Good morning and welcome if you are reading my updates for the first time!
I use and love airtable and google sheets to track a lot of things, like the startups I share in this newsletter, the software that social scientists use, the features for Texti (a software product I am building at SAGE), my paintings and many more. I catalogue almost everything, and often it is life saving to have columns link to other sheets. Last week, I was thrilled to discover an open source alternative to airtable, called NocoDB. It’s not even a month since it launched and it has more than 10k stars. That’s what you’d call a viral in open source software! I deployed it on heroku, and for those who are intimidated by that sentence, don’t be! I had no idea what that meant, but it didn’t take me more than 20 minutes to set up an account and click on deploy, heroku did the rest. I will now recommend it for anything you need to track and catalogue! Of course, if you are looking for something a bit more advanced, where you see a log of all the changes to your data, like proper version control for academic research purposes, then DoltHub can work wonders for you.
In other news:
Stack Overflow, founded in 2008, was just acquired by Prosus Ventures for $1.8 billion, this is the company’s largest acquisition to date. My biggest surprise was to find out that Stack Overflow was an edtech 🧐, and related, Prosus invested under $100M in Udemy and Codecademy previously.
Another edtech focusing on corporate and life-long learning, Guild Education, raised $150M to continue matching employees with sponsored learning programs. The offering is pretty cool, I’d be up for these learning opportunities; yet, I am more excited about what Obrizum is doing in this space.
Intern from Home is a simple, brilliant, and definitely not new idea, but that took off crazily with this year in lockdown. I remember when I was looking for internships, I just found people on their company websites and emailed them. Rarely anyone ever replied, I mean we are just so busy! Intern from Home is making the whole process a genuine delight for the student, and for us employers.
Have an absolute blast of a week!