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 three dozen pre-seed investments in the space including Lambda School, Outschool, GetSetup, and Maven. Before Dunce, I founded three companies, NetGravity (IPO), Rocketship Public Schools (12k students) and Zeal (sold 2018).
Thoughts
Hope everyone had a great Halloween! I was happy that there were some kids this year. Fingers crossed that next year is huge!
I’ve continued my threading on twitter. Here’s a fun table of contents I built for my threads in case you don’t have the twitter habit yet.
John Danner @jwdanner
Magic - https://t.co/jAHJHzGtgeNews
Congrats to GetSetup for their partnership with Tivity bringing 18m more seniors to their community.
Congrats to Contra for going commission free and closing their Series B financing to accelerate the move to freelance as the main way of working.
I’m spending an increasing amount of time on DAOs because I think they are such a good fit for education. If you missed Li Jin’s piece on this, here it is.
Deals
Questbook
Description: Earn crypto while you learn web3 development.
Website: https://www.questbook.app/
Founder: Madhavan Malolan
Twitter: https://twitter.com/madhavanmalolan
Email: madhavan@creatoros.co
Stage: Seed
Raising: Yes
Current Dunce Investment: No
Notes: Here we go on web3. Madhavan had the insight that there are so few web3 devs, that companies would pay people to learn the web3 stack. He builds courses for each platform and gets paid in tokens from that platform. Students then earn tokens as they learn.
buildspace
Description: Earn crypto while you learn web3 development.
Website: https://buildspace.so
Founder: Farza Majeed
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farza-majeed-76685612a/
Email: farza@buildspace.so
Stage: Seed
Raising: No
Current Dunce Investment: No
Notes: You might see the striking similarity between buildspace and Questbook descriptions. These are also two YC founders. Farza pivoted from Zipschool to this. A little more on why I’m interested in this space. First of all, Gen Z loves crypto and there is a lot of energy here. Second, the blockchain has all of the basic properties of something that could re-organize the way things work like the Internet did - currency, automated contracts, ownership-based organizational structure. Specifically for education, the idea that students and teachers could own part of the institutions they are involved in is pretty intriguing. Here’s a fun tweet discussion around web3 for education.
Allpod
Description: Tapping into ESA's to create new schools.
Website: https://allpod.com/
Founder: Ian Bravo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-bravo-1538b215/
Email: ianwbravo@gmail.com
Stage: Pre-seed
Raising: Yes
Current Dunce Investment: No
Notes: Changing gears, there is another interesting thing going on called Education Savings Accounts. Basically, this is chopping up government education funding and letting parents spend them the way they want. There are about 1.5 million eligible students now (about 2.5% of all students in US) so still small, but these have a lot of momentum in red states. Ian wants to build schools funded by ESAs.
Here is the complete list of Dunce Investments:
Mystery Science - purchased by Discovery Education 2020
Swing - on-demand talent for the education market
Epic! - the best children’s books digitally for every classroom and every home
Kunduz - the leader in test prep for Turkey
Erudifi - loans for students going to vocational schools and higher ed in SE Asia.
Outschool - the best marketplace of live small classes for your k-12 student
Juni - Coding, Math, and English instruction 1-1 and small group
Lambda School - teaching students to code and get jobs in great companies
LingoKids - English learning for young children
Padlet - a modern document creation and sharing platform
TinyCare - micro-daycare centers
SV Academy - teaching students tech sales and getting them jobs in great companies
Sora - a better high school, completely online
Prenda - micro-schools to unlock your child’s talent
CoLearn - K-9 virtual unschooling that’s better than free.
Galileo - the first online world school
Beanstalk - live classes for young children
GetSetup - live social network for seniors
Primer - live academic and social network for homeschoolers
Contra - social network for freelancers
Fourthrev - run digital bootcamps for universities focused on in-demand job skills
Marketerhire - marketing experts from that you can rent
Abwaab - the best test prep platform in MENA
Supernow - live classes and clubs for elementary and middle schoolers
Maven - the leader in cohort-based courses
Prendea - live classes and social network for students in LatAm
Kritik - peer grading for higher ed
Major League Hacking - hackathons and fellowships for university students
Reforge - live classes on Growth for upskilling professionals
Synthesis School - learn problem-solving by playing video games
AI Camp - AI for ages 13-18 from Stanford pHDs.
Bindr - Silent study groups online.
The Explanation Company - Google for kids.
Omella - payments for schools, non-profits, and small businesses.
Geniebook - a personalized learning platform for Singapore and Vietnam.
Hallo - cohort-based language learning.
StudyStream - Silent study groups online.
Ender - Minecraft competitions.
Stepful - A career training center for nurses.
Stoa - AltMBA for India.
Kurios - Reforge for LatAm.
This newsletter is not an offer to sell securities nor a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. I am not acting as your financial advisor and I urge you to consult your own advisors before making any investment decision.
I would love for you to follow me on twitter @jwdanner or read my medium posts medium.com/@johnwdanner
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