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XAs Parents Scramble, Edtech Startup TutorMe Partners with Comcast — and Nearly 100 Other Companies
Tami Abdollah was dot.LA's senior technology reporter. She was previously a national security and cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. She's been a reporter for the AP in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and for L.A.'s NPR affiliate KPCC. Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. A native Angeleno, she's traveled the world on $5 a day, taught trad climbing safety classes and is an avid mountaineer. Follow her on Twitter.

It's boom time in the world of remote learning.
That's especially true for TutorMe, a Los Angeles-based company founded in March 2015 that provides students with tutoring resources with the click of a mouse. The company has signed nearly 100 deals with schools and companies since the pandemic began, its co-founder and CEO Myles Hunter said this week. Most recently, the startup inked a September 30 agreement with Comcast to provide online tutoring services for families of their employees in the broadcasting and cable television company's northeast division.
The Comcast deal is evidence of an appetite to improve work-from-home quality of life for employees who are also parents. The pandemic has forced many parents to re-learn school subjects from years ago in order to help their kids complete their studies.
"It came about as a result of some HR survey work with employees that they were looking for a solution to help parents during the pandemic, and the region wanted to see whether this might be something that could work," said a Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas in an email.
In addition to partnering with companies to provide its services as additional employee benefits, TutorMe has also partnered with universities and school districts. It has seen rapid growth since the pandemic impacted the U.S. in March.
"We knew that online tutoring was the future and we knew it was going to be more and more commonly used as distance learning increased," Hunter said. "But (growth that) was going to take three years happened over the course of three months due to COVID."
Economic downturns have always been a difficult time for business, but it's also a time of accelerating and changing trends. Businesses like Uber Technologies saw immense growth in the years after the 2008 recession. The 2020 downturn appears to have favored biotech and edtechbusinesses, and also sped up a turn toward robots and drones.
TutorMe has worked with hundreds of thousands of students across the country, primarily in the U.S. and Canada. It now partners with more than 150 schools and corporations, including Calexico Unified School District, Childcare Network and Blue Cross Blue Shield in Tennessee.
It works with more than 12,000 tutors on the site who teach everything from kindergarten to graduate school-level classes. Hunter said the teachers go through a robust vetting process to ensure their background with the subject matter. They're paid weekly for their services.
A view of TutorMe's desktop.Courtesy TutorMe
To get started, a student goes onto the site and types in the subject he or she needs help with. TutorMe then takes them through a matching process to find the best tutor. The student can then decide whether they want to proceed with a specific tutor or try someone else. Students work with tutors in a lesson space that provides the resources anyone might need for an in-person lesson, including audio and video communications, plus editing resources for students writing code and papers. Students can connect with their tutors by video, audio or text.
The company also unveiled a writing lab during the pandemic that lets students upload a paper or essay to get feedback from a tutor. As an added plus for educators, the TutorMe platform also checks for plagiarism.
For those enrolled at programs that have signed up with TutorMe for their students, the learning management system can determine the course they are coming from and connect them to a tutor on the subject in less than 30 seconds, Hunter said. The company raised $1.3 million in seed money from an angel investor in the United Kingdom and Jason Calacanis. In April 2019, it was acquired by Chandler, Arizona-based Zovio Inc., a public company.
As of this year, it has seen demand increase significantly. In the second quarter alone, consumer usage went up by 350% and use by schools and other partners went up 850%.
As a student at the University of Southern California, Hunter said he and his co-founders found external tutoring resources "prohibitively expensive," while campus tutoring limited students to a set number of classes that weren't always available and required you to go to a tutoring center.
The company was co-founded by Hunter along with Victor Kotseruba, Alex Convery and failed Genius Fund co-founder Ari Stiegler.
"Ari was part of TutorMe in its early days and helped raise money for the company; however as time progressed, it was better for Ari and the company that we moved in a different direction," Hunter said.
L to R: Myles Hunter, Victor Kotseruba (co-founder), and Egor Shakhov (product engineer) on Easter Island, Chile.Courtesy TutorMe
The TutorMe website was the product of a round-the-world working trip taken by Hunter and a very lean engineering team, including a member or two hired in places like Moscow, Bali, Chile, the country of Georgia, and Mexico, where the cost of living is less expensive and so is the engineering talent.
Hunter remembers wearing the same swim trunks and three tank tops for most of the time, while living in hacker houses where everyone spoke Russian. The team would code in the quiet of the night and then sleep during the day.
"When friends ask me 'How was Bali?' I didn't see much of it in the light," Hunter said. "I was there for four months and there were two occasions where we went to the beach during the day."
The team traveled from early 2016 through January 2018, when the company began to take off and Hunter needed to be in Los Angeles, he said.
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Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter @latams You can also email me at tami(at)dot.la, or ask for my contact on Signal, for more secure and private communications.- Age of Learning Supplements Kids' Remote Learning - dot.LA ›
- Encantos Plans for a More Diverse Future in US EdTech - dot.LA ›
- TutorMe Parters with Comcast — and Over 100 Other Companies - dot.LA ›
- Formative Edtech Raises $70M Series A Round - dot.LA ›
Tami Abdollah was dot.LA's senior technology reporter. She was previously a national security and cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. She's been a reporter for the AP in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and for L.A.'s NPR affiliate KPCC. Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. A native Angeleno, she's traveled the world on $5 a day, taught trad climbing safety classes and is an avid mountaineer. Follow her on Twitter.
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Activision Buys Game Studio Proletariat To Expand ‘World of Warcraft’ Staff
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat, a Boston-based game studio that developed the wizard-themed battle royale game “Spellbreak.”
VentureBeat first reported that the Santa Monica-based publisher was exploring a purchase, noting its ongoing mission to expand the staff working on Blizzard’s hit massively multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft,” which launched in 2004.
Proletariat’s team of roughly 100 people will be merged into Activision’s “World of Warcraft” team to work on its upcoming expansion game. Though there’s no release date as yet for the title, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight” is expected to debut before the end of this year.
Activision did not immediately return a request for comment. Financial terms of the deal were not available.
This Proletariat deal is Activision's latest push to consolidate its family tree by folding its subsidiary companies in under the Blizzard banner. More than 15 years after it bought out New York-based game developer Vicarious Visions, Activision merged the business into its own last year, ensuring that the studio wouldn’t work on anything but Blizzard titles.
The deal could also have implications for workers at Activision who have looked to unionize. One subsidiary of Activision, Wisconsin-based Raven Software, cast a majority vote to establish its Game Workers Alliance—backed by the nationwide Communications Workers of America union—in May.
Until recently, Activision has remained largely anti-union in the face of its employees organizing—but it could soon not have much of a say in the matter once it finalizes its $69 billion sale to Microsoft, which said publicly it would maintain a “neutral approach” and wouldn’t stand in the way if more employees at Activision expressed interest in unionizing after the deal closes.
Each individual studio under the Activision umbrella would need to have a majority vote in favor of unionizing to join the GWA. Now, Proletariat’s workforce—which, somewhat ironically given its name, isn’t unionized—is another that could make such a decision leading up to the Microsoft deal’s expected closing in 2023.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Snap Officially Launching ‘Snapchat Plus’ Subscription Tier
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Snap is officially launching Snapchat Plus, a paid subscription plan on Santa Monica-based social media company’s flagship app.
Snap is now the latest media company to tack a “plus” to the end of its name—announcing Wednesday that the new service will provide users with “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features” for the price of $3.99 a month. The first features available to paying subscribers include the ability to customize the style of app’s icon, pin a “BFF” to the top of their chat history and see which users have rewatched a story, according to The Verge.
The new product arrives after Snap confirmed reports earlier this month that it was testing Snapchat Plus—though the version that it has rolled out does not incorporate the rumored feature that would allow subscribers to view a friend’s whereabouts over the previous 24 hours.
Snapchat Plus will initially be available to users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While certain features will remain exclusive to Plus users, others will eventually be released across Snapchat’s entire user base, Snap senior vice president of product Jacob Andreou told The Verge. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
The subscription tier introduces a new potential revenue stream for Snap, which experienced a “challenging” first quarter marked by disruptions to its core digital advertising market. However, Andreou told The Verge that the product is not expected to be a “material new revenue source” for the company. He also disputed that Snap was responding to its recent economic headwinds, noting that Snap had been exploring a paid offering since 2016.
Despite charging users, Snapchat Plus does not include the option to turn off ads. “Ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term,” Andreou said.
Snap is not the first popular social media platform to venture into subscriptions: Both Twitter and Tumblr rolled out paid tiers last year, albeit with mixedresults.Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui On How Small Funds Can Better Support Young Founders
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui talks about why he moved earlier stage in his investing and how investors can best support founders.
Lui joined his friend—and first angel investor—Ben Ling as a general partner at Bling Capital, which focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage funding rounds. The desire to work in earlier funding stages alongside someone he knew well drew him away from his role as a partner at multi-billion-dollar venture firm DCM, where he was part of the team that invested in Musical.ly, now known as TikTok.
Bling primarily focuses on entrepreneurs looking to raise around $1 million to $3 million who are often early in their careers as founders. Lui said Bling evaluates companies on characteristics that go beyond whether they like the founder or feel that the market looks good. Instead, he said they take a hard look at the available company data, and quickly respond.
“And we send it back to them and say, ‘Okay, this is what's working, what's not working’,” Lui said. “And then create the playbook for them on how to find product market fit and get to like, ‘These are the milestones you actually need to hit’.”
When considering companies, Lui said Bling looks at the founder, the market, the company’s current traction and differentiation while asking the founder the questions they would expect to get at Series A and Series B funding rounds.
“One thing that I really admire about what [Ling’s] built with Bling is the consistency and the processes and playbooks— everything from the way that we evaluate deals to the way that we work with our portfolio companies,” Lui said. “Everything is kind of around playbooks and operationalizing things and also iterating to do those processes better.”
As part of its work to support founders, Bling maintains an extensive product council, which connects tech executives with the founders in Bling’s portfolio. Bling also has created numerous self-serve resources for founders so they can easily tap into the fund’s network and shared knowledge.
“We have a bunch of playbooks that we introduce to companies around how to hire efficiently, how to negotiate with counterparties, how to think about the founding team, business development…We just have these different things that we start to train our entrepreneurs on,” Lui said.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.