Do you have a community offline? Is the core purpose of your community information exchange, networking and informal learning? Then you belong to one of the big groups who created next generation online schools using Supercool School.
Marc Dangeard is leading a group of entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley and in Paris called Entrepreneur Commons. With Supercool School he wants to strengthen and financially sustains the online community.
1. You started the Entrepreneurship Commons Academy. It sounds very exciting. Can you tell us more about it?
Entrepreneur Commons is a not-for-profit network of entrepreneurs providing mentoring through self help meetings, currently happening once a month in San Francisco, Menlo Park (Silicon Valley) and Paris. We are also starting one in New York soon, currently working on this. In addition to mentoring, we are also raising a fund to provide seed funding to startups. We are planning to offer unsecured loans of up to $100K to members of the network, with a peer-selection process: entrepreneurs within the network will decide who can get a loan.
2. Why did you decide to start your Supercool School?
The Entrepreneur Commons Academy is an additional service that we are very excited to offer to our members, as a way to capture the knowledge within the network and spread across the various chapters. It is also a great opportunity for each entrepreneur to build its own network within the network.
And it is a great opportunity for the experts around the network to monetize their expertise online. The web so far has been mostly about free knowledge, and while this is a good thing, it is not sustainable over the long term. Blogs do not allow to monetize expertise because ad revenues only go to a few top blogs. And many experts are reluctant to spend time sharing their knowledge for free on a blog, while they would be happy to use the web if they are given a way to monetize their expertise. I think the Entrepreneur Commons Academy will be a key element of the entrepreneurial ecosystem we are building.
3. How will you operate the School?
The school is for members only. Membership are very low, the cost is not prohibitive but rather it is a way to make sure members are interested in joining our group because they really care about how we work together.
The school will offer regular live events that will be recorded. Participants will be able to interact with the teacher, which will allow them to learn more and better, and then members of the school who did not attend the live event will also be able to access the knowledge through the recordings.
The goal here is to make it attractive for everybody: teachers as well as students.
4. What do you expect from your School?
The Entrepreneur Commons Academy is a good addition to the Entrepreneur Commons network because it allows us to include people who are in areas where there is no chapter to help them. Through the school they should be able to interact with others and get included in discussions, and therefore funding opportunities.
5. Anything else you would like to share with us?
I think that the Supercoolschool model is an excellent one, thank you for making this platform available to anybody who wants to starts its own school. I believe that it is a perfect example of the promise of the web delivered: peer to peer education, and a new way to allow monetization of expertise. Because while knowledge should be accessible, the system also needs to be sustainable over the long time.
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We are interested in hearing your opinion on this use case of Supercool School and on other use cases that you find promising. Feel free to comment on this post or to participate in the"Schools for the World" voting.
cheers, Bjoern
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