What’s On Deck for Business School - The Flywheel

Repeated interactions with a high-quality group lead to high alumni satisfaction.

High application volumes allow On Deck to remain selective even as enrollment grows.

With FOMO you create a high volume of applications.

It starts with FOMO. This is the secret sauce of any community, but it's hard to manufacture. On Deck created FOMO by doing something unscalable (dinner parties) for years.

On Deck is building a web of flywheels: each fellowship has its own flywheel(s) which connect to those of every other fellowship in one form or another.

Perhaps then, the opportunity to disrupt business school is not to change the incentive structure or delivery mechanism, but rather to simply deliver more value for a better price. There’s one company that is on its way to cracking that code: On Deck.

Neither of these models fully replace business school. In any ISA there’s an adverse selection issue, where only students who can’t afford to pay for school up front are attracted to that model. On the equity investment side, the glaring issue is that it’s only relevant for people who want to start venture scale businesses. If we think back to our ... See more