70% of the U.S population of adults 25 years of age or older don’t have a college degree. That’s a huge chunk of the population that’s potentially precluded from success in today’s job market, one which places such a heavy emphasis on the traditional path of going to a college for four years. Guild’s mission is to help people get the skills they need to succeed by enabling tuition-free education programs to be offered as an employer-sponsored benefit.
Our business model works because all parties involved – the education providers, employers, employees, and Guild itself, have aligned incentives. We look for the same traits among our investors too. I met Wesley while raising Guild’s Series B, and as a first-generation American & college graduate, he understood our drive to align mission with margin. While we didn’t partner up then, we stayed in touch, and he ended up persuading me – at 7 months pregnant – and my team to let his firm lead a $40M Series C round in May 2018, from start to finish in about 2 month’s time.
We started and closed our round in such a short period of time because that’s what worked best for Guild, a fast-growing company with ambitious plans, and for me, an expecting mother. The support, respect, and attentiveness that Wesley demonstrated gave me the time and space I needed to operate as both a founder and a new mom. Since then, Guild has only broadened the array of resources it offers to students, and we’ve done so by building strong partnerships aligned towards changing the future of work. Now, we’re glad to have partnered up with Wesley again as one of the first investments out of the FPV fund.
