Over the years, I've seen many startup pitches covering all types of industries, verticals, and stages. And I admit that platforms for education-based startups are pretty rare, and a team of people trying to set up a completely new, remote-only university is even rarer. Tomorrow University raised around $10 million in its series A. Write about fundraising on your blog.
Slides on this platform
30-slide presentations are a thing of the past. Tomorrow University has perhaps overcompensated a little in the other direction, with a very concise 10-slide presentation. Is posible to tell your story in a few slides. Guy Kawasaki, for example, advocates a 10-slide deck, but the vast majority of founders don't have a firm enough grip on their story to achieve this.
According to the presentation, the university plans to offer an MBA program, so I would expect the presentation document to be really first class, with very complete plans and financials. In university language: “This document does not meet minimum expectations.” We will get to that point. For now, here are the slides Tomorrow University chose to include:
- Cover Slide
- Historical context slide
- Goals Slide
- Mission Slide
- Solution Slide
- Product Slide
- Traction slip
- Market slide
- team slide
- Closing slide
Three points to pay attention to
The college experience can be quite disappointing, so I agree with the idea that the college experience in general could use an overhaul. This document speaks the common language in many ways.
Bringing some “real life” to education
This is how Tomorrow University imagines the universities of the future
Humans are infinitely complex and nuanced creatures, so it makes sense to tailor educational programs to individual wants and needs. A “metaverse campus” sounds pretty embarrassing (and nowhere on the platform does the university explain what that means specifically), but overall, I think this slide opens the door for investors Dream a little about what the next generation will be like. What the college experience could be like. Real-life challenges, personalized learning, and local learning groups are much more like the remote world we live in today than what we would find in the current university experience.
Interesting traction
My two biggest questions before reading the presentation: Are you accredited and how do you measure success? It turns out that both questions were answered on the same slide. Well done!
This traction slide does a lot of heavy lifting on the Tomorrow University platform
I like this slide and it answers some interesting questions, such as when it was founded, when it started offering securities, and how much money it has raised to date. But it also raised some questions.
On the one hand, having such thin slider traction in numbers is a little suspect. It says it has 3x growth, but it doesn't include what that growth is. Since that is not specified on the slide, the mind is invited to guess. Is it income? Is it the number of students? If it is the latter, it means that it went from 50 students in 2021, to 150 students in 2022, to 450 students this year. They've also raised about $30.000 per student in the program so far, which seems a little strange.
What does “in association with WU” mean? I assume it is the University of Vienna, but that is not made clear anywhere. Also, how does accreditation work in Germany and Europe in general? The slide suggests that Tomorrow University is accredited in Hessen, which is a state in Germany that incorporates the cities of Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. But is that enough to build a reputation as a university? The main accreditation body for higher education in Germany is the German Accreditation Council, so why wasn't it the one that granted accreditation to Tomorrow University? Should he have done it? Is there a plan to do this?
Suffice it to say that I lack the cultural or local knowledge to really judge this slide, but I know that if this came across my desk as an investor, I would have a broad set of questions for founders. These are questions that, frankly, would be quite predictable and could have warranted a slide or appendix titled “Roadmap to Accreditation” or similar.
As a startup, what you can learn from this slide is not to take for granted that your investors They have all the pieces of the puzzle. If you operate in a regulated space (such as healthcare, education, or finance), make sure you have some backup slides to explain the regulatory landscape and where the startup is in the process.
Size of the market
The size of this market is so large that it deserves additional detail.
If Tomorrow University suggests that it is going after the entire global education market, I would probably question it on that score; For example, the self-service platform may not work for everyone in the world. Perhaps post-secondary education is the company's true TAM, but still, I won't argue here: there is little doubt that the education market is gigantic and there is a huge opportunity for advanced technological solutions in this space.
There is a lot of value in chasing huge, well-established markets ripe for disruption, especially if you have a good go-to-market plan. The best way to do this is by showing the size of the market and then explaining how the startup's target slice of the pie will be divided.
As you can tell, it was a little difficult to find parts of this that really stood out, were liked, and worked well for Tomorrow University's plot. That said, there are also three other points that Tomorrow University could have improved or done differently.
Three points of improvement
The idea in general is good. And it would be a very attractive option compared to the traditional university model.
The main problem: it does not seem certain that Tomorrow University knows who its target audience is.
What are you going to do?
If you are raising $10 million, there should at least be a vague idea of what you are going to do with the money. For most founders, that's the most important thing: a sack full of cash is what drives their organization in the right direction. But in these 10 slides, nowhere does it say what you plan to do with the money.
In fact, most of the document reads more like a manifesto than a fundraiser. Don't misunderstand, good manifestos are great, but they're usually not very useful when it comes to fundraising. Paying attention to slides 1, 2, 3, 4 and 10 (full presentation at the end of this article). Each one talks about the future of education as a whole, without many details. “The next-generation university for those changing the world” sounds fantastic, but every founder in the world should be able to come up with a good, specific “what” and “why.” It's the “how, who and when” that makes people want to invest, and Tomorrow University fails to explain all three.
There are no finances, no projections, no operational plan. The platform does not say how many students Tomorrow University wants to target, how many courses it will offer, how it will attract students and how much it will charge them. Most importantly, there is a lack of information on how Tomorrow University will spend the $10 million.
It's surprising that this company managed to raise money and I suspect a lot of additional data is missing from this document. This is good; You can use dashboards and spreadsheets as part of your presentation process. However, a pro tip: it is key to place a screenshot of the data on the platform with a link to the data in an attachment. That makes it easier to send to investors; You can explain the numbers to them in detail as part of the fundraising process.
The team
The team slide is the most important slide. Some questions need to be answered: Who are these founders? What are your roles in the company? Why are these founders the best people to bet on to build this company?
The Tomorrow University team's slide doesn't answer any of these questions:
Wow, this doesn't say anything.
This slide doesn't include job titles, so I don't actually know who each of these people are. Are they university professors? Advisors? Co-founders? Their LinkedIn profiles are listed as “CEO and co-founder,” which raises even more questions. Do universities have CEOs? In my experience, they are often called chancellors, presidents, directors, rectors, guardians or deans. That's not to say you can't innovate on job titles, but figuring out how these two gentlemen fit into the leadership structure (and why they have the same title but presumably different responsibilities) would be a priority in the hiring process. of investment decisions.
None of Christian Rebernik's experiences undermine the message: “Yes, this guy can build a digital university.” However, his congratulations are for one thing: he highlights that all of his experience is with products in regulated spaces, which includes education.
Thomas Funke's linkedIn tells the story of how he was a speaker and thought leader in entrepreneurship for most of his career. Why isn't that reflected on this slide? And even then, how does being a speaker and digital advisor translate into being a good CEO for this organization?
Try this thought experiment: If you could write a description of the perfect founder for this startup, who would it be? A combination of these two founders, perhaps with some senior leadership experience at a higher education institution, would be a pretty close match to that description. The platform is making investors work hard to figure out why this is a great founding team.
explain why
Clear. But why do we use a slide to say this? How does this connect to the fundraising narrative?
Throughout the presentation, Tomorrow University makes statements of objective truth, without explaining why these things are true. On this slide, the company sets the stage with: “We live in an era of abundant knowledge and powerful tools.” Which, of course, is true. But it's also a truism: it's not clear why it's important to share that statement between slides 1 and 3. On the third slide, we encounter another topic:
How will Tomorrow University solve this?
So, after declaring that we live in an age of abundant information, we claim that we must move from the diffusion of knowledge to the domain of learning. That sounds great, but what is Mastery Learning in this context and how is it different from what was being done? Who is the “we” in that sentence? And how does the second statement on this slide connect to slide 2?
Overall, this all looks a lot like bumper stickers; Individually, they seem wise and insightful, but without connecting them or exploring the "why," it's not clear why it's worth doing. And, as an investor, it's hard to see how this will offer a return on investment.
It's not even that I don't agree with anything on these slides, but the founders don't explain what they plan to do to address any of these issues. They do a good job of stating the problem, but then don't follow through with their solution. And even more: How will money help solve this?
Complete Presentation
In any case, if Tomorrow University managed to achieve that Serie A, probably the convincing explanation of the model, accompanying documents or different iterations managed to attract investors. Even so, for a first contact I hope that these tips or vision can be useful for your future presentations.
