 Okay, we're back here live at the Stanford University, Stanford XL Symposium, 17th annual. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, and I have two great guests on this segment as one of the days, Linda Weidman and Bud Colligan, Linda from Linda.com. Very big success, and Bud Colligan, a legend in the tech community. Here on the block a few times, we've seen a couple cycles of innovation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. Linda, so you're keynoting up there, oh, a fireside chat, it's kind of like the keynote of this event symposium, very laid back, the high energy, high caliber folks here. What were you talking about up there? I was talking about the story of Linda.com and online education and our plans and vision for it. So you've been well-documented in your company. A lot of great revenue success, great product success in the market. Talk about what you've done to get there and what are you guys doing right now? Well, we have been publishing for, first of all, we've been doing this for close to 17 years. We put an online library together about 10 years ago and it's currently being adopted by both consumers and by institutions, enterprise, and it basically solves the problem of how to stay on top of changing software, technology, creativity, business skills, and we're just working our hearts out making this material and scaling our company. So bud, you were on the board prior to Excel investing. How much did Excel invest? What was the numbers? Well, we don't publicly disclose exact numbers, but the company overall raised $103 million, okay. $103 million, the big number. And it was, Excel was participating in the spectrum equity and also Merit-Tech capital. Okay, so that was the outside realm, but you guys were doing well before that. So you were involved before the investment. Yes. Talk about the early days. You've seen a lot of success. You've seen some flameouts in Silicon Valley. You've seen good companies and not so good companies grow. What was your take on these guys? As they were growing, you like Linda, this is a rocket ship, double down. What was your... Well, first of all, Linda and Bruce, her husband, have been at this for 17 years and I joined the board about a little bit over three years ago. So they had 14 years out of their belts before I ever came along. And the interesting thing about the company is that it had always been profitable. So it's nice as a venture capitalist when you actually intersect a company that has been profitable and doesn't need the money. And that was the case with Linda.com. What really attracted me to the company was, first of all, they had a very simple business model. You give your credit card, you pay $25 a month. When you get the training you need, you don't have to continue, but we've got over 2,000 courses so there's a lot of wealth of information and learning that you can take advantage of. But it's simple, right? And from that's on the B2C side and the enterprise side, those same people, we talk a lot, the trend now is BYO, bring your own into the enterprise. A lot of people brought Linda.com into the enterprise. So it's a very great lead generation system for people to enter at a very low cost and then go to enterprise. The second thing that was really interested in was the quality of the content. Linda and Bruce have done an amazing job developing a curated library, very high quality content in the creative area, in development tools and programming, business skills, and having been around multimedia and authoring tools and the learning business, having built Apple's higher education business back in the 80s, I was very attuned to finding a company that has simple model and had great content. So there was no friction to growing the company and that's why I was attracted. Great, and obviously your background, as you mentioned, I thought you might not know that, it was Macromedia, Apple, just a great success, but you have a lot of bring to the table, they're great. Linda, but I want to ask you now, okay, so the online transformation's going on now, so you had a great spike, create a great product, market starts growing, you see on Academy, look at the standards we had Tom Byers on earlier talking about what they're doing with education, with entrepreneurship, the free online course is hundreds of thousands of people getting education, so it's a democratization, it's a transformation. How do you guys look at this next wave of transformation in the business? How do you look at that? And what are you thinking, how do you attack that? Well, I mean, I think there's a huge opportunity, clearly in the very beginning, people might have been dubious and skeptical about online education and I think what all of these different players are proving is that there's a huge market, that there's a huge demand and that it's a great either compliment or alternative to face-to-face education, it can be both. What Linda.com prides itself on is that we believe we're a compliment, we're not trying to replace higher education or K through 12 or competing whatsoever, we're a lifelong learning company and we're for all ages, all people and the types of topics that we teach are sometimes taught in school. I mean, I was citing in my keynote about how UCLA has started to use Linda.com for prerequisites to some of their courses. Learn Final Cut or Premiere on Linda but then come to my film theory class, knowing how to edit. So the pre-studies are all right there, they point to, it's all referenceable. Oh, correct, yes. So Jeff Wiener was in there giving a keynote here from LinkedIn, obviously a public company and really smooth. He was very smooth watching him do the CEO speech but he really brought up a good point, the economic graph he talked about, he talked about how LinkedIn's being now a tool for people with their end job because obviously it's a recruiting tool initially now it's a social network. People are connecting around learning. Are you seeing that same trend with Linda.com and are you guys going down that road of saying, hey, people are using the videos, is there a path for social networking and people to connect amongst each other? We are, it's not at the top of our road map at the moment but we will eventually get there. We have found that, I mean, I think there's definitely a social angle to doing what we're, to learning but I also think that learning can be a solitary act. What I like to talk about is that a thousand people can come to Linda.com with a thousand different things that they need to learn and have a thousand different experiences and you can't really do that when you're talking to somebody else. That's not something that happens in a synchronistic way. So while I think social would be great for us, I don't think it is our top priority. So you're marketing to the persona of one. Correct. Personalization, personalized learning, that's exactly right. That's the big trend right now. You're talking all the trends we see is using big data or whatever techniques to market to the person of one. That's versus the old way, which was hit a lot of people and convert. Correct. People want their own individual needs. I mean, that's what technology affords. You can't do that in the physical world but you can do that with online tools and that's very liberating. I mean, I had a teacher write to me recently whose student thanked him for implementing Linda.com at their school because she had cerebral palsy and she couldn't keep up with the classes but now that she has Linda.com she can watch something over and over and really study it and she was just thanking him that it was helping her and we hear stories like that all the time because not only is it different learning objectives but it's different learning styles. Some people can skip ahead and go to something advanced or they need to start from the beginning and go to the end and that's what you can't do in physical space and time. You know, that's the thing people source information whether it's YouTube videos here or there, whatever's on their fingertips, kind of a new user experience. But I want to ask you as someone who's obviously in the venture capital business here at Excel you see a lot of things and you're obviously busy on the board here but you've been at Apple you've seen the multiple generations of really changed the world type products. This is transformative, this educational and the personalization and media, right? So it's interactive. What's your vision around the corner? What do you see happening next couple years? Well, I'm really excited about education obviously like you are. I think that there are tremendous opportunities. What Lynda.com is doing is what we're doing now is just the tip of the iceberg. I'd love to see us be the worldwide platform for education. Already we have a very strong brand reputation for quality and obviously we're reaching approximately 2 million people around the world with our product and if we could build on that and incorporate some of the features that you mentioned about community and social. I think long-term the Lynda.com experience has to be more than the learning. There also has to be a social and community component which we have today. We have a community. We just need to enable that community to. And timing's everything too. You don't want to force something down a community's throat. Right. It's like kind of like if people have success on a personalized level of skill improvement building less than they need is another pop-up window saying register or join. Right. I'm not talking about intrusive community but ways of taking that community and you know Jeff talked about professional status for example. I mean we could talk. He talked about the economic graph. We can talk about the education graph. Totally. You know where the skill graph for people are really mapping out their set of skills at Lynda.com and we have something called playlist today where people can begin to share a curriculum or a pathway for learning around different topics. And we're working on pathways, et cetera. So I mean those are a few of the things that we're working on that are evolutionary. But I think revolutionary is when Lynda.com is a worldwide global platform where it can take not only our own content but also third party content. And when we think about learning a lot of talk here today has been about learning too. How is it going to evolve in higher education in K through 12 but particularly in higher education or lifelong learning. I think it's going to be much more of a modular approach. Right. Universities are already going you know San Jose State University is now offering Udacity courses for credit. Right. Starting I think now or in the next couple of months. So in the same way I think Lynda talked about Lynda.com being used as a prerequisite but I can see a time where people will actually get credit for Lynda.com courses within a university or courses that we produce in the future. And universities themselves are being forced to relook at what does their degree mean? What does their diploma mean? Is that going to be some Lynda.com, some Udacity, some courses offered by the university, some you know a sort of a mix and match modular approach that at the end of the day you are, get a bachelor's in American studies or you get a bachelor's in chemistry or you get a master's in physics. You can arrive at that in many different ways and I think that's what Lynda's talking about when she talks about independent learning that everyone can approach that learning path in a different way and I think the institutions are going to have to adapt to this new model where everyone mixes and matches. Dean rolls a little bit and shakes the foundation of those institutions that are slow. Obviously I have a personal opinion. Yeah but I will tell you, I'm on a board at Georgetown University. They already have a number of things in the online learning area. Stanford is going like crazy. San Jose State is doing it because they have thousands of students on wait lists to get courses. This is an area where the universities are moving faster than I've ever seen them move on any topic. Well let me ask you before we ask Lynda a question after but I want to get on that because that's really important. The institutions are being forced to change because the users are there, the consumers. And the cost. Yeah I mean so I was just asking Tom Byers earlier, Stanford has huge success meaning what 700,000 people not going to school have taken one class or another online. That's not including the entrepreneurship impact that they're making, some of his work. The naysayers are like, well our business model they won't come to Stanford so you have the naysayers. Wait a minute, that's just going to cannibalize our business model and in fact the reality is this is now the transformation. So how do you talk about that when you're in board means in Georgetown and within institutions to eliminate any cognitive dissonance around the extinction of incumbents? It's a very hot topic, very controversial because tuition is the business model. With the exception of a few universities at the very top end of the food chain like Stanford and Princeton and Harvard and so forth who have these enormous endowments. Tuition is the lifeblood of every university so to the extent and they have built up a large amount of fixed costs with buildings, with tenured professorships. Tenure means lifelong employment right at pretty good salaries and so those fixed costs are very hard to change for universities. So when you start talking about meddling with an annual inflow of tuition, it's very dangerous. Yes and so I don't think the top 100 branded universities are going to have a problem. Everyone's always going to want to come to Stanford or Georgetown or Princeton or whatever because of the brand that they have. But when you go below that I think all of those universities and colleges really are going to have to rethink their business model. What will their tuition be? Will there be a difference in tuition between a physical experience and an online experience? Do students need to go for four years anymore? Can they go for two years? Can they get other courses online or in other ways and aggregate them to have a diploma? There are a lot of changes coming. It's exciting too because there's positive outcomes. So the good news is there's proof points. I mean you agree right? Yeah there's going to be more access and there's going to be lower cost. I think those are both great outcomes. So Linda going back let's rewind the clock before when you started the company with your husband there wasn't all this talk. Well there was in certain series but now it's just being treated. The mobile device and the rich user experience and the connected internet of things whatever you want to call the edge, the intelligent edge has catapulted media and education in the mainstream. How does that make you feel? I mean looking back on your career you've done some really good things just by having a great product but now suddenly it's very relevant. Sure your personal feelings. I mean I kind of feel like Dustin Hoffman when they go plastics right? Like you find yourself at this, you're in the hot space even though you had no clue you were going to be in the hot space. I mean all that I've done is pursued my passion, my interests and my calling what I think is my calling. And I feel incredibly fortunate that there's so much value placed on it. And I mean we look at how teachers today are being really vilified. There's so much attention on measuring whether they're good teachers or bad teachers and so much talk about that which I think is misplaced anger at them when it's really something much bigger than them but that's a whole other topic. But it's wonderful to be in a position where we're actually paying our teachers really well and at lynda.com the content, we call it content is queen instead of content is king but the content is what is bringing the people and that's the teaching, those are the teachers. And so really teachers are being honored, teachers are being respected and teachers are being appreciated and that's really gratifying, I love that. And to share with the folks out there, this is kind of a, there's no real wrong answer but I want to get your perspective. What is the most amazing thing that you've seen happen with your work that surprised you and almost made you fall out of here, and you say, wow, that's amazing. Well, we have a site-wide license at a university in the UK and that means that every student, faculty and staff member gets access. And we heard a story about a janitor who studied web design on lynda.com and switched jobs from being a janitor to working on the web team. I thought that was a really beautiful story. That's awesome. But final word for you, what are your experiences, you've been into the education now with all this momentum, what gets you excited right now? Well, I guess a couple of things. One is on the lynda.com side, every month there's a newsletter and there's a little quote and the story that Lynda just told I think is repeated hundreds and thousands of time every year where people have transformational experiences and one of the things that I loved about being at Apple and then at Macromedia and then I love about lynda.com is it's great to work on a problem in an area that makes transformational differences in people's lives. And, you know, there's so many types of jobs where you can't say that. You know, and it's not to say that they're not important jobs, they are important jobs. Whether you work- You change people's lives with technology and education. Yeah, by learning something, we all want education for our children and by learning something, you can transform yourself and the lives of other people. And to me, that's the most exciting thing that I can do is work with companies and with people that are doing that kind of work. Lyndon, but thanks for coming inside the Cube SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of the Stanford Excel Symposium here live at Stanford, California at Stanford University. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.