Online learning site Grockit is scaling up its leadership team after raising $7 million last May. Today it is announcing that it is hiring Roy Gilbert as CEO. Gilbert is Google’s director of user operations and policy, in charge of many non-advertising operations. He helped set up Google’s India operations and grew it from 20 people to 1,000, and was the first business manager for Gmail.
Founder Farb Nivi recruited Gilbert, who will also be taking a board seat. Nivi will be president, chief product officer, and chairman. “I kind of look at him as our Eric Schmidt,” says Nivi, who came back getting hit by a minivan last year to keep his startup going and growing.
Gilbert served in the military driving nuclear submarines, and yes, he was a boy scout. But he also comes from a family of teachers, and he and his wife started a school in Hyderabad while he was in India for underprivileged children called the Rainbow Primary School. So he has education chops as well. “I pretty much can’t believe we landed him,” says Nivi.
Nivi also recently hired a chief marketing officer, Chris Strausser, who created the Jamba Juice brand, and previously worked at PepsiCo and Kaplan. Knewton, another online education startup, also recently made a top executive hire. The whole education space is definitely heating up.
Grockit is an online social learning company. It currently offers Test Prep services for GMAT, IIM CAT, LSAT, GRE, ACT, SAT and AP Calculus and AP History tests. Grockit has conducted significant research proving that people learn better through peer-to-peer instructional design instead of teacher-to-student lectures, and Grockit has built a platform for license and direct-to-consumer products that harness this research. Florida Virtual Schools, KIPP Schools, Georgetown University and other schools have deployed Grockit services. Grockit...
Roy Gilbert is Grockit’s CEO. Prior to joining Grockit, Roy spent seven years at Google in multiple roles. Most recently, Roy led Global User Operations, which was responsible for all of Google’s non-advertising functions including search quality, consumer and ads policy, localization, book scanning, and product support. Prior to that, Roy built and led Google’s operations in India and launched the business operations for Gmail. Roy began his career as an officer in the United...
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