David Blake. Used under Canada’s Fair Dealing Guidelines.

David Blake is the founder of Degreed, a platform that allows students to earn and digitally display accreditation. He was the founding product manager at Zinch, a social networking site geared specifically to college student, which was acquired by Chegg. He is also a Stanford dSchool EdTech Entrepreneur.He has a Bachelors degree in Economics from BYU. Degreed provides a platform for learners to publicly track their academic, professional and lifelong learning.

Degreed is unique from other badge platforms because it allows users to display badges, but also degrees from institutions (including their transcript), events attended, what media they are consuming and their future goals. In a Huffington Post blog David likens educational institutions to real estate agents. He proposes that online realty platforms were not successful in moving customers away from real estate agents the way Expedia was successful in moving customers away from travel agents due to the high personal impact of failure to sell a home. His suggestion is that students and employers are moving away from their traditional agents to gain and express learning.

The founding team includes Eric Sharpe, Director of Software Dev at MediConnect Global, recently acquired by Verisk, an analytics company for businesses. Sharpe has in MBA from BYU. This is not a first venture for either David or Eric and they have already been successful in being granted the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator funds in 2013 allowing them to grow their team from 6 members to 10. This also allowed them to hire a COO, Chris McCarthy from Chegg, a textbook rental company.

It is obvious that BYU and Chegg have had a large influence in the leadership team at Degreed. The exposure to the college demographic through Chegg and Zinch likely give David interesting insight into the venture opportunities in the college demographic. Degreed has also had a surprisingly warm welcome from issuing institutions of traditional degrees, who are partnering with Degreed.

Founder Leader: Guido Kovalskys Co-Founder of Nearpod

Venture name: Nearpod

Venture description:
Nearpod is an application desinged for teachers inside of a BYOD classroom. It allows all devices (Apple, Android, etc..) to connect to a teacher controlled content application. This teacher controlled application allows teachers to control what the students are being exposed to on their BYOD devices without allowing them to use other applications. When a student is doing other things on there phone it informs the teacher. It also has the ability for teachers to embedd youtube videos, interactive questions and share student results to all the devices.

Teachers Perpective: http://vimeo.com/95197111
How it works: http://vimeo.com/39006989

Founder Background:
According to his LinkedIn profile, Guido Kovalskys co-founded Nearpod with others in 2011. He is originally from South America and completed his MBA at Berkley. After graduating he worked as a consultant for 7 years before getting his feet wet with entrepreneurship. Guido has started 5 ventures in the last 15 years that have included a broad spectrum of areas.

My Personal Opinion:

After using this product, I am sure that this venture is going to be a hit amongst all the teachers who are pro BYOD. This venture’s application allows teachers to control their classroom in a way that is currently not offered by any other service. I honestly do not think, at the moment, there is anyone competing in this space. I would certainly invest in this product.

Khan Academy

Salman (Sal) Khan,

Founder & Executive Director, Khan Academy

https://www.khanacademy.org/

About the Product

Khan Academy is a non-profit organization that provides high-quality free online education. It consists of a library of thousands of educational resources available to anyone with a computer and access to the internet. The resources include interactive activities, assessments and short YouTube tutorials on topics ranging from Math and Science to Economics and History and even Computer Science. The Academy employs an adaptive assessment environment allowing self-pace learning. To date the Academy has delivered more than 300 million lessons and has over 10 million users per month.

About the Founder

Founder, Sal Khan, started the venture after noticing that his math tutorials on YouTube intended for his cousins were gaining popularity by other internet users. He then decided to quit his job as a manager of a hedge fund and dedicate himself full-time to creating tutorials, making high-quality education accessible to anyone anywhere and provide an alternative to traditional classrooms where students could learn at their own pace.

Sal holds three degrees from MIT (one in Mathematics, and two in Computer Science) and an MBA from Harvard.  In addition to his skillset, he has a well-rounded pool of talent in his staff who bring expertise in computer science, finance, education and design with experience working for prominent companies such as Google and McKinsey & Company, government sectors and the non-profit world.

My Reflection

Sal is an innovator.  He conceived the original idea of Khan Academy and brought it to fruition by successfully leveraging his talent in delivering simple, yet engaging video tutorials, recruiting the right pool of talent to grow the venture, and gain support and financial backing from major organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Recently, Google awarded two million dollars to the Academy to create new courses and translate them into the world’s main languages.

From my analysis of Khan Academy, I have learned that having the right individuals to support your venture, who are passionate about your idea regardless of the risks involved, is important in order for your venture to succeed. From studying the profiles of Sal’s team, it is apparent that many had left their jobs in leading tech companies and consulting firms to join Khan Academy.