It's education, stupid!

In the past few days we announced two new investments in the US: Schoolwires and Go Internet Media.  Both target the education market, albeit in very different ways:

• Schoolwires provides web-based content management and community management applications to the K-12 market.  Its SaaS product is used by over 4,000 US schools to manage their websites and Intranets, to enable collaboration among parents, students, teachers and administrators, and to manage administration taks and the distribution of learning materials. 

A renewed focus from the Obama administration on the modernisation of primary schools will benefit vendors like Schoolwires, whose on-demand solution is a low-cost way for a school to benefit from Internet-age technologies.

Schoolwires has a great management team, who've done it before as part of Sungard Systems' higher education software business.

• Go Internet Media is an online advertising network that specialises in delivering applicant leads to higher education institutions across the US.  The company operates information websites such as searchbydegree.com and freeeducationguide.com that help consumers find the right online or offline university and guides them through the application process.

In the current economic environment, demand for higher education is booming, as people decide to ride out the recession by returning to school, or look for new skills to adapt to changing markets.  The fastest growing segment is the new crop of for-profit universities (operating online and offline) which are expanding around the country and acquiring new students globally using the Web.

Both companies are good examples of the type of business we love to invest in: they are profitable, bootstrapped, founder-owned companies that have demonstrated an ability to grow rapidly using little or no external capital. That puts them in a strong position to accelerate growth with judicious use of our investment capital.

Congratulations Eric, Javier and Gus!