Founders

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…

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 8 — Private Schools

I wish charter schools were the best place to innovate, but I can say from my time at Rocketship that the public system puts far too many constraints on charters for them to innovate as radically as they should. Instead, I think we are…

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 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…

The Reading Teacher

Like addition, learning basic reading fluency is one of those things that has a massive impact on your life. When you become…

The Coach on Your Phone

One of the big changes I’ve blogged about before is the availability of reliable synchronous video. It’s definitely more reliable on desktops now than on phones, but it’s getting there fast. The main things that enables is to carry your coach around with you at all times. I mean a real…

Simple bandaids

Why is it that right when you have some wound bleeding all over the place, you have to find a bandaid, open it, peel it back, etc. It seems totally possible to make a bandaids that adheres on contact.