My wine edutainment with Gary Vaynerchuk

I worked the 2011 summer and also part-time throughout my senior year of NYU at an education or "edutainment" start-up called Veri that was part of the first ever Tech Stars cohort in New York. The product aimed to create engaging courses for adults with a "reversed" learning pedagogy: you would answer a question about a topic first and if you got it wrong you were presented with a snippet of content from a blog, video, etc. that taught you the specific info, and then move on to the next question.

My first job was building courses across different verticals to test which ones users engaged with the most and enjoyed learning on our platform. Gary Vaynerchuk (of our Cork'd case) was actually a seed investor and advisor to our team and, go figure, at his suggestion one of the verticals I built out was wine education! I can attest that he is quite the character. I created a couple of courses on the basics of French and Italian wines. These were some of our most popular courses, as people felt they were digestible and the knowledge was immediately applicable in their lives offline - impressing friends at parties and feeling more confident when ordering. Unfortunately, Veri pivoted though and yet another wine ed product was lost to the startup graveyard.

I'm amazed that 8 years later, with continued demand and product experimentation, there still isn't a solid/winning wine education site or app. I would make a bet that the most successful experience will end up living on a broader life-long learning platform, with a wine vertical such as the one we had at Veri, because the company will have the resources to create an overall incredible learning experience.