Coding school General Assembly has agreed to be acquired for $412.5 million in cash by Swiss staffing and workforce development company Adecco.
Why it fits: A majority of GA's revenue by year-end is expected to be business-to-business, whereas it was only 15% two years ago.
Most of that is in terms of re-skilling workers, including a "talent pipeline as-as-service" business whereby GA acts not only a a recruiter, but also as a trainer (with hiring companies paying the freight).
"Last fall we began mapping out on a white board with Adecco how we could work together, so we've been having off and on conversations with them," says General Assembly co-founder and CEO Jake Schwartz. "We'll be run as an independent entity."
ROI: General Assembly raised nearly $120 million in VC funding between 2011 and 2015, with a final round at a post-money valuation of around $440 million. That basically means the last investors like Advance Publications and Wellington Management will do a bit better than break even (due to the "preference stack") while early investors like Maveron and Initialized Capital should make sizable returns (the Series A post-money valuation, for example, was just around $20 million).
New York-based General Assembly was co-founded by Schwartz, Adam Pritzker, Matthew Brimer and Brad Hargreaves. It currently has around 500 employees and campuses in 20 cities.
🍃Pruitt gets grilled by Congress —🎖️ Ronny Jackson withdraws as VA nominee — 📺 Trump holds forth on Fox & Friends — 🇫🇷 Macron sums up his Trump visit
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French President Emmanuel Macron said at a remarkably candid postgame for a small group of reporters last evening that his State Visit left him convinced President Trump will withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran, and that the U.S. president wants to create "a series of new Trump's deals."
His big takeaway: "[Y]our president is a dealmaker. You always have to understand the rationale of your counterpoint. He's a dealmaker. So he wants to find a deal and he wants to find a deal under his condition."
Hours after addressing Congress — and after two dinners, a press conference and several meetings with Trump — Macron sat down with a dozen or so journalists on couches in the George Washington University student center.
Macron and Trump had such playful, touchy-feely interactions for cameras that a New York Times headline called it "Le Bromance."
Macron thinks Trump will get out of the Obama-era deal with Iran by a May 12 deadline "for domestic reasons":
When a columnist asked if Trump will have a "much more difficult time persuading North Korea to accept a deal if he does not honor the Iran deal," Macron replied:
Be smart ... Macron had this take on U.S. vacillation on international agreements, including the Iran deal and the Paris climate accord: "It can work [in] the short term, but it's very insane [in] the mid- to long-term."
