Degreed

What is Degreed
Degreed is creating the world's first digital diploma that scores and validates your lifelong education from any source, both formal (e.g. Harvard) & informal (e.g. Udacity, Khan Academy, iTunesU, etc.).

The digital diploma enables a best-of model of education. Fast Company writes, "Why can't we take robotics at Carnegie Mellon, linear algebra at MIT, law at Stanford? And why can't we put 130 of these together and make it a degree?" With Degreed you can.

Who is Degreed

Degreed’s founding team of education and technology entrepreneurs are uniquely qualified to enact worldwide, transformative change in education. Some notable accomplishments of the team include helping found two accredited universities (Neumont.edu and NEW.edu); serving as a non-resident fellow to the U.S. Department of Education; selection as a Stanford EdTech Entrepreneur; and the building, scaling and successful acquisition of Zinch.com which serves over 4.5 million students worldwide and whose clients included ~900 of the nation’s top universities including Yale, Dartmouth, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, among many others. 

Degreed’s founding team of education and technology entrepreneurs are uniquely qualified to enact worldwide, transformative change in education. Some notable accomplishments of the team include helping found two accredited universities (Neumont.edu and NEW.edu); serving as a non-resident fellow to the U.S. Department of Education; selection as a Stanford EdTech Entrepreneur; and the building, scaling and successful acquisition of Zinch.com which serves over 4.5 million students worldwide and whose clients included ~900 of the nation’s top universities including Yale, Dartmouth, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, among many others.

• It will be primarily a leads based business model. As we come to have meaningful, topical data on the knowledge and proficiencies of our users, this will enable us to sell highly-targeted, highly-qualified leads to employers, universities, or any institution that has the need for human capital recruiting. 
• In the first year we believe we could generate about 3,000 employment leads per month (3k leads * 12 months * ~$15 per lead = $0.5M).
• The Online Recruiting Market is $3B annually according to a 2011 WSJ.com article: http://on.wsj.com/epgsNY. Our addressable market will be primarily entry-level positions--making the addressable market size likely closer to $1B annually. We believe we could capture 1,000,000 annual leads * ~$50 per lead = $50M within 3 years of launching (0.5% market share).
• Given David Blake's relationship to Zinch, the initial hope is to partner to sell the leads to Zinch who sells to the schools directly. This would give us an immediate way to monetize the site. Each high school student lead is worth ~$5 to Zinch (and more directly to a university).  In the first year we believe we could generate about 20,000 high school student leads per month (20k leads * 12 months * $5 per lead = $1.2M).
• University marketing and recruiting is a ~$400M per year market. We believe we could capture $10M or 2.5% of the market within 3 years of launching.
• Estimate $1.7M in year 1 revenue. Estimate $60.0M in year 3 revenue.

Direct-to-cosumer:

• Previously, education products required servicing the existing formal system both for adaption and revenues which requires a difficult sales channel.
• We have addressed and fixed the very issues that have kept previous education companies from a viable direct-to-consumer model; namely, meaningful measurement and feedback within the product and a business model that sells to non-ed coorporations, not districts, schools, teachers, or students.