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Santa Monica-based Snap continues to grow its gaming operation, announcing two new leadership hires for the division on Thursday.
<p>Panayoti (Pany) Haritatos will be Snap's head of games. He will report to Will Wu, the company's director of product. Haritatos was most recently chief operating officer of game publisher and platform Kongregate, and was previously an executive at mobile games titan Zynga. He will be responsible for Snap's gaming strategy and expanding its gaming content, working across the company's product, engineering and partnership teams, as well as with external game developers. </p><p>Jessica Shetty is now head of games partnerships, North America. She will report to John Imah, Snap's head of games and entertainment partnerships. Most recently Shetty was head of mobile gaming partnerships, North America at Facebook, where she was a founding member of the company's Instant Games platform team. Her responsibilities will include Snap's gaming partner strategy and expanding Snap's developer ecosystem.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQzNzM0Ny9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNTMzMzU3Mn0.Nrtgq-ofYfL9k0FnBrvT8ARc8NX9kKykH6O6ad-0hOE/image.jpg?width=980" id="895f4" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f4ce1debf445fd4bf417f2cd60c2279b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="" />
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Jessica Shetty (L) and Panayoti (Pany) Haritatos (R) will join Snap's gaming division's leadership team. </small></p><p>In 2019, Snap introduced Snap Games to allow Snapchatters to play games – whether developed by Snap or external partners – directly in the app. The following year, the company <a href="https://dot.la/headspace-and-snapchat-2646169354.html" target="_self">highlighted its software development kit's integration</a> with other applications, including functionality that allows users to bring their Bitmoji characters into other publishers' games. (<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/25/snapchat-reportedly-acquires-bitmoji-maker-bitstrips-for-100-million/" target="_blank">Snap acquired Bitmoji in 2016</a>, <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/02/heres-how-much-snap-paid-for-bitstrips-looksery-and-vurb/" target="_blank">reportedly for $64.2 million</a>.)<br/></p><p>Over 100 million Snapchat users have played Snap's games, the company reports. Snap has 238 million daily active users, most of them young.</p><p>The new hires will seek to build on the company's gaming momentum. </p><p><a href="https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/newzoo-games-market-numbers-revenues-and-audience-2020-2023/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mobile gaming is the largest portion of the $150 billion+ gaming industry</a>, which is expected to surpass $200 billion by 2023. </p>
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This Test Prep Service has a Cult Following Among Med Students. Soon it Will Have an Animation Studio
Sep 24 2020
The unnamed king wears a crown and large pink robe as he grasps a tissue to his nose.
No, this isn't some Netflix show on the quarantine lives of the rich and famous; it's actually a method SketchyMedical uses to help students recall complicated concepts.
Such images by Los Angeles-based online education startup SketchyMedical have helped catapult the company to cult status among the med school set, who dress up in their drawings for Halloween. One fan even got a tattoo of SketchyMedical's pencil representing penicillin.
On Thursday, SketchyMedical announced its first outside investment stake, a $30 million shot in the arm from former Hollywood executive Peter Chernin's investment firm TCG to help establish an in-house animation studio that will bring to life those famous sketches and expand its team of 30 employees.
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</p><p>The funds will also help SketchyMedical bring its symbolic characters and scenes to other health professions, as well as create new ones for students preparing for the MCAT in the short term and new subjects like law over the next few years.<br/></p><p>"We are reintroducing this method in modern education that's really been lost, and the students have noticed, and it works and they're using it," said CEO and cofounder Saud Siddiqui. "We're really looking forward to expanding our reach, making this accessible no matter what they're studying."</p><p>SketchyMedical's success is part of the recent trend toward the consumerization of education — a trend that has been rapidly accelerated by the pandemic.</p><p>Students pay thousands annually for medical entrance and licensing exams, flocking to big name test prep companies and paying thousands more to prepare. As the internet has provided myriad more ways to connect and learn, it's become a buyer's market for students looking to differentiate themselves from their peers and ace those exams. </p><p>The company was founded by medical students for medical students in 2013 after its four co-founders used similar techniques with great efficacy while preparing for their board exams.</p><p>SketchyMedical has been profitable since its early days through its subscription model, which offers tiered pricing — from roughly $230 to $550 for up to two years of programming — that includes video lessons, review cards and quizzes. The company currently has more than 30,000 active subscriptions.<br/></p><p>Sketchy Medical relies on the "memory palace technique," from an era when oral tradition meant memorizing long stories passed on from one generation to the next. Med students are given a simple visual way into the material through characters, storylines and humor. </p><p>For example, in one sketch <em>a naked Mona Lisa sits in a red-colored bathtub by the fire, petting a dalmatian and holding grapes.</em></p><p>She represents the bacteria known as pseudomonas aeruginosa, which thrives in aquatic environments and is classified as a gram-negative bacilli. It produces a fruity grape-like odor when plated and has swarming motility</p><p>In another four-minute coronavirus lesson, the crown represents the "coronaviridae" family of RNA viruses, the robe represents the fact that it is enveloped, while the tissue represents how they cause the common cold. The image shows up in pictures whenever a coronavirus becomes relevant.</p><p>Siddiqui said the company found students had a 30% improvement in recall using its method. Anecdotally, he said even the non-medical artists at the company are getting 100% on the preclinical quizzes from working on the images. </p><p>Cofounder Andrew Berg, speaking in front of a Zoom backdrop featuring the company's pencil (penicillin) drawing, said professors across the country have also integrated the company's sketches into lecture slides. </p><p>And Siddiqui said the company has seen more institutions using SketchyMedical during the COVID-19 pandemic as they've tried to find creative ways to supplement their traditional lectures.</p><p>"We argue that everybody is a visual learner, that our brain has evolved to be really good at visual spatial recall," Siddiqui said. "It's necessary for survival to know where that fruit grew or where that dangerous predator was, or our cave. This is the same for animals. This bird can remember the location of 30,000 seeds across the landscape."</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
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</p><p>TCG vice president Michaela Venuti said the consumer-focused investment fund has been diving deep into the education space for the last year and a half and seen students take ownership of their education, picking and choosing among a wealth of new products tailored to their interests, area of specialty or aspirations.<br/></p><p>"Consumers can make decisions about what supplemental tools they want to use and build their own education," Venuti said. "A lot of that has been accelerated during the pandemic, and Sketchy fits well in this broader scheme of consumers choosing."</p><p>Venuti said TCG interviewed graduate and med school students as part of its work in the education space and 100% of the students they talked to mentioned Sketchy as a crucial tool to get through med school. That known brand name should help the company as it expands into other types of content and categories of education.</p><p>While it's hard to quantify exactly how large the market is for supplemental spending on education, TCG looked at another early leader in the direct-to-consumer space: Santa Clara, Calif.-based Chegg Inc. is a publicly traded company that began in the textbook rental space and now offers tutoring among other student services. </p><p>Venuti said she could certainly see SketchyMedical going the way that 2005-founded Chegg has, ultimately offering a suite of student services. <a href="https://s21.q4cdn.com/596622263/files/doc_financials/2020/q2/Chegg-Q220-Investor-Deck.pdf" target="_blank">Chegg reported 3.9 million subscribers</a> in 2019 and a current $8.7 billion market cap, but <a href="https://s21.q4cdn.com/596622263/files/doc_financials/2020/q2/Chegg-Q220-Investor-Deck.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the company believes the total potential market opportunity for their services is 102 million students</a> in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. The company has seen a 39% compound annual growth rate over the last five years, and its total revenue of $153 million is up 63% year over year for the second quarter of 2020.</p><p>TCG believes Chegg's outlook on market opportunity is similar to what SketchyMedical could expect, Venuti said. However, she added that SketchyMedical's "secret sauce" is the content the company has built, its method for teaching students and its passionate and engaged user base.</p><p>An internal analysis by TCG estimated a total addressable market of 93,000 medical students and adjacent medical specialties like dentistry and pharmacology, who are already using SketchyMedical's content for studying overlapping topics. TCG also discovered an "ever-increasing amount of global edtech unicorns — such as VIPKid, Coursera, Duoling, ByJu's, Quizlet and more — with consumer-facing supplemental tools valued in the billions.</p><p>The analysis also found that in the medical school market supplemental tools are becoming so important that "<a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/medical-school-life/why-some-medical-students-are-cutting-class-get-ahead" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">students are skipping class</a> to instead <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2018/08/14/medical-students-skipping-class/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">study via supplemental learning tools</a>."</p><p>___</p><p><em>Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on </em><a href="https://twitter.com/latams" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Twitter @latams</em></a><em> You can also email me at tami(at)dot.la, or ask for my contact on Signal, for more secure and private communications.</em></p>
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Startup Tiltify wants to use lessons from Twitch's success in the gaming industry to change the way charities interact with their audiences. A recent $6.5 million raise will help them do just that.
The Los Angeles-based crowdfunding platform was launched in 2014 by Michael Wasserman and Mark Russell to get younger generations participating in charity fundraisers.
<p>"There's a couple things that came up with every client," said Wasserman, a 12-year veteran of the charity space. "Consultants would ask me about younger donors and younger fundraisers: 'How do we work with the younger generation?', was sort of one side of it. And then the second side was thinking about how people are interacting through social media," he said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQzNTI4Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNzgyNzI0OX0.F9py3amKeed5j9OkVc-J8-P6QkAfoin5dce1m9VHws4/img.png?width=980" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQzNTI4Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNzgyNzI0OX0.F9py3amKeed5j9OkVc-J8-P6QkAfoin5dce1m9VHws4/img.png?width=980" id="5de94" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="dfa5ab617376eb3f15c53224e411dde7" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Tiltify" /></a>
</p><p>Wasserman decided to launch Tiltify to give donors new ways to interact with their favorite charities beyond social media.<br/></p><p>It took a cue from Amazon-owned Twitch. Its platform, launched in 2007, allows viewers not just to watch, but to take part in their favorite players' streaming video game. Tiltify wanted to do the same for live auctions and charity events.</p><p>"I was watching one yesterday on our site where people were weight lifting…All those like fun interactions where it sort of changed the value proposition from, 'Hey can you just drop off somebody at this sort of static mailbox page' that didn't do anything to a form of entertainment and more of an exchange to like, 'Well, let's get involved together and get my whole online community together,'" said Wasserman.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQzNTI4MS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MDc4MTYzM30.1UI2_8LchbpKe0iSX1lWQuijTIgRlfWb8qCtClnQWTU/img.png?width=980" id="9044d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f6d8597f430b2022422ada5dc3ce0410" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Tiltify co-founder Michael Wasserman.
<p>The approach lets charities make their outreach efforts more conversational and interesting, Wasserman said, allowing them to expand beyond the usual charity campaign.</p><p>Pace Capital led the recent funding round, which the company will use to develop faster technology and unique fundraiser-focused features. Those include donation polls and reward incentives. Tiltify also recently inked an exclusive partnership with TikTok.</p><p>And with the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement and recent California wildfires, it's been more popular with a record number of new users to the platform, Wasserman said.</p><p>In April, Wasserman said he was contacted by over 400 charities and year-over-year user growth is 1,000%.</p>
<p>To create an account, charities must be verified by the Internal Revenue Service. Once they're approved, the services are free of charge.<br/></p><p>"We never wanted a barrier for someone's favorite charity. Maybe they're really small. Maybe that charity only does $50,000 a year; we didn't want that to be a barrier for any organization," said Wasserman.</p><p>The startup charges based on an annual tier. Larger accounts can opt for a different model, in which Tiltify takes between 3% and 5% based on the volume of traffic coming in.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/crowdfunding-market" target="_blank">crowdfunding market</a> is expected to reach $28.8 billion by 2025.<br/></p>Related Articles Around the Web
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