Meet the new Lore. (Photo: Screencap)

The latest from edtech startup Lore: Today the company debuts a rebuilt platform, designed to function more like a social network and less like those dreadful discussion forums you might remember from your educational days.

The rebrand fits with the vision CEO Joe Cohen was excitedly evangelizing when last we spoke. Back in April, the company shucked its original name (Coursekit) and christened itself Lore, a move meant to provide the team with more wiggle room. “Our vision is to be a platform for learning in whatever form,” he told Betabeat, but refused to divulge any details on what that might mean, product-wise.

In a phone conversation yesterday explaining the changes to Betabeat, Mr. Cohen was every bit as irrepressibly pie in the sky:

“Our ambitions are bigger than kits or courses,” he told us. “We want to be this underlying software platform for the whole of education.”

That's a big ambition, all right.

Lore's approach: social networking, but specifically for education. The revamp introduces profiles, so that rather than the platform privileging a particular class, students and instructors will be individual users who happen to be participating in a class. The company has also merged the newsfeed-style stream and the class calendar, as well as adding a library to serve as a repository for course content.

"If you think about companies like Yammer, LinkedIn, they've validated this idea that you don't just have Facebook. You have situation-oriented social networks. And we're trying to do that for education," Mr. Cohen told Betabeat.

He described the results as analogous to LinkedIn: “We think we’ve got the largest connected community of instructors and students ever put together so far,” he said (even as he confessed there’s no real data to support that feeling), and the revamp is "the next step in making that fabric stronger but also more pervasive,” he added.

After a semester up and running at 600 schools across the country, Mr. Cohen confessed that he just “didn’t see the platform scaling” into the future to meet that broader goal. Hence the redesigned user interface.

Besides the more social changes, Instructors landing on the homepage are now prompted with the question “What do you teach?” They can choose from one of twelve areas where the platform has worked best, ranging from social studies to engineering. Once they select an area, they’ll get an explanation of how Lore works best for that particular discipline.

To date, Lore has raised $6 million in venture funding, including support from the king of higher-ed skeptics, Peter Thiel.

But back in the day, those first 23 companies were all the rage. Like shiny new toys, they were exciting and fascinating. There was even a reality television show about them. So even though their three-month, highly-competitive startup accelerator program has ended, these companies are still around. They didn’t just vanish into thin air. (Well, some of them did).

But all of this begs the question, where are these companies now? How have they fared in the big, bad world? Did they flop? Or surpass expectations?

We didn’t know, so we decided to find out. And it turns out that we weren’t the only ones who were curious about what these companies have been up to.

“When we launched, everything was a concern,” managing director David Tisch told Betabeat in an email. “We were new, a startup.” New York City, he said, brought a unique set of challenges and advantages to these first two classes, but you never how things might turn out. So, Mr. Tisch, what’s the verdict? Have the first 23 New York City companies done TechStars proud?

“The progress shown so far is very promising,” Mr. Tisch said, “and I expect a few very big companies to emerge. There are some early standouts who have shown progress on the product side, revenue side, and team side.”

In the last year, about half of the companies raised over a million dollars in funding from investors (in addition to TechStars's initial $18,000 in each company) and only two companies failed. A third company, FriendsList, also failed, but its two cofounders shifted gears and transformed into another company, Timehop, a popular app that has since raised $1.1 million.

“I think the quality of the people we funded stands out to me,” Mr. Tisch added. “[And] as I look back at the companies from our first two classes at TechStars NYC, I am confident we have funded some amazing teams who are building big businesses.” -Jess Schiewe

Mr. Cohen. (LinkedIn.com)

Coursekit, which bills itself as a social network for higher education, is Coursekit no more. Henceforth the company will be known as "Lore," a name which offers a little more flexibility for a fast-growing, still-evolving startup.

The company released a statement saying that the change “reflects the company's ambition to be the global network of learners, instructors, and educational content.”

Also included in the announcement: Peter Thiel recently invested, via the Founders Fund. He offered a few remarks to explain the move:

The Internet is reshaping how people learn, and Lore is one of the companies making that happen. My course at Stanford is using Lore and we can see dynamics changing already.

Mr. Thiel’s investment is especially interesting, given his famous antipathy toward traditional higher ed and the fact that the rebrand seems to open the company up to a broader notion of learning. Nor is this the first sign of ambition beyond straightforward classroom learning management--back in February, CEO Joseph Cohen talked NYU Stern professor Aswath Damodaran into opening up two of his popular classes to nonpaying Internet denizens via the platform.

In a brief phone conversation, Mr. Cohen told Betabeat that his team had come to feel the name “Coursekit” was too confining. He and his cofounders started the company while in school, as a way for professors to better manage their courses and for students to connect outside of the classroom. But since then, they’ve covered a lot of ground--they’ve dropped out, they’re at $6 million in venture funding and in 600 institutions--and along the way, their thinking has evolved. “Our vision is to be a platform for learning in whatever form,” whether a course-specific study group or broader school community, Cohen explained.

“We don't think there are many inspiring brands in the area, and we want to be that,” he explained. “We’re looking to build a big company here, and we felt that our name was limiting.”

So why Lore? Well, there are the practical aspects: “It’s short, simple, sweet, but we could also fill it with meaning because not that many people use the word very often.” But the term also has bigger implications: “Lore means knowledge shared between people, which is what we do.”

Despite the name change and the seeming broadening of focus, Cohen refused to reveal any upcoming alterations to the offering itself: “As of today, we’re not announcing any product changes.” That said, “you should expect things to get better and bigger and evolve over time.”

Sounds to us like there’s something in the works.

A sample question

This semester, Coursekit, an academic social network of sorts that gives teachers and students a way to communicate outside of class, tried a little experiment from the Peter Thiel school of thought.

Coursekit founder Joseph Cohen, a Wharton drop-out and TechStars New York alum, was already familiar with the work of Aswath Damodaran, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business with a big academic following. So last year, he cold-emailed Mr. Damodaran to encourage him to join Coursekit's pilot program. "I don't think he was looking [for a solution like] Coursekit," Mr. Cohen told Betabeat by Gchat. "But when he saw what it could do...he and I really hit it off."

This semester, Mr. Damodaran decided to take it one step further and offer both his Corporate Finance and Valuation classes to anyone around the world, for free*. Considering that an MBA from NYU-Stern costs $100,894 for residents (with a "recommended annual budget of $82,867), we'd say that's a pretty good deal. (*Beer pong networking sessions with the future 1 percent not included.)

The first lecture started Monday, said Mr. Cohen. Without any press, almost 1,800 students signed up from 40 countries, representing six continents. "I believe in a future where you don't need to go to school to get an 'education.' This is a taste of that," he added.

On his blog, Musings on Markets, Mr. Damodaran called it, "a small challenge to the 'university' business model." (The scare quotes are his). "For hundreds of years, we (as consumers) have had no choice. Universities have operated with little competition and substantial collusion," he writes.

"But I think that the game is changing, as technology increasingly undercuts the barriers to entry to this business. I am not just talking about online universities (which, for the most part, have gone for the low hanging fruit) or the experiments in online learning from MIT, Stanford and other universities. These are evolutionary changes that build on the university system and don't challenge it. I am talking about a whole group of young companies that have made their presence felt by offering new tools for delivering class content and learning. I am convinced that the education market is going to be upended in the next decade and that the new model is going to do to universities what Amazon has done to brick and mortar retailers."

Unlike Coursekit competitor/nemesis Blackboard, a clunky closed-off system Betabeat first used back in 2006 during our own stint at an NYU grad school, the lectures and content will stay up accessible to all on line.

In a message to students, Mr. Damodaran said, "I want to make this class the very best class you have ever had (not just online but ever)." But he did offer a conciliatory note to his NYU employers:

"Just to be clear, my first obligation is to the students in my MBA classes and I will not stint or compromise on that obligation, but I view delivering a great learning experience to those taking the class online as a close second. Note also that you will not get any credit from NYU for taking this class."

Sort of puts the question of whether you're getting an MBA for the knowledge or the connections in stark contrast, doesn't it?

It's not a competition, we're just saying

During interviews with Betabeat Coursekit's Joseph Cohen has always played down Blackboard, which currently owns 80 percent of the market for educational software. “Our business model is not to compete with Blackboard by selling software,” Mr. Cohen told Betabeat. “It’s to create large audiences of students and teachers that we can then leverage for all sorts of things.”

They may not see themselves as competitors, but that doesn't mean Coursekit can't leverage all the ill will towards Blackboard out there. Today the company launched an ad campaign, #eraseblackboard, featuring testimonals from students who had been screwed by Blackboard. "Brian's Chem final didn't go as planned, so he emailed the professor to fight the grade," reads one. "Or so he thought. Instead he sent the message to the entire class. Now everyone thinks he's a brown-nose, and he still has a C."

We're a little suspicious of these students. The fourth one is about a student named "Vinny" who looks strikingly like Jesse Lamb of Dispatch, a classmate of Coursekit at TechStars NY.

Update: But there is a source for the statistic that "93 percent of people hate Blackboard", making it the #2 most disliked software in America behind Microsoft (Damn you Clippy!).

But the best part of the campaign is a running feed of Twitter complaints that sit at the bottom where users express their frustration with Blackboard. There is nothing manufacture or tongue in cheek about the litany of complaints that flow by in 140 characters or less. And by creating a clever hashtag, Coursekit is channelling that anger into exposure for their product.

"@coursekit 5 out of my 6 professors have already made comments about hating Blackboard in the first 3 days of class. #EraseBlackboard" tweeted Ryan Delk from the University of Florida. That's the kind of marketing you can't buy, and the perfect entry point for Coursekit, which hopes to dodge the loathsome IT purchase cycle and sell straight to teachers and students.

The Coursekit Office

Coursekit, a graduate of TechStars NY which bills itself as an academic social network, has raised $5 million in a Series A round of venture capital financing. Led by the Social+Capital Partnership, a new Silicon Valley venture firm started by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, the round includes existing investors IA Ventures and new angel investors Joel Spolsky, the CEO of StackExchange, and Michael Kearns, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Ted Maidenberg, a partner at Social+Capital and a former board member at LivingSocial, has joined Coursekit’s board.

The startup, founded by Wharton dropout Jospeh Cohen, hopes to take on the billion dollar incumbent, Blackboard, by selling direct to professors and bypassing the red tape and slow sales cycle of academic IT departments. Blackboard rakes in $400 million of the $500 million spent on this type of software per year, Mr. Cohen said, but Coursekit isn’t interested in that money. “Our business model is not to compete with Blackboard by selling software,” Mr. Cohen told Betabeat. “It’s to create large audiences of students and teachers that we can then leverage for all sorts of things.”

By borrowing from the conventions of today's social networks, Coursekit hopes to create an environment that will get students excited to share materials. “It’s mostly a question of how students interact with each other. That is pretty much everything for a class. For that, Coursekit is really helpful,” said Sharka Hyland, a professor at UPenn. “I have no problem talking to my students, but it’s so much more difficult to have them engage with each other. I think Coursekit is really good for that because in class I can force them to talk to each other, but it comes naturally when they use the software."

Coursekit

All sorts of things! Like what? we asked.

"Higher education accounts for half a trillion of our GDP," he said gravely. "What we're saying is we want to compete for a slice of that and be the platform by which vendors get to students."

That means distributing electronic textbooks for McGraw-Hill, for example, he said. The company is starting with courses but plans to expand to serve as a platform for departments and groups within universities; for example, all NYU students will be part of an NYU Coursekit.

Blackboard dominates the market because universities are slow and bureaucratic, Mr. Cohen said. The school administrators—not the people who actually use the software—signed contracts for the software in the late 90s and as far as they know, Blackboard works. "If you look at the software that is used to support real world education, it's really lousy most of the time," he said. "It's called a 'learning management system.' The leading learning management system, the company with a monopoly on the learning management system, is Blackbaoard. It's meant to be used for things like grading, management style, keeping in touch with the class. We said okay, let's do those really, really well."

Coursekit is certainly simple, although the news feed-centric app has some teachers confused. Coursekit ran a pilot program with 30 professors, and had problems mostly with professors who had never used Facebook. The app has the ability to collect papers and store them online and lets students post questions and comments in a discussion that's less like the forum-y feature of Blackboard and more like the unstructured realms of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Coursekit's five employees are holed up in a large loft in Tribeca with space for about 15 more, Mr. Cohen said, who he hopes to hire over the next 18 months. "It's fantastic, we're in Tribeca, but literally we're in this huge loft and we're in the corner," he said. The company is listing openings for a software engineer, front-end engineer, design director, product designer, and two interns.

Coursekit has already had a reality check after its public debut into the harsh world of Startupland: Business Insider broke the 3 p.m. embargo on the story at midnight.

With Demo Day coming up tomorrow, ten out of 11 companies is the number to beat. That's ratio of startups from TechStars inaugural class that got funded. But keep in mind not everyone had a killer Demo Day. For some, funding didn't come till a few months down the line. "It's like the SATs," one mentor told Betabeat of Demo Day. "Some people are good at testing, some aren't."

There's a lot riding on tomorrow's event--the funding environment isn't quite as frothy as it was for TechStarsNY 1.0, and the companies are well aware of that, mentors told Betabeat. "It's a more fragile period of time than last Demo Day," said the mentor. "They realize that they gotta be on their game." As such, companies have been pounding out the decks, practicing demos for each other almost every week.

Perhaps it's because the cameras aren't around, or perhaps because TechStars New York is more established, but there’s less ego in this class and fewer type-A personalities. Investors promise that this Demo Day will still have plenty of showmanship and say this season’s TechStars class is fundamentally very solid. Many companies have partnerships; some have revenue. Almost all have raised money or gotten commitments–several New York VCs told us they had invested in at least one of the startups. Two companies won’t even really be raising money, one mentor said, because they don’t need it."

Curious to know who pivoted and who's already closed their round? Check out our cheat sheet, get your game face on for tomorrow and pick your ponies in the comments.

Update: SideTour announced their funding today on TechCrunch, a $1.5 million round led by RRE and Foundry Group. We noted in the slideshow they already had their lead investors locked down, but it seems unlikely now they will try to grow their round tomorrow.