Glean

Personalized learning for educational video lessons

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Artia CEO, Glean
Hey all .. my co-founder Levi and I are happy to answer your questions. We'd also love to hear you feedback on our product!

We launched Glean yesterday and are looking to disrupt the classroom. We power 1-to-1 learning by matching a student with a teacher based on things like learning style and abilities
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Ryan Hoover Product Hunt
Yo, @artia! Welcome aboard. When we first met (maybe 4 months ago), you were telling me about Glean. It's great to see it LIVE. Congrats.

The education space is particularly challenging and (from my perspective) more competitive than ever. Why did you choose to move away from your previous role in VC to build Glean?
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Artia CEO, Glean
Great question @rrhoover -- at a certain point in VC you meet so many entrepreneurs building amazing things that their enthusiasm becomes infectious. You feel like you're missing out.

I also launched a website called SchoolRack a few years prior and missed the creative process of building. It's really satisfying seeing a vision come to fruition, which I'm sure you can agree with
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Ryan Hoover Product Hunt
No doubt! I just buffered your quote about infectious enthusiasm. :)

@artia - How has Glean evolved since the first version? Were you always planning to run with video-based education?
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Artia CEO, Glean
Feel free to use the quote @rrhoover :)

We actually stuck with our original vision pretty closely, and online video was always going to be the common thread through the site. There are thousands of incredible teachers posting videos online (in addition to Khan) that we bring together under one roof. With all the tech entering the classrooms, we want to make a teachers job easier to find the right videos for them

Also this article nails our thesis and why we chose online video: http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/0...
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Ryan Hoover Product Hunt
You're right. It's not that there isn't good content out there. Finding it is the challenge. @byosko recently wrote about the "Curation of the Web" (http://www.instigatorblog.com/cu...) and Product Hunt is also in that category.

@artia - How did you bring together a team? Building and marketing a product is hard but finding the right team to do it with is arguably even harder.
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Artia CEO, Glean
@rrhoover I agree, finding the right team is tough. It's toughest finding the right co-founder though. I got lucky and partnered with Levi (twitter.com/levi) who I'd worked with in the past. We have a great relationship and both believe in the vision so that helps keeps things together. Once the founding team is functional and has strong rapport, hiring talent becomes a bit easier.

It also helps that he's amazingly talented and built our mvp by himself
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Ryan Hoover Product Hunt
Awesome. It's hard to know if you'll work well together until you actually work together. :)

@artia - How are you going to acquire students? Are there any channels or networks you're getting good traction in?
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Artia CEO, Glean
Won't be easy @rrhoover ... still exploring a number of channels right now but grassroots efforts like school visits to get teachers in the habit of using Glean w/ students will be best for us at this stage

Word of mouth goes a long way in ed-tech!
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