affordable price.

Perlego raised $50 million in March (out of $75M total funding) to expand its business after seeing its platform boom through COVID-19. The London based startup currently has 400,000 paying subscribers who get all-you-can-read access to some 850,000 titles — textbooks, fiction and other literature that students are assigned as coursework at universities and other higher-learning institutions. It works with 5,000 education publishers, including Cengage, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Harvard University Press. That catalog makes Perlego the largest online textbook subscription service in the world. Perlego has won 26 awards including Europas Best Edtech, Virgin Voom and the KPMG pioneer award.

Recommended Resources

• Brighteye Ventures
• enablinginsights blog by Adam Black

Topics This Week:

1. Fall Election Cycle
   • Va. Gov. Youngkin faces second suit over teacher tip line
   • Democrats Cede ‘Party of Education’ Label to GOP
2. 2022 CHLOE 7 Report
   • Announcement + PDF
   • Online learning leaders think fully in-person will be a rarity
3. Big Tech vs. Udemy
   • Amazon Launches Udemy Competitor
   • Facebook Working on a Udemy Competitor?
4. Metaverse
   • Harvard Metaverse in Education Report
   • Deloitte Metaverse Report
   • AppLovin wants to buy video game maker Unity for $20 billion
5. Funding + M&A
   • upGrad raises $210M and acquires Exampur
   • Jodo raises $15M
   • Territorium raises $4.4M
   • Kide Science raises $1M
   • Achievable raises $650K
   • Prometric LLC acquires Finetune
   • EducationDynamics acquires EDU First

Josh Chernikoff is an educational entrepreneur and small business advisor. For the last 14 years, he has founded and grown two successful educational enrichment programs serving hundreds of thousands of students in 85 schools across six states. He now runs Cascade Communications, an edtech advisory. Josh and his team at Cascade are, above all, content and relationship experts in the educational space, leveraging email communication and live relationship roundtables to engage the entrepreneurs and businesses with key education decision makers. He also hosts two entrepreneurship and Edtech podcasts - How I Broke That and Breaking the Grade.

Recommended Resources

• @brianbeers
• @thejustinwelsh
• @dickiebush
• @JasonRBradwell
• @justingordon212
• @nathanbaugh27

Welcome to Season 2 of This Week in Edtech!

Guest: Matthew Tower, Principal @ Workshop Venture Partners

• Subscribe to Matt’s weekly newsletter @ https://matthewtower.substack.com/

Topics This Week:

1. Byju’s
   • Layoffs, debt, litigation!?
2. Bearish OPMs
   • Phil Hill: ”The brutal spring and summer for OPMs & MOOCs”
   • Zovio sells OPM business to University of Arizona Global Campus
   • 2U Layoffs + tuition share agreements
3. Funding Landscape
   • HolonIQ – Global Edtech Funding 2022 H1
4. Metaverse
   • College in the metaverse is here. Is higher ed ready?
   • Time Magazine cover + Meta ads 
   • Classdojo raises $125MM
5. Crypto & Web3
   • Pearson plans to sell its textbooks as NFTs
   • DAOs - the new LLCs?

Also check out our weekly newsletter @ https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/

 Jonathan Finkelstein is the CEO of Credly, one of the leading organizations in the credentialing space for education technology around the world. Credly is a Pearson business.  Previously, as founder of LearningTimes, he helped mission-driven organizations produce and launch innovative online programs, products and platforms that impacted the lives of millions of users. He was also a co-founder at HorizonLive, which was acquired by Blackboard, and author of Learning in Real Time.  He's a frequent author and speaker on digital credentials and the future of work.

Recommended Resources

• How I Built This, podcast hosted by Guy Raz
• Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines, book by Jamie Merisotis
• How to Tell a Story, book by The Moth
• Resources Page, curated by Credly

Sophie Ruddock is a former impact investor and consultant with 10+ years experience across the private, public and non-profit sectors. She is one of the  founding members of Multiverse, a tech company building an outstanding alternative to college. She spent the last 4 years growing Multiverse’s delivery operations in the U.K, before moving onto leading their expansion to NYC as GM North America.

Recommended Resources

• The Job, a weekly newsletter by Paul Fain

Troy Williams is a Managing Director at Achieve and University Ventures. Troy leads both firm’s investments in education technology companies, including AdmitHub, EverTrue, Examity, Motimatic, Packback and Ready Education.

Prior to UV, Troy was a senior executive at Macmillan where he was CEO of Macmillan Enterprise Solutions and President of Macmillan New Ventures. Previously, Troy founded and served as CEO of Questia Media, an early ebook company. Prior to Questia, He was previously employed in the mergers and acquisitions practice at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York.

Recommended Resources
Better Money Better World, podcast by Daniel Pianko

Alec Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Learners. Learners, formerly known as UXR Collective, started as a small meetup in Toronto and has become an online learning platform for researchers and designers around the world. Before Learners Alec worked in product and user research at a number of Toronto-based startups including Thalmic Labs, Finaeo, and Meta.

Recommended Resources
Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell

Melissa Jones leads Technical Programs for Shopify, focused on empowering the Research and Development teams with the technical skill and support they need to be successful. She oversees onboarding, leadership development, communications and early talent initiatives for engineering and the other R&D disciplines. Prior to joining Shopify, Melissa served in leadership roles at General Assembly, Code.org and Adobe. 

Alison Evans Adnani is the senior program lead for the Dev Degree team at Shopify. Dev Degree is a work-integrated learning program that combines Shopify developer skills with a university degree. She has had a rich career in software development, education and learning. Alison started her technology career as an intern and is a passionate advocate for experiential learning opportunities.

Recommended Resources
Work-integrated learning companies to watch out for:

• Kibo School (listen to our interview with CEO Ope Bukola here)
• Multiverse (interview with North America's GM Sophie Ruddock coming soon)
• Alura

Praxis Labs: a New York-based company offering diversity, equity and inclusion training through immersive learning and VR
TechKnowCon: an annual conference to bring together peers from various companies to compare notes and share best practices about technical training, documentation, and learning in the workplace, available virtually through a Slack group

Guest: Quinn Taber, Founder & CEO @ Immerse

Topics This Week:

1. Politics Heat Up
   • Colleges aren’t prepared for Roe’s fall
   • Schools Are Spending Billions on High-Tech Defense for Mass Shootings
   • 'Don’t Say Gay’ bills will make it harder for teachers to support students
   • The public cost of private schools
   • Education Department Approves $8 Billion in Public Service Loan Forgiveness
2. ISTE
   • A Call For ‘A Major Infusion of Joy’
   • Teachers Are Reminded of the Value They Bring to Ed-Tech Companies
3. A Growing Edtech Landscape 
   • Class Technologies CEO: 'The education landscape has forever changed'
   • The edtech top 50 — emerging companies for higher education
4. Layoffs Continue
   • Startup layoffs – the art of reinvention and a MasterClass in change
5. Funding + M&A
   • Leap, JobGet, Wilco, Neol, Cinematic Health Education, Kibo School
   • GoGuardian Acquires TutorMe, Degreed Acquires Learn In