Don’t stop learning: How Cornerstone kept scaling, w/Adam Miller

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Founded at the dawn of the dot-com era, entrepreneur Adam Miller’s original concept for Cornerstone was a kind of Netflix for adult education: training courses through CD-ROMs. Migrating to online offerings for major corporate clients, Adam steered the company through tough times that included an encounter with a loan shark, markets collapsing, and global crises. By the time he sold the company two decades later – for more than $5.2 billion – Adam learned essential lessons about how to scale during uncertainty.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Bob Safian, host of Rapid Response.
0:03.4	Many of our best episodes are only in the Rapid Response feed.
0:07.5	To make sure you catch it all, search for Rapid Response,
0:10.7	wherever you get your podcast.
0:12.4	This Friday, we'll be digging into
0:14.4	Apple's AI adventures and highlighting what you most need to know from this week's
0:18.8	W. W. W. D.C. Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
0:23.5	We'll explore what Tim Cook calls Apple Intelligence,
0:26.9	the company's partnership with Open AI, and more.
0:29.9	It's only on rapid response, so subscribe and listen this Friday.
0:34.8	See on the other side.
0:39.8	In 2005, the company had a near-death experience.
0:46.7	I had hired a boutique investment bank in LA,
0:51.4	got called into a meeting with them, and I went to the office and the main guy there says
0:57.4	Adam you know what it hasn't worked out as planned and we're not going to be able to do this anymore. And I thought,
1:05.3	oh shit, we are screwed. This was back when Adam Miller was CEO of Cornerstone.
1:11.6	That's the educational technology
1:13.7	company he founded 1999. They had already weathered one dot-com burst. Now, after
1:20.1	years of growth, they were running out of money again. I got one of our existing
1:25.5	investors to put up some money but he said it'll only do it if we raise a
1:30.9	million dollars and then I went to every single person we knew.
1:35.0	I had raised 350,000.
	...

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