General Assembly (GA)

A feature of the incubator founded by Yale graduates is educational services for its startups.

GA workshops teach, for example, the basics of the HTML language or the promotion of the created product. Courses and classes are distributed in three areas: design, business, technology. Each theme has its own difficulty scale, from 100 to 900.

Job rental and GA training passes cost from a few hundred dollars a month, one-time seminar tickets sell from $30. The incubator has a limit of 14 people, not by the term of study, but by the size of the staff. If more, the company leaves the incubator. The office in London in size will be about the same as in New York, and will be about 2 thousand square meters. m.

By April 2018, General Assembly has many customers, among them about 300 of the world's largest corporations, such as L'Oreal and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Performance indicators

2017

In 2017, General Assembly's revenue amounted to $100 million.

History

2018: Adecco Group buys General Assembly for $412.5 million

In mid-April 2018, the Swiss recruiting company Adecco Group announced the acquisition of General Assembly for $412.5 million, taking into account the debts of the latter. Analysts believe that the price is overpriced, but the deal has great potential for the buyer.

All formalities regarding the sale of General Assembly to Adecco Group are planned to be completed in the second quarter of 2018. First, the deal must be approved by regulators.

IT education project in which Milner invested sold for $413 million

General Assembly will function as one of the divisions of Adecco Group under the leadership of its founder and CEO Jake Schwartz, who will report to Adecco executive committee member Sergio Picarelli.

The Adecco Group is counting on significant synergy from joining its educational business , General Assembly, which specializes in providing services for training in the use of digital technologies in the business.

After the announcement of the acquisition of General Assembly, the quotes of Adecco Group sank 0.7% on the stock exchange in Zurich. Analysts at Zuercher Kantonalbank say they did not expect much market reaction to the deal, which amounts to less than 1% of the Swiss giant's market capitalization (23.7 billion euros).

The purchase price is high. However, there is a potential for significant synergy and for the growth of Adecco's profile business to improve slightly, said Zuercher Kantonalbank experts, who downgraded Adecco in March 2018.

Adecco said that joining General Assembly will increase the company's profit slightly from 2019, but  General Assembly's adjusted EBITA margin will grow much faster than in the Swiss group on average.^[1]

2011: Investments by Julius Milner

In September 2011, for the first time, Yuri Milner supported General Assembly. He was made up of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and others. They invested $4.25 million.

In November 2011, it became known about Milner's new round of investments^[2], which involve^[2] development of the General Assembly (GA) technology cluster in London, which will be opened in 2012. The volumes of the new round were not disclosed.

Notes