Venture Capital

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 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 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 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…

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…

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.