Guild, trilogy and lambda

For a very long time, education was a terrible place to invest. Then founders started to figure things out. Coursera, udacity and Udemy took advantage of the web to create massive audiences. For many of us though, it wasn’t clear that ‘access’ to better education was the be all and end all.

What I Am Up To

After five years building Zeal, we had a profitable business serving about 50,000 students. The only problem was that beyond some very leading edge schools, no one saw the need for a tutoring system that could diagnose student misconceptions and give small tutoring doses to help them. Despite spending a lot…

Tips for edtech entrepreneurs part 1 — why is this market so difficult?

A few months ago i vowed that if i was asked the same question by more than 3 edtech entrepreneurs, i would blog about it to save myself time and spread the word faster. Since rocketship is probably the most…

5 differences between consumer and institutional edtech

We have had a couple of institutional edtech exits in the last month — engrade and area9. Institutional edtech companies are ones whose customers are the insitution — teachers, schools, districts, etc. consumer edtech companies make…

Why Homeschooling is important…

I’ve been watching the homeschooling space for years. About 2 million children in the U.S. (3%) are…

Five reasons I’m optimistic about the next 20 years in education

Tips for EdTech Entrepreneurs — Navigating This Mess

Minimum Viable Instruction

At Zeal, we are pretty big believers in the lean startup approach. The fundamental thesis is that you are constantly doing just enough engineering work in order to understand what your customer needs, by doing small experiments and analyzing the results. You are building the…

Tips for Edtech Entrepreneurs — Part 2 — Looking at Success Past and Present

If you are still reading this blog, you have shown the mostimportant characteristic of an edtech entrepreneur — persistence! One way to start to think about how to createa company in this space is to…

Thesis — Synchronous College

I remember when MOOCs came out. I took one long sigh and hunkered down for a decade of student misery. Let’s unpack that. The compelling thing about MOOCs is that they require almost no behavior change from professors. They sit up there lecturing but now someone has a video…