What's On Deck for On Deck?

New competitors to On Deck will emerge, many of which will try to do one thing very well instead of taking On Deck’s platform approach.

On Deck is an education business with software margins: On Deck turned a profit in 2020, and entered 2021 on a ~$20M run rate.

Over the past year, On Deck has done something insanely hard: scaled community and education, online, profitably, while growing revenue 10x and building out a platform on top of which it can launch new products and integrate acquired ones such that each is a desirable standalone offering that connects to and strengthens at least one other part of t... See more

On Deck is building a modern, digitally native education platform at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional higher and continuing education.

One of the challenges with both community and top-tier education is that it’s really hard to scale. There’s something called “evaporative cooling,” which is when the quality of the people and interactions in a community decreases as more people join. On Deck has one of the most credible approaches to solving this challenge of any I’ve seen.

It’s building a modern educational institution that looks nothing like the ones it aims to replace.

By adding new verticals instead of making the Founders Fellowship really, really big, On Deck has built a group of small, intimate communities that roll up into one large, On Deck community.

This may be On Deck’s biggest advantage over traditional educational institutions: its willingness to experiment and try new things. The world is moving ever-faster. The ways for people to make a living are constantly expanding. The half-life of professional skills has fallen to five years. A modern educational institution needs to be able to serve... See more

On Deck doesn’t make programs, it makes organizations that make programs. And it does so incredibly quickly. On Deck launches new products and programs more quickly than pure software companies do, while managing all of the complexity of dealing with real humans.