Another company in the edtech independently reached out asking if we were open to acquisition. We preferred the first company's culture so we were likely to go with them, but it was good to know there was general interest from the market.
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Just ask them what’s their process for acquisition.
We should have asked [first acquirer].
Establish relationships with other companies who could be interested.
Not letting the acquisition tail wag the dog.
Concerns:
- [x] Brand, how would that work.
- [ ] Someone who doesn’t understand painpoints enough to tell the difference between us.
- [ ] Not B2C
The person I talked to and who is coming out to meet with us is Shawn Gaide, "VP Corporate Development, General Manager". He manages their College Scheduler product. Screenshot from his LinkedIn attached. He's coming from Austin and he said someone from Chico would be driving to San Francisco as well. They want to get an NDA in place first.
I'm afraid I'm not sure about their acquisition process and he didn't touch on many specifics, other than that they've been less active recently but that their investors are encouraging them to explore it more, recently. I know little about the company other than they acquired their first company, College Scheduler, after raising $60 million in September 2015 (during the summer we met you, Tara and I were competing with College Scheduler because they sell a scheduling product to college & universities). Based on Crunchbase, they've acquired 3 companies (2015, 2016, 2018), but he told me he's led their acquisition of 5 companies. I'm pretty sure College Scheduler was the farthest long of these acquisitions, and it had many millions in revenue at the time of the acquisition. None of the acquisition amounts have been disclosed and my best guess is College Scheduler was a strategic/P&L acquisition and the other two were acquihires/somewhat strategic.
It's clear that Shawn's current interest in us is our value from a strategic perspective. His current idea is that there could be a "winner take all" approach with Coursicle remaining somewhat independent and getting student users, and then they use our high penetration rates to drive their sales to those universities for their products. He refers to it as a "squeeze from both sides" approach, where we go B2C and they go B2B.
75,000 students register this past term using [redacted].
We've become official course search for UNC.
* Do you guys measure impact, graduation. How? We're interested in measuring that.
* Get our name out.
* Students prefer Coursicle.
-
- That said, don't think it's a concern. Why we're not threatened.
- Be candid,
* Runrate:
- no run rate.
- 5 employees, looking to hire 2 more.
* NDA in place for them.
Send him links to all our stuff.
get an NDA
6 and a half years.
Now he does corp dev. 5 acquisitions. One was college scheduler.
Now he still does corp dev, but he's responsible on college scheduler.
300 institutions. 2 million, active users.
Total reach is 4 million students.
Now they do full registration experience. The whole workflow behind the scenes.
75,000 students register using their stuff this past semester.
Texas A&M mandated their registration through college scheduler.
"In a perfect world, I'd love to see where we could have both a top down and a bottom up marketing capability". Squeeze from both sides.
They've talked about doing that maybe doin the squeezing from both sides. They do have some public course search functionality today.
I agreed that squeezing from both sides makes sense.
Asked how we stack up against the catalog, like Leap frog, works.
Told him that we get a lot of traffic from our course pages.
He's definitely open to acquisition talks. Gives them a lot of gumption if we can make a good plan for how we can dominate the market.
One thing he's thinking about is whether they need to worry about helping us, because if they do, we might end up getting universities to use us and they don't want to buy College Scheduler anymore.
Said he wouldn't want to learn about our business and then backstab us and build a competitor.
Show Tara -24.00 and in the recording.
Asked about graduation rate and persistence:
* They basically do statistical intense analysis to predict graduation rates.
* They have to adjust for selection bias, because students who use our services are probably more likely to graduate on-time anyway.
Comes down to:
1. Do we like each other.
2. Can we get excited about some sort of shared vision.
Send him links:
* Course/professor pages
* mobile app/web app
* Course search
https://www.chicoer.com/2019/05/19/chico-entrepreneur-enjoys-his-first-retirement/