#248 – Scaling Learning with Laura Warnier of GoStudent

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What’s in this episode?

Thanks to Learnosity and WorkTripp for sponsoring this episode. 

In this episode, I’m in conversation with:

• Laura Warnier, the Chief Growth Officer at online tutoring platform GoStudent

We talk about: 

• The factors involved in GoStudent’s rapid expansion – investment, team, zeitgeist. 
• Laura’s view on network effects and membership models 
• Near to peer tutoring, support and engagement 

Plus, some updates on edtech events, reports, and other news. 

People

Laura Warnier, Chief Growth Officer, GoStudent

Laura Warnier is Chief Growth Officer at the online tutoring platform GoStudent, recently valued at €3B. Laura joined GoStudent in 2018, as the company’s second full-time employee, to develop and execute the commercial strategy. She built from scratch a scalable customer acquisition machine and grew the sales team from 0 to +250 employees. In mid-2020, Laura started GoStudent’s international expansion by launching the French and Spanish markets. With that experience, she created a playbook and a cross-functional team that enabled the scaleup to further expand to 15+ countries in 2021. Today, Laura is leading a team of 100+ employees across Branding, Marketing, Partnerships and International Expansion. Born and raised in Belgium, Laura has spent the past ten years experiencing Europe. Living in London and  Dublin, via Barcelona, Copenhagen and Berlin, she settled in Vienna five years ago. Laura holds a double master’s degree in international management from CEMS – the Global Alliance in Management Education – and the Louvain School of Management. She started her professional career at HelloFresh, Google and Telekom Austria, where she gained extensive experience in business development, sales and marketing. Right before joining GoStudent Laura built the paid performance marketing business at Improove Inc, an international advertising agency.

Laura is an expert on hyper-growth topics, sales & marketing strategies, international expansion, cross-cultural management and global education systems. She is passionate about building structure and processes as a foundation for growth and she works hard to foster her team’s creativity, encouraging them to be bold, helping them to  scale faster and stronger. Born in a family where entrepreneurship and education matter (her father is a business owner and her mother is the headteacher of a secondary school), Laura’s ambition is to revolutionise education and give students across the globe the opportunity to develop their full potential.  

In 2022 Laura, together with 31 Belgian entrepreneurs, investors and experts, banded to form Syndicate One, the first Belgian angel investor syndicate. Their goal is to elevate the Belgian startup ecosystem to the next level. With 10+ years of experience in the tech startup environment, Laura provides mentorship and hands-on advice to the next generation of founders, giving back to her home community.

Founded in 2016, the EdTech scale-up is now active in +20 countries. GoStudent has more than 2,000 employees and works with 20,000 self-employed tutors. More than 1.5 million tutoring sessions are booked each month. To date, GoStudent has raised more than +€590m. Investors include Prosus and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. 

Sophie Bailey is the Founder and Presenter of The Edtech Podcast | Twitter: @podcastedtech

Sophie is the founder of the iTunes new and noteworthy, The Edtech Podcast. The mission of The Edtech Podcast is to improve the dialogue between ‘ed’ and ‘tech’ for better innovation, through storytelling. The podcast is downloaded from over 145 countries with the UK, US & Aus in the top 3. Sophie has spoken and moderated at a variety of events including SXSW EDU, Yidan Education Prize, ASU GSV Summit, and the Next Billion Edtech Summit. She is an industry mentor and advisor, a Reimagine Education, GESA Awards, Bett Awards and XPrize Adult Literacy judge, and previous Edtech50 and Edtech Digest winner.

Sophie is passionate about lifelong and everyday learning, and is now building new venture, WorkTripp. If she’s not interviewing a University Vice-Chancellor, Edtech Investor, School Leader, or StartUp about education innovation, she’s engrossed in Teach Your Monster to Read or wrestling her lockdown baby. A keen cyclist, she lives in West Devon which she considers the English version of the Pyrenees. 

References from this week’s episode

• Learnosity
• WorkTripp
• Edutech Europe, Amsterdam, 5 – 6 October 2022
• Edtech Next Summit, 24.-26 October in northwestern Germany
• Dr Maureen Dunne, Lego Foundation 
• Felix Atkin, Sharesy
• GoStudent
• Acq. of Seneca and Tus 
• Seneca Learning
• Tus media
• Strength finder Gallup
• You are a brand

Thank you to this week’s sponsors

Learnosity is the global leader in assessment solutions. Serving over 700 customers and more than 40 million learners, its mission is to advance education and learning worldwide with best-in-class technology. Learnosity’s specialized expertise and pre-built assessment APIs make it easy for modern learning platforms to quickly launch fully featured products, scale on demand, and always meet fast-evolving market needs. Visit learnosity.com today to discover how.

WorkTripp is a marketplace for high-growth companies to book team offsites, to improve talent retention, cross-team innovation and employee experience. We come at team offsites from an events and learning and development perspective, not just a transactional booking process. This helps teams to get the most out of their time and investment on bringing everyone together. To book a WorkTripp or add your listing go to www.worktripp.com  

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