00:00 Course Hero was co-founded by Andrew Brower, his two brothers, and a classmate of his at Cornell,
00:06 Frederick Kerrigan, in 2006 and started and still is really this online library, a collection of
00:14 class notes, essays, exams for students, uploaded by students.
00:20 Before Course Hero, I spent hours looking for help online when I was stuck on homework or
00:27 studying for tests. Ever since a friend told me about Course Hero, it's the only tool I use for
00:32 every course. I just drop in whatever I'm working on. We started Course Hero about 17 years ago in
00:38 2006 and the whole idea was born out of helping students study and helping students who are
00:47 studying for a test, prepping and working on an assignment and feeling stressed, feeling anxious,
00:52 and it was something that I had empathy for being a student myself. I experienced it and so
00:59 really when we built it, the idea was how can we best build something that would help students
01:06 study and the lucky and most important thing that we got right was that we started, we just did it,
01:14 and we kept building. In the beginning of Course Hero, we focused on crowdsourcing resources,
01:23 study materials, test prep materials, materials helping people with homework from students and
01:30 educators across different campuses and the idea was can we connect people to knowledge that came
01:37 from other people versus having to go to people to get to the knowledge and the visual in our
01:44 heads was to build a Wikipedia-like product that instead of organized around an encyclopedic
01:51 taxonomy, we would build a product that was organized around a course-specific, school-specific
01:56 taxonomy. Course Hero is a Forbes 30 under 30 company and you know with all of those companies
02:02 we like to stay in touch and we were seeing the acquisitions Course Hero was making in recent years
02:09 and then how they created their new parent company, Learneo, in late 2022 and so really jumped on that
02:17 news and became more interested in his strategy, his acquisitions, and just how they're pivoting.
02:23 Course Hero began acquiring companies in 2020 with his first acquisition of Simba Lab and since it
02:30 has acquired seven businesses and it really was a combination of things that led them to
02:35 this strategy of acquisitions. You know first gap-based increased competition in the ed tech
02:42 space. Another factor was a surge in venture capital during the pandemic. Course Hero raised
02:49 nearly 500 million total by the end of 2021 and so that capital is really used for their acquisitions.
02:57 Another factor were college enrollment decreasing. It led the company to look for ways to diversify
03:05 and so that was through acquisitions of companies like CloBot and Simba Lab focused on professionals
03:12 and so the company now rebranded under Learneo is focused on adhering to both students and
03:21 professionals. You know how do you take that core clientele and carry it on through the work world.
03:27 Building Learneo and acquiring different businesses that are founder-led with really
03:33 entrepreneurial builder teams is incredibly important. At Learneo the idea of building a
03:40 platform of businesses and founders each continuing to be led by their CEOs is a belief that
03:48 decentralization and delegation of autonomy is incredibly powerful and each of us each of the
03:55 CEOs are able to focus on building for a closely clustered set of customer needs. They can go
04:01 incredibly deep and they don't have to worry about another teammate or potential future teammate
04:07 being able to take on an incredible new opportunity and that's the opportunity to be able to balance
04:13 going super deep and also broadening and going after new opportunities. It takes an incredible
04:20 amount of time and energy passion to be able to start something, work on it, build it over time,
04:28 get product market fit, get to expansion phase and for us that is something we want to
04:34 really facilitate and continue post-acquisition. For us creating an environment that empowers
04:44 autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurialism just like when we're startups individually
04:51 is incredibly powerful and that's core to how we want to build Learneo as a platform of businesses
04:57 that are powered by founders, builders and entrepreneurial talent. Rohan Gupta is a
05:04 co-founder of Qwilbot which is essentially an AI powered writing and paraphrasing tool for both
05:11 students and professionals. It was founded in 2017 and acquired by Learneo in late 2021.
05:17 My co-founder and I were studying at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We both were in
05:24 love with artificial intelligence and we were just tinkering with the technology, made a breakthrough
05:30 in technology to rewrite sentences. Thought it was pretty interesting, just put it up on Reddit
05:38 and it started going viral and that's how we founded Qwilbot. Back when we started in 2017
05:44 there was not a lot of support for building AI tools especially compared to what it's like to
05:50 build on top of AI today. And yeah back then we were just the three of us were tinkering in an
05:57 apartment on campus. We had next to no funding, we just had a small grant from the university
06:02 so we had to be very scrappy and it was just a green field and every day was a new experiment.
06:08 I met Andrew in the winter of 2020. It was really exciting. I was a user for Course Hero for
06:16 several years and so it was nice just meeting him as a fan and then as a fellow entrepreneur
06:23 understanding his experiences and getting advice from him. It completely changed our trajectory.
06:29 I mean one thing is just having access to so many brilliant founders and CEOs to share best
06:35 practices with and learnings from. It's also been a privilege to be able to partner with some of the
06:42 best writing businesses in the sector and collaborate with them on new product development.
06:47 And finally we just have access to way more resources than we would have otherwise. Every
06:54 single business has a unique culture and a unique way of operating and it's you can think of it as
07:01 many different experiments being run at the same time. So seeing what works for another business
07:08 and how I can apply it to my own has been invaluable especially because everyone within
07:14 Learneo is so transparent about what's working well and what's not. Some of the challenges in
07:19 the evolution of building up Learneo from one business to a platform of now eight companies
07:26 have to do with how can we make sure that we stay true to our operating principles of empowerment
07:35 and responsibility. We think there's a huge value in being a decentralized platform and creating
07:41 autonomy for the different businesses and as you scale from not just running one business with
07:47 multiple product lines to two to four to eight being able to create an operating model that is
07:53 effective at each of those stages is an incredible challenge and also something really fun to solve.
08:00 The pandemic saw an increase of venture capital specifically in the ad tech space and so now
08:06 companies are kind of dealing with the decrease in that. From 2021 to 2022 it nearly halved it went
08:13 from 20.8 billion to 10.6 billion and so companies are dealing with less venture capital out there
08:19 right now. College enrollment has decreased the last three years as students and Gen Z particularly
08:26 are rethinking the value of a college degree and that means you know declined customers for
08:33 ed tech companies like Learneo and so companies like Learneo are asking themselves how do you
08:39 diversify in this space and so they're focused more on professionals as well as students and
08:44 so Learneo's acquisitions of Clobot, Symbol Lab you know indicate that trend of professionals
08:52 using ed tech tools like these. With artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGBT and
08:59 Google's BARD popping up it's really created just a lot of competition for these education
09:05 technology companies like Horse Hero and Ched. I think with so many students and professionals
09:12 looking for resources for maybe school reports or business reports they're looking for more of
09:19 a free option that maybe ChatGBT can provide rather than a subscription service like Ched
09:26 or Horse Hero. Ched was kind of an extreme example there where they had said ChatGBT affected sign
09:34 ups it ended up vomiting stock and really just with these tools it's creating a lot of competition
09:41 for you know customers both professionals and students looking for tools like this.
09:47 Artificial intelligence is an incredible theme and opportunity and disruption in the world today
09:54 and at Learneo we're incredibly excited about how these technologies and transformer-based
10:01 technologies large language models are impacting language, summarization, translation, question
10:08 generation, question answering and I'm not sure I've ever seen a time in our history of building
10:16 where there's so much opportunity and a huge amount of energy being developed to act fast
10:24 and with conviction and to iterate on a huge technological change.
10:30 [Music]
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