Can you tell me how to get to Silicon Valley?
Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces Sesame Street, is launching a venture capital arm called, what else, Sesame Ventures to help shape the future of tech for kids. Sesame Ventures will invest in startups focused on children's education, development, health, and nutrition.
Like a lesson on friendship straight out of Sesame Street itself, the outfit won't be going out on its own, but rather joining established venture capital firms. "If we only focus on doing everything ourselves, we can have an impact," Jeffrey Dunn, Sesame Workshop's president and CEO, says. "But if we're partnering with others, we can have a much bigger impact."
Sesame Ventures will be working with venture capitalist Craig Shapiro's Collaborative Fund to launch the Collab+Sesame Fund. While Collaborative Fund will manage it, Sesame Ventures will be actively involved in choosing the startups and offering insight based on its history and experience of working with children's programming.
While the startups haven't been chosen, Shapiro says they could be anything from fresh food upstarts making healthier snacks for kids to apps focused on childhood development and education, like learning how to code. Startups working with Sesame Ventures may find an additional benefit, too, when it comes to marketing: Dunn says the firm will consider allowing startups to use the Sesame Street characters if it makes sense.
For Sesame this is not the first time it's invested in new ventures to try to create new great things for kids. "It's in our DNA," Dunn says. The company has historically used part of its endowment to invest in new products, such as TV network Noggin in the late '90s, which has since evolved into Nick Jr. Dunn hopes the investments made by Sesame Ventures will lead to the same kinds of innovations updated for today's digital age.
And today's episode was brought to you by the letters I, P, and O.
