Why I invested in Maven and why I am building Network Capital

Hi everyone, my name is Utkarsh. I'm the CEO of Network Capital. Today to talk to you about the power of cohort based courses. Why I invested in a company called Maven, which recently raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowith and ultimately the guiding philosophy behind Network Capital. So let's start with nc. The mission of Network Capital is to help you build your category of one. So whether you're a student, a young professional, an executive, instead of playing finite games and competing with each other, which is something that is bound to be a lose lose for everyone involved, how about you look at life as an infinite game and instead of competing, make radical collaboration your mission. And in doing so, Network Capital provides you with content, community, career, intelligence so that you can carve out something that you need to add and that you can be paid for as well. So we have 100,000 users. Everyone comes to Network Capital to build his or her category of one. That's what we're all about. An interesting product that NC came up with sometime last year in the middle of the pandemic was the cohort based courses or these live fellowships where we'd bring together the best faculty, the most motivated students who had the hunger to learn and the willingness to spend time doing so and put together a time bound experience where for a month or two they will learn writing, public speaking, perhaps figuring out their MBA application, looking at how or what skills are required in a CEO. And we noticed that those fellowships really help Network Capital transform from largely being a content and community provider to essentially being an online university or an online school. We expanded to the K through 12 space, then looked at young professionals and then now do executive and CEO training as well. But not for everybody. NC is not for everybody. It is built for a certain kind of ambitious and curious student or professional who wants to carve out the category of 1. These cohort based courses got me interested in looking at education and thinking about the future of it. I wrote about it in Harvard Business Review, in World Economic Forum, in Observer Research foundation, and now I have in my next book coming out which is going to be focused on Passion Economy. And one segment of the book is focused on teachers who are teaching cohort based courses on platforms like Network Capital and Maven. Some of these teachers have made millions of dollars essentially monetizing something that have been working on for years. Their specific knowledge is valuable to people and people are willing to spend their time, spend their money on learning from the best instead of all the restrictions and rules imposed by this industrialized model of education space. Cohort based courses are transforming who we learn from, how we learn and what we retain. MOOCs, or massively open online classrooms which were supposed to be disruptive, have a completion rate of anywhere between 3 to 6%. Why? Because most people don't complete MOOCs. It's a boring, solitary activity and once you get stuck you don't really find the motivation to go back. I'm not saying MOOCs are bad, in fact, I've taken a few MOOCs and benefited from it. But there isn't a single MOOC that I can remember being a memorable experience. So looking at some of those same aspects of content, adding the live teaching layer on it, complementing with live mentorship office hours, and then making on demand personalized content available to every student, I think is the future of education. On Network Capital we look at the 3C's content community and Career Intelligence. The content must be available live and also be available to watch later so that students can clear their doubts. Community learning is fundamentally about learning with and from each other. That is why on nc, first we built the community and then we started putting on other kinds of layers and products and services on top of that. And the third is Career Intelligence, which is the mentorship aspect of it. So far our mission has been going well. I'm happy doing what I do. My team loves being a part of the mission and our community members love to be building this supportive community, this kind community which is helping each other build Categories of one. I invested in Maven at a very early stage, even the name was not finalized and it struck me that they were trying to do something very similar to Network Capital. But instead of taking the end to end career experience in my mind, they just decided to focus on a certain segment of people in certain geographies and unite bring interesting teachers to come and teach courses. And these courses are exceptionally expensive, but there is a certain set of people who would value that experience of these cohort based courses and Maven is targeting that. I invested in that company and I'm very happy to share that. Recently they raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The team of Maven, Gagan, Biani, Wescow, Shreyans, Bhansali. They all have strong tech experience plus they also understand education and what doesn't. Gagan, for example, was one of the co founders of Udemy. He's not involved in the company anymore but but Udemy has played an important role in all of us understanding education, especially in the aspects of the cohort based courses that can be applied from some of the failures of the previous iteration, which were the massively open online classrooms. So very excited to be an investor there. And I really think that the time for FOMO based education, or looking at education as a, as a proxy for test prep, that time is up. We live in an era where people cannot expect that they are going to be, you know, competing with each other and have a meaningful career. Sure, competition perhaps has a space in the world, but if you're only competing, if you're only learning because of fear of missing out, you won't really find the joy in doing so. And if you don't find the joy in doing so, 21st century is going to be very hard because you'll have to disrupt yourself, reinvent yourself multiple times. So on Network Capital, we are here to support you, reinvent yourself with the help of content, community and career intelligence. These cohort based courses are critical to the future of education and my company, Network Capital and the company that I've invested in, Maven, are both trying to do that. So if you're interested in cohort based courses, go check out networkcapital tv and maven.com and we hope to see you there. Thank you.