Lessons - She Built the altMBA With Seth Godin Then Raised $25M to Reinvent Online Learning | Wes Kao - Maven Co-Founder (Backed by a16z)

In this lessons episode, discover why learning by doing is more effective than passive education for building real world skills. Understand how accountability and community accelerate growth. Explore why proof of work is becoming more valuable than traditional credentials. And uncover how learning from experienced operators can fast track career success.

Just to tee it up, for cohort-based learning, I just want to understand from your perspective and for people that are listening to this who don't know what cohort-based learning is because that's what Maven is, what is it replacing? Is it replacing MOOCs? Is it replacing university? Who would benefit from this and who have you found to be the target audience for a cohort-based learning?

front core based courses are really simple. It's learning online with a group of people with a set start and end date. So you might do a course with 30 other people on UX design over a two week period. That's core based course.

You might do a course with a thousand people. Section four with Professor Galloway has a thousand people in their course. But either way, there's a lot more interactivity. There's a lot more hands-on doing.

And it's not passively consuming content. You're not just reading by yourself, watching videos. You're actually putting the lessons that you learned into practice. So with this design course, for example, instead of reading about white space and color and balance and proportions, you're actually designing a flyer using these principles and then maybe sharing a figma link in Slack.

where the other classmates and your instructor can critique your design, and then everyone talks about it, learns, here's what this person dwells, here's what you could fix, and it's much more about that hands-on doing. So with corporate-based courses, what does it replace? I like thinking about learning experiences not necessarily as replacing something, but adding another option for learners. So there are times when you might want something that's pre-recorded.

You might want the flexibility to watch videos and kind of get that information download from something, especially if you're a beginner. But then there are other times when you want to learn with a group of people and you want to actually put those lessons into practice and you want someone to keep you accountable. You want that community. And in that case, a cohort-based course is an amazing option.

Same with, you know, Do core-based courses replace higher education? I get that question a lot. And I don't think, especially in the short term, it's going to replace higher education. I think higher education is less so for the information that you're learning, more so for the credential.

We still live in a society where a lot of jobs say... four-year degree required, right? Like bachelor's degree required. And it's kind of a gatekeeping tool to keep people out.

And so I totally get if people still want to do college, because like that makes sense, like in our current society. I think more and more, the beauty of the internet is that the internet allows you to show proof of work. proof points of your ability. So instead of saying, I went to advertising school, got, you know, I don't know what that is, like a MFA or something.

Whatever. Whether it's a master's or an undergrad degree in advertising, if I posted an ad every day on Instagram, That's pretty cool. If a future employer sees thousands or hundreds of ads that I've created or mocked up or edited, that's a great proof of work. I'd much rather hire someone who has proof of work with either a podcast they've created, a blog that they've written, articles, Instagram, Twitter following that they've grown.

All of this shows their ability to build and their ability to ship. Much more than, hey, I studied mass comm in college. So I think the beauty of the internet is that it does open up much more opportunities for people to show their work. And it also opens up opportunities for you to learn from amazing operators.

So with cohort-based courses, you know, instead of learning from a professor of product management who hasn't been in industry for 25 years, you can learn from Lenny Urchitsky, who was an early product manager at Airbnb, now makes a living writing his Substack newsletter. And he has a product management course on Maven. Yeah. And you can learn directly from him on what it took to be a successful product manager for him and, you know, all the learnings that he's gathered along the way.

So it's much more practical. It's much more concrete. It's much more relevant and timely. You know, instead of learning...

about investing from a professor, again, who is rooted in academia, you can learn from Lee Jin, who is a former VC at Andreessen Horwitz, who now has her own firm. She coined the term passion economy and is known for investing in passion economy companies, supporting passion economy founders. So if you're a fellow VC and you want to get in the creator economy game and in that kind of company, or if you're a founder of a creator economy type company like Maven is, who better to learn from than someone like Lee, right?

And so I think that the exciting thing about core-based courses is that it provides opportunities to supplement your learning and allow working professionals to continue retooling, upskilling, and deepening their craft. from people who are actually doing. And that's actually bringing it full circle to actually the first point you made about that ideal employee who is somebody who can execute. And if you want to be that ideal employee, if you want to be the employee, like, you know, of the future who can be creative to take on challenges and to not just ideate on them, but to actually execute on them.

Well... this is a great way to start turning yourself into one of those people because now you're learning for people that have actually done those things. So if you want to, if you're a marketer and you want to, for example, go back to your example to run videos on LinkedIn - Well, maybe you should be learning from somebody who's actually executed on that successfully so that you can now figure out step by step how to execute on that successfully and learn every single piece that could eventually allow you to do that and to even put it in front of a manager or a leader versus taking a more academic approach.

lens to that topic that you want to learn about. And then you're like learning theoretical about how to optimize for conversions or how to, you know, how to set up a campaign. Like you can actually work with somebody who's done it before. And I think that that also, that the person who is that kind of employee who does take action and who does not just ID on things, but builds things, that could also be the ideal consumer of a cohort based course.

realistically that's I just I'm just trying to think about like the personality that would also enjoy this and find it useful it'd be somebody who is a doer who wants to learn the practical step by step yeah absolutely I think if you if you want to sit back and you know kick your feet up cross your arms and wait for someone to entertain you a core based course isn't right for you If you're ready to dive in and do the work and you want to learn by doing hands-on, whether it's with exercises, projects, breakouts, shipping, actual copy that you're writing, that's what a court-based course is great for.

It provides that as a level of accountability. Exactly. I was going to say, because every like there is so with the core, big cohort based course, excuse me, there is accountability for everything that you're putting out. And you have peers, you have your instructor and you're working one on one every step of the way, everything that you're learning, everything you have to ship things, you have to create things in a cohort based course usually.

And that's part of the accountability piece, too. Yeah, I think the other part of accountability is that just by virtue of you having paid a premium for a course, you're way more likely to take it seriously. So I've personally signed up for, you know, $10, $15 Udemy courses. I think I have one on classical music appreciation and one on hand lettering calligraphy where I watched maybe 15 minutes of the first lecture and then said, oh, I'm going to come back to this later.

And five years later, it's still gathering digital dust. So, right, like that's, there's no accountability there. There's no, there's no skin off my back. If, if I don't go back, it's only, you know, 10, 15 bucks.

Whereas most cohort based courses are in the, the several hundred dollar range or a few thousand dollar range. So if you're paying, let's say $750 to learn this topic, um, there's a certain, there's, there's way more commitment on you, the learner, even if, even if, you know, the instructor isn't breathing down your neck or coaches aren't breathing down your neck, um, there's It's something that you already feel committed to. That's why you're even paying this and that and doing this course in the first place.

So it's kind of like a personal trainer at the gym, right? Theoretically, we could all work out in our living room from YouTube videos. Why don't we all do that? Because life gets in the way, we get distracted, no one's holding us accountable, no one notices if we don't do it, right?

Whereas if I've paid a personal trainer, you know, 70 bucks an hour, 100 bucks an hour, you bet I'm gonna show up. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.

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