Why we invested in SuperHi again — the future of decentralized education
SuperHi Basic Income — an experiment to see if giving multiple people $1,000 a month will help accelerate their creative careers
I was introduced to Rik, Founder/CEO of SuperHi, in November of 2020 by Turner Novak to invest in their pre-seed after they went through Expa. At the time he was doing $2M+ in one-time sales of his coding/creative classes but was raising the capital to pivot to Saas, a yearly subscription that’s more predictable and something that investors like better.
We generally stay away from traditional education startups, focused on selling to college students or anything university-related. No question we know the coding boot camp space is “crowded” but with remote work gaining momentum (pre-covid times) and traditional education only becoming more expensive/putting so many students in debt, we wanted to bet that would change in the coming years. We invested with the goal of this round to hit $1M ARR within a year, which they accomplished in under 7 months.
But during this time (a year into covid) crypto/web3 started to gain momentum again around DAOs and play to earn, so Rik came up with a BIG idea… What if you could build a platform/community where the students/teachers have more of a say AND can participate in the upside!? I’m very vocal (check my tweets) about my stance on this space that most people are just doing XYZ on crypto but when he told me this idea, I got really excited. Having gone through and paid for undergrad and an MBA, there could be some really interesting dynamics about having more of a say and benefiting beyond a traditional sit in the class and choosing from this list of classes style education and the countless outdated case studies.
From Rik, CEO/Founder of SuperHi
We’re building educational tools that not only help people gain new skills but also get paid for sharing those skills too. At the moment platforms dont reward people for their highly technical knowledge… If you take something like Stack Overflow… it sold for $1.8bn recently on the backs of its community’s free technical labor but I would argue that the value isn’t in just the tech that SO provided, the value is a combination of product and community. A lot of creators and I think it’s unfair that people aren’t being rightly rewarded for their participation in helping people, So we’re building an education protocol that doesn’t let creators be tied into one website, that doesn’t skim or change numbers to look good, and lets them be rewarded for adding value to it. Basically we’re letting the teachers and students run the school rather than the admins.
He was able to convince a few other strategic investors as well and quickly raised a $5M Series A led by Framework Ventures to pursue this idea.
So keep an eye out over the coming year for the evolution of online education, their Universal Basic Income initiative, and the launch of their token.
Sign up for the UBI here www.superhibasicincome.com and/or some of their amazing classes to learn something new www.superhi.com
