Ride the Wave

I had the opportunity to meet with David Cancel, the co-founder and CEO of Drift. He’s an awesome guy and he gave me some great advice (he’s also a big Charlie Munger fan, like me).

One piece of advice he gave me for the startup I’m working on is that you have to find an external trend to latch onto. Then, as the trend picks up steam, you ride its wave to success. When he told me this, I immediately thought of PagerDuty, and how the Alex, Andrew, and Baskar did an incredible job of latching onto the wave the would become the DevOps movement. Today, you can’t do DevOps right without PagerDuty.

For SquashPrep, a startup I have been working on over the summer, I think we have a couple of wave options. Being in the EdTech space, we have been looking at a lot of the trends happening within the classroom. Here are some of them:

Flipped Classroom: Teachers have found it more valuable to flip the classroom-homework model. Today, many teachers have students do homework in class, where the teacher is there to serve as a knowledge resource. At home, the students read and get familiar with concepts.

1:1 Devices: Most school districts in the United States have the goal of ensuring that every student has a digital device for learning. Chromebooks appear to be the most popular.

Opener/Closer: Teachers now often begin and/or end a class with a practice problem. This problem serves the purpose of reminding students of something they have learned in the past or introducing a new concept that will be covered in a future class.

There are many more trends in education and it will be interesting to see which wave we are able to catch.