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…

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…

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…

The new vocationalism

In the past 30 years, “vocationalism” became a dirty word in education, especially among those of us serving low income students. VocEd meant a two-tiered system in high school with a few kids getting ready for college and the rest stuck in shop class, getting ready for something “less.”

Are schools better than parents?

I am in the nice position as a third time founder that I no longer have to look at the world as a zero sum game. My success and those of other entrepreneurs in learning technology are correlated in my opinion, not inversely correlated as I remember feeling in my first…

Know think do

The way I think about learning is in three parts. First, you have to know a bunch of things to be successful in life. There is no way to fake it if you dont know multi-digit addition. At some point, if you don’t, you will put the wrong things into your calculator and give $20 change on an $18 purchase…

My Trip to India Part 4 — Affordable Schools

It was very interesting to be in a country where over 50% of students attend non-government schools. Let me say that in my opinion this proliferation of school choice is probably the second best reason to have hope for India, right behind the fact that…

Who’s your customer?

One of the things I have been struck by the past few edtech gatherings is that the traditional education technology industry doesn’t seem to know a lot of teachers or students. Coming from the world of teaching, this struck me as pretty bizzare. 

But I realized, because the person with the…

Why Blended Charter Schools are “Whales” in the ed institutional context…

My past few posts, I’ve painted a pretty grim picture of what it takes to sell to schools and districts. I want to take a moment just to answer the question “But hey, Rocketship doesn’t act that way, you…

The Case for Humans

It may seem strange to a lot of people that Zeal has put so much focus into live math coaches. After all, isn’t software supposed to be eating the world? Isn’t artificial intelligence supposed to expose us humans as insignificant? Maybe some day, but in education, human relationships are…