- Raise Me is a platform that aims to expand access to higher education by rethinking how students access scholarships and grants for college.
- They believe this is important because the cost of education has been rising while the majority of jobs now require a college degree.
- Raise Me allows students to accrue scholarships and grants throughout high school based on their individual progress and skills, rather than waiting until after they have already applied and been accepted to college.
- In their third school year, Raise Me awarded over a billion dollars in scholarships and grants to students across the country.
- The founder of Raise Me previously worked in strategy consulting and research before teaching at a high school in India, which inspired the idea for the platform.
- The initial vision for Raise Me was similar to its current direction, but the founder had to determine where the funds would come from and decided to start with higher education institutions.
- Building density in the network and concentrating on specific regions has been important for managing the balance between students and funds.
- Product-market fit was a gradual awakening, but the founder gained confidence when thousands of students started signing up for Raise Me.
- Fundraising took over a year, with initial funding coming from personal savings and grant funding from competitions, including a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation.
- After pausing fundraising to focus on product traction, investors became more confident once the platform was live and students were signing up.

- The company faced initial pushback in the ed tech industry, but gained traction and confidence from investors.
- They currently have 52 employees and have gone through 2 and a half rounds of funding.
- In the early days, the CEO focused on tactics like customer interviews and pitching to colleges and universities.
- The CEO's role has evolved to setting vision and strategy, recruiting, and fundraising.
- Patience and resilience are important in the early stages of a company.
- The biggest barrier facing students, aside from financial aid, is a lack of guidance and mentorship.
- The CEO hopes that in 5 years, their platform will be used by every student in the US and beyond for their college and career journey.

At YC Edtech Night, early-stage edtech founders from around the world gathered to meet and learn from each other. The sessions included fireside chats with edtech alums from YC and Imagine K12. 

Preston Silverman is the founder of RaiseMe - https://www.raise.me/ -
 (Imagine K12, S12), a platform that allows colleges to award micro-scholarships to students throughout high school for doing the things that prepare them for college success. Last year, RaiseMe awarded over $1B in scholarships to students. At Edtech Night, Preston talked with Tim Brady about building a two-sided marketplace and shared his experiences fundraising as an edtech founder.

We're focused on expanding access to higher education by rethinking the way that students access scholarships and grant funding for college.

We think this is really important because since the recession over 80% of jobs that have been created in the US require some form of a college degree, but at the same time, as Tim mentioned earlier, the cost of education has been rising dramatically.

Millions of students and families are questioning whether it's a viable path for them and how they can afford it.

1 thing that we saw early on is that in the US, we're already awarding over $100 billion every year in scholarships and grants to help students pay for college.

But historically, that money hasn't been awarded until after students are supposed to have already decided whether and where to apply to college.

And for many students, that's too late to impact their college ambitions or their application decisions.

And as a result, many students check out much earlier or just assume that it's not a viable path for them, even though they might be eligible for for thousands of dollars in aid that could help them in their journey.

So the basic premise behind Raise Me is was what if instead of waiting until after a student has already applied and been accepted to a college to award this aid, what if we enabled them to accrue it as they go throughout high school based on their individual progress and development, their unique skills and talents?

And that way we could create a more transparent and empowering system for students, give them access to these funds earlier before they have to make these decisions, so they can be more confident pursuing their college and career goals.

We just finished our third school year, we're going into our fourth school year.

Last year we awarded over a billion dollars, nearly a billion and a half dollars in scholarships and grants through the platform to students all over the country, which we're really excited about.

Billion dollars, congratulations, that's awesome.

Fourth school year, but how long have you been at it?

5 years, so maybe take us through what were you doing before Raise Me?

And then how did you come to the decision to start this?

So when I first graduated university, I worked for a strategy consulting and research firm that was a small boutique firm.

And 1 of the reasons I was attracted to that was got to work on a lot of different industries.

It was international, so I worked in a lot of different countries and got exposed to and learned a lot.

But after a few years, I felt like I wanted to have more direct impact.

A lot of our work ended up being put together, a PowerPoint presentation and send it off, and I wanted to really tackle something more hands on.

And I'd always been really passionate about education as a means of creating opportunity for people.

So as I was trying to think through what was next for me.

I went and taught at a high school in India.

I was teaching high school juniors and seniors.

And so I ended up talking to them a lot about their plans for after they graduate, going to college, paying for it, reflecting on my own experience, trying to navigate that process.

And had the idea for Raise Me There and just started doing a lot of research and trying to validate it and then applied to what was, you were then calling it to IK-12 and moved to California for that.

So you moved to India, I'm sorry, from India to California for this.

And so getting into the program was kind of the threshold, if you will, to get it started?

No, I mean, I had already at that point committed to it, and I think regardless of whether it was admitted or not, was gonna do it, but that was the icing on the cake.

And so you're a solo founder, but at the time you were or weren't?

So when I applied, I thought I had a co-founder and it was very early days.

You know, You say you will admit sole founders and people without a prototype and without any users.

And so to some degree what you've built, and actually let me back up, the vision for Raise Me Back Then, is it pretty similar to what you have now?

Or have you made any major changes in kind of the direction or the vision of the company?

I would say the overall premise is very similar of, you know, this aid is awarded too late to impact a lot of students, so let's move it up in the process and make it more transparent and predictable for students.

1 thing, I don't know if you'll recall, I was still trying to figure out was where the funds going to come from.

Out of the $100 billion that gets awarded every year, a little over $50 billion comes from colleges and universities.

About $10 billion comes from corporations and foundations.

So I was trying to think through, should we start with crowdsourcing, should we start with foundations, corporate money, all that kind of thing.

And it took a good, I would say, 3 to 6 months of just iterations and cycles trying to sell people and prototype things to get to a place where we landed on we should start with the higher ed institutions themselves.

So, you have a bit of a, because it's a marketplace of sorts, there's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem with getting these funds and then getting the students.

How did you, was it always clear that you had to get the funds first or could you get the students first?

Because I know a lot of people building marketplaces run into this issue.

I felt if we had the funds, we'd be able to find the students.

And I think that's proven out in a broad sense.

For us, I think every marketplace is different.

1 thing we've learned over time, and we could have been more sophisticated with early on, is the importance of building density in the network.

So With us, we find building concentration in certain geographies and regions is really important and allows us to better manage the balance between students and funds.

So when did you know you had product market fit?

Or was it a gradual awakening, if you will?

I think it was a little bit of a gradual awakening.

I always had a lot of conviction around the idea that if we could build this, then students would find it very valuable.

But it wasn't until, of course, we opened it up and we started to see thousands of students signing up that I felt really confident about it.

And then I would say 1 other thing is I don't think of product market fit necessarily as a binary thing.

I think it's something you have to continue to iterate on and you can get closer and closer to, you know, a perfect product market fit.

Maybe take me through your fundraising story.

What are your thoughts reflecting back on it?

I would say our first round took well over a year.

Yeah, I had saved a little money from my previous job and so used that.

You guys were only giving out like $12,000 at the time.

So that was pretty, had to be pretty scrappy there.

That's where your experience in India came in handy.

Yeah, And then we, I think 1 thing we tapped into that you can do in the education space is a little more grant funding.

We were fortunate to win a grant that was sponsored by the Gates Foundation.

That was $100,000 and that made a really big difference for us in terms of being able to hire our first employee as well.

But yeah, so eventually we kind of stopped fundraising after a while because I was like, we're getting no traction here.

We need to get a little more traction on the product, get more partners on board, have some more proof points before we're ready to go back out again.

And then when we did that, we had the platform actually live and was working, and we were starting to get students signed up.

So that gave, I think, the investors a lot more confidence.

And we went back to a lot of people that had told us no before, but once they saw that, I guess they had liked the idea, but once they saw the little bit of traction, they were more confident about coming on board.

And how is it to raise money as an ed tech company in Silicon Valley?

I've only raised money as a tech company.

Oh, I did, and At the time, MOOCs were like all anyone could talk about in ed tech.

We got a lot of pushback in particular around, well, college isn't going to be around in 3 years, so you guys are wasting your time.

I think people have come around on that, but that was certainly a challenging dynamic.

We were really fortunate to find investors that saw the potential opportunity as a business, but we're also very mission driven and just passionate about what we were doing as well.

We raised a convertible note, and we converted that into our seed round when we got our first institutional investor, and then we raised a series A last year.

So maybe help, because a lot of the folks here are just starting out their companies, and being CEO of kind of pre-seed, seed is very different than what you're doing today, I imagine.

Can you compare the 2 and maybe focus on the early days and what was hard about it and what was surprising about it to you looking back?

Yeah, I think Early days was, I would say, much more tactical.

Like, your tactics are kind of everything.

So I was really rolling up my sleeves in terms of doing tons of customer interviews, user research, prototyping, you know, that type of work, which I loved and was really exciting.

A lot of hands-on selling as well, going out and pitching colleges and universities, pitching teachers as well.

That accounted for probably 80% of my time when I wasn't fundraising.

And how that's evolved, I would say, is now less hands-on.

I would say major jobs are setting the vision and strategy and goals for their organization, making sure we're all aligned around a North Star of what we're trying to achieve.

Spend a lot of time building out our team and making sure we have the right people on the bus.

1 thing I feel I've learned is everything comes down to your team at the end of the day.

And if you have the right team, you'll be able to overcome the challenges that come your way and figure out a lot and you'll be a lot more resilient.

And then third, I guess, is the same as your responsibility is making sure you have the money in the bank.

So, you know, fundraising hasn't gone away.

So on this journey, what has been the biggest learning or surprise to you personally, like in terms of what you were expecting it to be and what it's turned out to be?

Any advice for folks in the audience on if you, what do you wish you knew then that you knew now?

In many ways I feel like if we were gonna do it over again, we could probably get to where we are today in half the time.

I would say 1 of the most important things is just to have patience and resilience.

The name of the game in a lot of ways early on is just survival.

If you have a lot of patience and resilience, you're going to figure things out and you're going to iterate as you need to.

There can oftentimes be, I think, a misconception that if it doesn't feel like you're on a rocket ship on day 1 or day 10, then you're not on the right track, and a lot of people, there's this fail fast mentality, and I think it is important to very quickly identify what's not working, but that doesn't mean you should throw in the towel on the entire company.

Maybe change tactics and get out of the company for a second.

What do you think, other than maybe financial aid, what's the biggest barrier facing students today?

Outside of financial aid, I think guidance and mentorship is really lacking for a lot of students.

In high schools across the country, there can oftentimes be 1 counselor for every 600 students, and they're trying to make this really important decision about what's the next step in their life after high school, and they get 20 minutes with a counselor.

And that's particularly challenging for students that might be first in their family to go to college or are from a low-income community.

And so I'd like to see us figure out a way to support students better in terms of mentorship and guidance as they're trying to navigate these difficult decisions.

I think we could do a lot better job linking education with career opportunities as well and making sure we're focused on the skills that students need to develop.

You know A lot of education is still centered around the content or knowledge.

I think it's more important that students are developing the fundamental skills that they need to be successful because the content they're going to need is changing and evolving so rapidly.

5 years, where do you hope to be 5 years from now?

Well, we plan to be a platform that every student in the US and hopefully some students out of the US by then, are leveraging in their college and career journey.

We can support them not just with financial aid, but really many of the pivotal decisions that they need to make as they're navigating this critical piece of their lives from early high school to and through college.


Speaker 0: Hello everyone, good evening. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So I'm founder and CEO of Raise Me. We're focused on expanding access to higher education by rethinking the way that students access scholarships and grant funding for college.

We think this is really important because since the recession over 80% of jobs that have been created in the US require some form of a college degree, but at the same time, as Tim mentioned earlier, the cost of education has been rising dramatically. Millions of students and families are questioning whether it's a viable path for them and how they can afford it. 1 thing that we saw early on is that in the US, we're already awarding over $100 billion every year in scholarships and grants to help students pay for college. But historically, that money hasn't been awarded until after students are supposed to have already decided whether and where to apply to college. And for many students, that's too late to impact their college ambitions or their application decisions.

And as a result, many students check out much earlier or just assume that it's not a viable path for them, even though they might be eligible for for thousands of dollars in aid that could help them in their journey. So the basic premise behind Raise Me is was what if instead of waiting until after a student has already applied and been accepted to a college to award this aid, what if we enabled them to accrue it as they go throughout high school based on their individual progress and development, their unique skills and talents? And that way we could create a more transparent and empowering system for students, give them access to these funds earlier before they have to make these decisions, so they can be more confident pursuing their college and career goals. We just finished our third school year, we're going into our fourth school year. Last year we awarded over a billion dollars, nearly a billion and a half dollars in scholarships and grants through the platform to students all over the country, which we're really excited about.

And yeah, I'll pull up there.

Speaker 1: Billion dollars, congratulations, that's awesome. Thanks. So you've been at it 3, 4 years?

Speaker 0: Yeah, entering our fourth school year.

Speaker 1: Fourth school year, but how long have you been at it?

Speaker 0: 5 years.

Speaker 1: 5 years, so maybe take us through what were you doing before Raise Me? And then how did you come to the decision to start this? And what was that process like?

Speaker 0: So when I first graduated university, I worked for a strategy consulting and research firm that was a small boutique firm. It was kind of a startup in itself. And 1 of the reasons I was attracted to that was got to work on a lot of different industries. It was international, so I worked in a lot of different countries and got exposed to and learned a lot. But after a few years, I felt like I wanted to have more direct impact.

A lot of our work ended up being put together, a PowerPoint presentation and send it off, and I wanted to really tackle something more hands on. And I'd always been really passionate about education as a means of creating opportunity for people. So as I was trying to think through what was next for me. I went and taught at a high school in India. I was teaching high school juniors and seniors.

And so I ended up talking to them a lot about their plans for after they graduate, going to college, paying for it, reflecting on my own experience, trying to navigate that process. And had the idea for Raise Me There and just started doing a lot of research and trying to validate it and then applied to what was, you were then calling it to IK-12 and moved to California for that.

Speaker 1: So you moved to India, I'm sorry, from India to California for this. Yeah. Okay, I didn't realize that at

Speaker 0: the time.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 0: Okay. Minor impact on my life.

Speaker 1: And so getting into the program was kind of the threshold, if you will, to get it started?

Speaker 0: No, I mean, I had already at that point committed to it, and I think regardless of whether it was admitted or not, was gonna do it, but that was the icing on the cake.

Speaker 1: And so you're a solo founder, but at the time you were or weren't?

Speaker 0: So when I applied, I thought I had a co-founder and it was very early days. You know, You say you will admit sole founders and people without a prototype and without any users. I checked all those boxes. And Yeah, so it was very, very early.

Speaker 1: And so to some degree what you've built, and actually let me back up, the vision for Raise Me Back Then, is it pretty similar to what you have now? Or have you made any major changes in kind of the direction or the vision of the company?

Speaker 0: Yeah. I would say the overall premise is very similar of, you know, this aid is awarded too late to impact a lot of students, so let's move it up in the process and make it more transparent and predictable for students. 1 thing, I don't know if you'll recall, I was still trying to figure out was where the funds going to come from. Out of the $100 billion that gets awarded every year, a little over $50 billion comes from colleges and universities. About $10 billion comes from corporations and foundations.

So I was trying to think through, should we start with crowdsourcing, should we start with foundations, corporate money, all that kind of thing. And it took a good, I would say, 3 to 6 months of just iterations and cycles trying to sell people and prototype things to get to a place where we landed on we should start with the higher ed institutions themselves.

Speaker 1: Got it. So, you have a bit of a, because it's a marketplace of sorts, there's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem with getting these funds and then getting the students. How did you, was it always clear that you had to get the funds first or could you get the students first? Like how did you approach that? Because I know a lot of people building marketplaces run into this issue.

Speaker 0: Yeah, that's always very tricky. I felt if we had the funds, we'd be able to find the students. And I think that's proven out in a broad sense. For us, I think every marketplace is different. 1 thing we've learned over time, and we could have been more sophisticated with early on, is the importance of building density in the network.

So With us, we find building concentration in certain geographies and regions is really important and allows us to better manage the balance between students and funds.

Speaker 1: Got it. So when did you know you had product market fit? What was that moment? Or was there a moment? Or was it a gradual awakening, if you will?

Speaker 0: I think it was a little bit of a gradual awakening. I always had a lot of conviction around the idea that if we could build this, then students would find it very valuable. But it wasn't until, of course, we opened it up and we started to see thousands of students signing up that I felt really confident about it. And then I would say 1 other thing is I don't think of product market fit necessarily as a binary thing. I think it's something you have to continue to iterate on and you can get closer and closer to, you know, a perfect product market fit.

Speaker 1: Got it. Maybe take me through your fundraising story. How did that go? How long did it take? What are your thoughts reflecting back on it?

Speaker 0: It took a very long time. I would say our first round took well over a year.

Speaker 1: A year after you started?

Speaker 0: A year after we started the company.

Speaker 1: And you just bootstrapped until then?

Speaker 0: Yeah, I had saved a little money from my previous job and so used that. You guys were only giving out like $12,000 at the time. So that was pretty, had to be pretty scrappy there.

Speaker 1: That's where your experience in India came in handy.

Speaker 0: Yeah, exactly. I thought about moving back. Yeah, And then we, I think 1 thing we tapped into that you can do in the education space is a little more grant funding. So we applied for some competitions. We were fortunate to win a grant that was sponsored by the Gates Foundation.

That was $100,000 and that made a really big difference for us in terms of being able to hire our first employee as well. But yeah, so eventually we kind of stopped fundraising after a while because I was like, we're getting no traction here. We need to get a little more traction on the product, get more partners on board, have some more proof points before we're ready to go back out again. And then when we did that, we had the platform actually live and was working, and we were starting to get students signed up. So that gave, I think, the investors a lot more confidence.

And we went back to a lot of people that had told us no before, but once they saw that, I guess they had liked the idea, but once they saw the little bit of traction, they were more confident about coming on board.

Speaker 1: And how is it to raise money as an ed tech company in Silicon Valley? Was it, did you?

Speaker 0: I've only raised money as a tech company.

Speaker 1: But did you feel labeled, if you will? Or did you not notice it?

Speaker 0: Oh, I did, and At the time, MOOCs were like all anyone could talk about in ed tech. We got a lot of pushback in particular around, well, college isn't going to be around in 3 years, so you guys are wasting your time. I think people have come around on that, but that was certainly a challenging dynamic. We were really fortunate to find investors that saw the potential opportunity as a business, but we're also very mission driven and just passionate about what we were doing as well.

Speaker 1: Got it. So how many employees do you have now? 52. 52, wow. And how many rounds of funding?

Speaker 0: 2 and a half. 2 and a half. So we, I'll explain the technicality. We raised a convertible note, and we converted that into our seed round when we got our first institutional investor, and then we raised a series A last year.

Speaker 1: So maybe help, because a lot of the folks here are just starting out their companies, and being CEO of kind of pre-seed, seed is very different than what you're doing today, I imagine. Can you compare the 2 and maybe focus on the early days and what was hard about it and what was surprising about it to you looking back?

Speaker 0: Yeah, I think Early days was, I would say, much more tactical. Like, your tactics are kind of everything. They are the strategy at that point. So I was really rolling up my sleeves in terms of doing tons of customer interviews, user research, prototyping, you know, that type of work, which I loved and was really exciting. A lot of hands-on selling as well, going out and pitching colleges and universities, pitching teachers as well.

That accounted for probably 80% of my time when I wasn't fundraising. And how that's evolved, I would say, is now less hands-on. I would say major jobs are setting the vision and strategy and goals for their organization, making sure we're all aligned around a North Star of what we're trying to achieve. And then second is recruiting. Spend a lot of time building out our team and making sure we have the right people on the bus.

1 thing I feel I've learned is everything comes down to your team at the end of the day. And if you have the right team, you'll be able to overcome the challenges that come your way and figure out a lot and you'll be a lot more resilient. And then third, I guess, is the same as your responsibility is making sure you have the money in the bank. So, you know, fundraising hasn't gone away.

Speaker 1: So on this journey, what has been the biggest learning or surprise to you personally, like in terms of what you were expecting it to be and what it's turned out to be? Any advice for folks in the audience on if you, what do you wish you knew then that you knew now?

Speaker 0: That's a great question. In many ways I feel like if we were gonna do it over again, we could probably get to where we are today in half the time. What's the case? We made so many mistakes. I would say 1 of the most important things is just to have patience and resilience.

The name of the game in a lot of ways early on is just survival. If you have a lot of patience and resilience, you're going to figure things out and you're going to iterate as you need to. There can oftentimes be, I think, a misconception that if it doesn't feel like you're on a rocket ship on day 1 or day 10, then you're not on the right track, and a lot of people, there's this fail fast mentality, and I think it is important to very quickly identify what's not working, but that doesn't mean you should throw in the towel on the entire company. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Great. Maybe change tactics and get out of the company for a second. What do you think, other than maybe financial aid, what's the biggest barrier facing students today?

Speaker 0: Oh, I think that's a big 1.

Speaker 1: To completing college.

Speaker 0: To completing college. Outside of financial aid, I think guidance and mentorship is really lacking for a lot of students. In high schools across the country, there can oftentimes be 1 counselor for every 600 students, and they're trying to make this really important decision about what's the next step in their life after high school, and they get 20 minutes with a counselor. And that's particularly challenging for students that might be first in their family to go to college or are from a low-income community. And so I'd like to see us figure out a way to support students better in terms of mentorship and guidance as they're trying to navigate these difficult decisions.

I think we could do a lot better job linking education with career opportunities as well and making sure we're focused on the skills that students need to develop. You know A lot of education is still centered around the content or knowledge. I think it's more important that students are developing the fundamental skills that they need to be successful because the content they're going to need is changing and evolving so rapidly.

Speaker 1: So last question. 5 years, where do you hope to be 5 years from now? Where's Raise Me 5 years from now?

Speaker 0: Well, we plan to be a platform that every student in the US and hopefully some students out of the US by then, are leveraging in their college and career journey. We can support them not just with financial aid, but really many of the pivotal decisions that they need to make as they're navigating this critical piece of their lives from early high school to and through college.

Speaker 1: Cool, thanks very much. Thanks for sharing. Thank you, Tim. All right, great. You you

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Preston Silverman on Building out a Marketplace in Education - at YC Edtech Night