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.
Exclusive look at Amy Chozick's "Chasing Hillary" — 💐 Barbara Bush laid to rest — 🇰🇵 Kim Jong-un's art of dealing with Donald
Exclusive scenes for Axios readers from a book out next Tuesday by N.Y. Times writer at large Amy Chozick, "Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling":
"At the election-eve rally in Philadelphia with Bruce Springsteen, Hillary joined Obama onstage. He crouched down a little to kick a step stool closer to her podium. 'When you’re president, it’s gonna be permanently there for you,' Obama whispered in her ear before kissing her cheek and exiting stage right."
An off-record spaghetti dinner for reporters at campaign chairman John Podesta's home in D.C.: "Maggie Haberman sat near the center of the main table. She didn’t have to work the room. Everyone came up to her. "
Email: "Hillary could’ve acknowledged it was a mistake and apologized, but even as I joined the delirium of the scrum, I understood her instinct. She thought using a private email was another nonstory ('the biggest nothing burger') started by the Times and amplified by her political rivals. Every elected official ... used a personal email. Why should she apologize?"
"[T]he day Trump announced he was running, I admitted to a couple of Times editors that I’d watched eight seasons of The Apprentice and that we should do a story about it. They told me political reporters wouldn’t be writing about Trump. 'We have enough candidates to cover,' one editor said. 'Let the TV writers do it.'"
" [O]ur Polish housekeeper, Wanda, ... is so bad at her job that a couple of friends who’ve also used her for years came home early once to find Wanda watching TV in their bed. But she is a solid person and charges eighty dollars to clean a two-bedroom apartment, including laundry. She also happened to clean Don Jr.’s and Eric Trump’s New York apartments. In 2014, Eric and Lara invited Wanda to their wedding at Mar-a-Lago — which, despite what anyone thinks about the Trump sons, was a class-act thing to do."
Go deeper: The cover of tomorrow's N.Y. Times Sunday Review features an adaptation from Amy's book, "'They Were Never Going To Let Me Be President' ... Covering Hillary Clinton’s campaign from before it started to the very last moment."
