Dunce Deals #3 - Menon, Sail, and Major League Hacking
Deals and Trends in EdTech and the Future of Work
Hi, I'm John Danner, Managing Director of Dunce Capital. Dunce Deals is my look at the most interesting deals and news from edtech and the future of work. In the last four years, I have made over two dozen pre-seed investments in the space including Lambda School, where I am on the board, Outschool, Prenda, and Contra. Before Dunce, I founded three companies, NetGravity (IPO), Rocketship Public Schools (12k students) and Zeal (sold 2018).
News
There was a lot going on in the space this week. Sora, a live online highschool, announced it was one of the first schools of its type to be fully WASC accredited. Congratulations Sora!
Here is a great interview by Michael Horn with getsetup.io founder Neil D’Souza.
Austen welcomed Stoa School’s first class of MBA’s. Thank you Austen!
And as you may have seen on twitter, I funded a new company founded by Gagan Biyani, founder of Udemy, and Wes Kao, who created altMBA. I’m incredibly excited to watch them reshape professional learning.
Thoughts
This week is part three of my four part series on 2020 trends that I see in startups serving the edtech and future of work space.
Deals
Please feel free to reach out directly to the founders or I am happy to connect you. I would love it if you would send me deals you think I missed. I invest in the future of learning and work, ideally idea and pre-seed, but seed and Series A are awesome too.
Menon
Description: Menon Labs supplements your online courses with cool projects and a community of like-minded learners, to ensure you finish the next online course you start.
Website: menonlabs.com
Founder: Paul Muller
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paumue/
Email: paul@menonlabs.com
Stage: Pre-Seed
Raising: Yes
Dunce Deal: No
Notes: Menon is going after community as a service with a twist, they aren’t just building tech, but hosting the communities and making them awesome. They’ve partnered with several Coursera course creators like Berklee College of Music to add a great community focus to their courses.
Sail
Description: Touchy Feely taken to scale.
Website: joinsail.co
Founder: johnny chen
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnnychen0
Email: johnny@joinsail.co
Stage: Pre-seed
Raising: Yes
Dunce Deal: No
Notes: For those of you that don’t know the reference, Stanford GSB had a class run by Carole Robin which everyone referred to as ‘Touchy Feely’. It was the top-rated class at the GSB for over a decade. The idea was to take all of us left-brained people and talk about right brain stuff - emotions, feelings, etc. I was lucky enough to take a class directly from Carole through her new organization Leaders in Tech. Although Johnny is not affiliated, he is approaching these social emotional issues head on with live online cohort-based groups. His model is based off of what YPO has done successfully for years.
Major League Hacking
Desciption: Hackathons and Internships for great college coders
Website: mlh.io
Founder: Mike Swift
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theycallmeswift
Email: swift@mlh.io
Stage: Seed
Raising: Yes
Dunce Deal: Evaluating
Notes: I have wanted to fund a hackathon company for a long time, but could never find one with a business model. Mike wandered through the woods for a while with this problem, building up hundreds of thousands of college students doing hackathons, but no clear model. Covid provided the answer. As internships went remote, MLH created a pathway for college hackers to connect with great companies and do internships. They are only about 8 months into this new approach, but it looks promising.