Scott Galloway is a professor, author, investor, and popular podcast pundit. He’s also a serial entrepreneur who has launched a number of successful companies by identifying opportunities and building a team to pursue them. As an entrepreneur, he’s following his own advice: chase your talent. Scott knows what he likes to do and what he’s good at, and as importantly, what falls outside those categories.
Scott’s most notable companies include RedEnvelope.com, L2, Prophet, and his latest, Section4. We were investors in L2 and are proud to once again be back in business with Scott and the Section4 team leading their Series A.
Founding Again
Scott’s first foray into entrepreneurship was in his second year of business school when he founded Prophet, a premier brand strategy consultancy. In 1997, Scott founded RedEnvelope, a site that helped consumers with gift buying, which grew into one of the internet’s first breakout eCommerce sites (NASDAQ IPO: 2002). Paul Sagan was an early investor in RedEnvelope and has known Scott for more than twenty years.
Following RedEnvelope, Scott realized that companies were moving online en masse but had no way to assess the digital strength of their brands. In 2010, he founded L2, a marketing intelligence platform that benchmarks a company’s online presence. In 2014, we backed the company as its only institutional investors (until Gartner acquired the company in 2017). We got to know Scott very well in the process.
When Scott identifies a problem that can be solved with the application of a technology platform, he starts a company to solve for it. His efforts are sector-agnostic: from helping the gift-giver and marketing insights to now taking on continuing education. One of Scott’s biggest strengths as a repeat founder is his ability to create a vision others can get behind. He conceptualizes and evangelizes the problem but lets the CEO and team drive the business.
Scott Galloway, founder of Section4
Rethinking Executive Education
For his next act, he’s launched Section4 alongside CEO Greg Shove, VP of Content Development Taylor Malmsheimer, and VP of Product and Creative Jerllin Cheng.
Section4 is an executive education platform that helps people uplevel their professional and business skills without the disruption and expense of pursuing a traditional MBA. With the belief that marketers need to reskill every few years, Section4 aims to deliver the content and case studies needed to stay competitive – and to do it on a continual engagement basis and at scale.
The challenge for current continuing education solutions is they aren’t meeting the immediate needs of modern professionals. Traditional executive MBA programs are somewhat flexible, but they often lack immediate applicability or specific focus. Massively open online courses (MOOCS) are readily accessible but have a varying degree of quality often coupled with overly-broad instruction necessitated by the nature of being massive.
The Section4 approach is content-driven. Working with globally recognized business school professors, the company’s content team co-develops courses specifically for the platform. Courses are held in two-three week “sprints” focused on product, brand, and strategy. The goal is to create a level of engagement not found in other online education offerings. Current case studies coupled with live instruction and group project work strive to produce learning that can be applied in their own business as quickly as possible.
With Section4, we’re backing Scott’s vision that MBA elective coursework has an addressable market of millions, not thousands. We’re excited to be along for the ride as the team sets out to transform that vision into a full-stack learning platform.
— Larry, Paul, & Team GC
