Steal This Idea — Alexa English

I spend a lot of time trying to understand how kids learn English and learn how to read. I have…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 10 — India

India is a very different situation than the U.S. or China. I will be out at the…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 1 — A Social Network for English learners

In this series, I’m going to talk about the ideas I’ve been looking for this year but haven’t found. As a serial entrepreneur, I’m quite thesis-driven in my investment. These are the companies I will…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 12 — Teachers take control

I made an investment in a company called Padlet recently. If you aren’t a teacher, you have probably never heard of it. If you are a teacher, you probably have. Padlet has been growing like a week for a couple of years with…

Steal This Idea — A fully online computer science high school

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 11 — Home Schooling

My two main investment criteria are things that have high impact on students and things that scale. That usually means I’m looking around the edges of the existing system. Home schooling is a very interesting edge. With 2 million…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 7 — Live Instruction

Probably the biggest change I’m seeing is the move from asynchronous ‘dead’ content, to scheduled live teaching, to teaching-on-demand. From your phone, when you need to learn some English, click a button and you and a coach start…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 5 — Disaggregating Higher Ed

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 4 — Disrupting DayCare

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 3 — Kids Coding

This is an area that a ton of companies have worked on, but I still haven’t found the one that will delight an order of magnitude more children to learn to code. I definitely think that the intentional practice part of coding is important and…