by Eric Peckham | Aug 27, 2015 | Ideas |
To explain why our team here at Arena is so bullish on crowdfunding that we tied our model to it, I find it helpful to draw an analogy to another trend I’m passionate about: online education. The early wave of online degrees and online universities created a stigma around online learning - people associated online degrees with a low bar for quality/prestige and with several well-known for-profit universities who didn’t have students’ best interests at heart. But the educational potential of learning online is extraordinary: data and machine learning improve students’ education in real-time and give professors magnitudes more information with which to improve courses. It can enable top universities - freed from the constraints of physical buildings - to scale their educational experience to everyone who qualifies (anywhere around the world) on a model that actually gets better the more students it includes (thanks to the amassed data). The first startup I worked for out of college was 2U, Inc., an edtech company that is powering full online master’s degrees for top universities (Yale, Berkeley, Georgetown, USC, etc.). 2U has spearheaded the model of online higher ed that lives up to its true potential and empowers tens of thousands of students. Rather than being third-tier students, the students learning online via their platforms are full equals to peers on campus, with student IDs, campus gym access, 12-student average class size, student organizations, and class gifts to the university when they graduate. Their admissions criteria, learning outcomes, and job placement outcomes match or beat the statistics for on-campus students in the same degree programs. Over the last couple...
by Paige Craig | Jun 9, 2015 | Ideas |
At Arena Ventures we’re taking a unique approach to venture capital: we’re enabling the rest of the world to invest with us. Whereas most venture firms exist only to benefit their institutional and family office investors, Arena has a broader mission to activate a new wave of individual angel investors who can get directly involved in our deals. Each time Arena Ventures invests in a startup we share part of our allocation in the deal with our Arena Ventures Syndicate on the crowdfunding site AngelList. What this means is any accredited investor nationally or internationally (currently $200k income for last 2 years or $1M in assets, per SEC rules) can follow our lead into deals. From engineers in Silicon Valley like Akash Garg and Ding Zhou to professionals in London and Singapore like Jihan Bowes Little and Lhoucine Aderdor, a wide range of backers are already in the syndicate. In the next 5 years, we’re going to help 10,000 more invest with us. The first spark behind Arena Ventures happened three years ago when Jeff Lo and I found ourselves as strangers in Las Vegas comparing Jeff’s backing of poker players to my method of evaluating startup founders. Our friendship quickly developed into a professional relationship of sharing deals, co-investing (often as the first investors in a startup), and constantly learning from each other. We weren’t formally “in business” together yet, but we spent the last three years collaborating as angels. Together we’ve seen thousands of pitches, made thousands of helpful contacts, and earned exceptional returns through a number of big wins. But as individual angels we also saw a challenge -...
