Jeff Whatcott has spoken with a lot of managers who run software engineering teams, and they’ve pretty much all told him the same thing: Too much of the time, developers must resort to Googling for professional training content.
"What you don’t get through Googling is you don’t know if you’ve done the truly best thing. And you don’t know how to sequence things," said Whatcott, formerly the CMO of Brightcove. "It’s hard to know, 'Am I starting at the middle or the end? What background am I missing?'"
And so he and another veteran of the Boston tech scene—Will Koffel, who was part of the founding engineering team at Akamai—have teamed up to lend a hand to professional developers. Their startup is Outlearn, which is now launching cloud software for curating training content relevant to developers. The Boston company launched a year ago and today is announcing a $2 million seed round from General Catalyst Partners former longtime Akamai CEO Paul Sagan.
Two things to be clear about upfront: Outlearn is not a courses library (like Lynda.com or Pluralsight) and it isn’t part of the “learn to code” crowd. Instead, the purpose of using Outlearn is to better organize the learning content that’s out there on the Web while blending it with internal, proprietary training. And the focus is on working developers, not coding newbies.
What Outlearn offers is Web software that lets users curate and publish “online learning paths”—links to learning content (videos, PDFs, Google Docs, Web articles etc.) that can be organized however you choose.
“All the learn-to-code stuff is great, but what unfortunately tends to happen is that when a developer gets out of 'learn to code' and into the professional workplace, suddenly they’re left to their own devices,” Koffel said. “We’re tackling the professional developer segment, which we think is severely underserved.”
Outlearn is based in the Leather District and employs five full-time. Here are some more key things to know about the company:
Founding. The idea for the company resulted from discussions between Whatcott and Donald Fischer, venture partner at General Catalyst, and so General Catalyst has been part of the company since the start. “They’d been wanting to see a company of this kind, and felt there was a big opportunity in enterprise training,” Whatcott said. “After doing a lot of research, we settled on the concept that became Outlearn.” Whatcott is co-founder and CEO of the company, and Koffel, who joined a few months in, is co-founder and CTO. "When I sat down with Jeff, during our first meeting at Voltage, what he was talking about immediately resonated," Koffel said. Outlearn, he said, is seeking "to help the kinds of teams I've been working with for 15 years."
Founder backgrounds. Whatcott was CMO at Brightcove from late 2008 through March 2014, a month after the company’s IPO. Previously he was VP of marketing at Acquia, VP of marketing at Adobe Systems and VP of Product Management at Macromedia.
“We’re tackling the professional developer segment, which we think is severely underserved.”
Koffel is an alum of MIT’s computer science program, where he worked with the professors who founded Akamai. After working at Akamai during its early years, he has been a startup founder and held positions including CTO of Sermo.
Customers and pricing. Initial customers are focused on financial services (such as banks and insurance companies), IT professional services such as consulting shops and software companies. Outlearn isn’t naming customers for now, but some are already paying for the service, which starts at $15 per person per month for private custom learning paths. For individuals who’d like to curate their own learning paths, Outlearn is free to use—with the hope that individuals will end up bringing Outlearn to their organizations for team use, Whatcott said.
Free content. Outlearn today is also launching public learning content that is free to consume. This consists of five “topic streams” curated by subject matter experts—for the Go language, Docker, AngularJS, Node.js and Pro JavaScript. More are in the works.
