MAVEN

Gagan Biyani built Udemy in 2010, and it grew into the dominant online learning marketplace. He also co-founded Sprig, a prepared-meal delivery startup that raised $55 million and shut down in 2017.

Through those experiences, he identified the fundamental flaw in online education: people buy courses and don't finish them. Completion rates on self-paced video courses average under 10%.

In 2020, he teamed up with Wes Kao — who had co-created Seth Godin's altMBA, one of the earliest successful cohort-based programs. Together they built Maven: a marketplace where experts design and run live, scheduled cohort courses where students learn together in real time.

The platform launched during the pandemic, when live online learning was suddenly the only kind of learning happening anywhere.

Maven is a two-sided marketplace. Experts and practitioners design and teach cohort-based courses on the platform — live, scheduled programs that run for weeks at a time.

Students pay to enroll, with prices typically ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per course. Maven takes approximately 10% of revenue from each course.

They also have Maven for Teams, a B2B product where companies pay for custom cohort learning programs built on Maven's infrastructure for their employees.

Maven's core product is the Course Builder: a platform for instructors to design and run cohort-based courses, manage enrollment, host live video sessions, track student progress, and collect payment. Students get a community space with their cohort members and access to all course materials.

Maven for Teams is the enterprise product, letting companies commission custom cohort programs for employee learning and development — built on the same technical infrastructure but with a completely different sales and support model.

Maven's growth was built on credibility by association. Their early instructors were not random experts — they were people with substantial existing audiences who had credibility in specific professional domains.

Lenny Rachitsky ran a product management course. Shreya Doshi taught product leadership.

Each successful course became a case study that attracted three more instructors with similar audiences. The Andreessen Horowitz backing also opened doors — a16z has a portfolio of tech companies that became early corporate customers of Maven for Teams.

Cohort-based courses are expensive and exhausting to produce. Instructors have to show up every week, engage with students, give feedback, and repeat the whole thing for the next cohort.

Many popular instructors burn out after a few runs. Maven's marketplace depends on high-quality instructors staying on the platform and running courses repeatedly — but those same instructors could also build their own direct course business and cut Maven out entirely.

The enterprise product helps de-risk that, but enterprise sales cycles are long and the buyer is completely different from the creator.

Maven raised from Andreessen Horowitz — one of Silicon Valley's top venture firms. a16z has a long history of backing companies in the creator and education space, and the Maven thesis fit cleanly into their portfolio thesis on the future of work and learning.

They brought both capital and portfolio distribution: a16z's network of tech companies became early customers of Maven for Teams. Additional backing came from angel investors in the edtech and creator economy ecosystem.