The hard thing about edutech products

I’ve taught programming as a hobby occasionally to kids, to old people, to finance and law students and my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym buddies, and there hasn’t been a single student who failed to grasp it, because when one teaching method doesn’t work on you, I can keep adapting until you learn. I understand what can go wrong at every point in your learning, and I can use that knowledge to craft a learning experience that works for you.

Knowing which teaching method to use is a wisdom called pedagogy, and I’ve become an entrepreneur because I wanna live the rest of my life figuring out how to scale up pedagogy, to help anyone learn anything as long as they’re curious.

To do that, I think we need to rethink edtech on multiple levels (not at the same time):

1. Organisation
2. Team
3. Business model
4. Product
5. Distribution
6. Human-in-the-loop personalization
7. Content loop
8. Organisation

There are attractive companies in every industry that people, from senior talent to high school grads dream to join. Entertainment has Netflix and Spotify, Transportation has Uber, Lyft, Grab, etc., Security has Palantir, Space industry has Nasa and SpaceX, Social Networks have Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin etc., Tech in general has Google and Apple and etc., and so on.

I’ve yet to come across an edtech company that is that attractive. I know way too many smart people who joined the more famous edtech companies and got jaded after 6 months and left, because decision making and product leadership just sucked.

Team

There are people who study pedagogy at university, but they end up becoming corporate trainers or curriculum mass producers at edtech companies. Undervalued, underutilized. There are 0 edtech companies on the planet in which an instructional designer is part of an agile team with a PM, PMM, engineers, a designer and data people. 0.

Business model

There needs to be more business models that require companies to get learning right or die. Business model is the key to activating the full intellectual, creative and technical capacity of smart people and create a radically focused team of people who can solve, build, sell and scale. Income Share Agreement gets close but it has a legal aspect that’s too hard to enforce at scale, and it is only applicable to topics that get you a job (e.g. “learn how to code, for free until you land a job as a software engineer”). What about everything else?

Product

Most products need to win user’s attention once and retain it (aka product/market fit). Learning products need to do that AND make sure the user learns. that’s an order of magnitude more complex. Example: Duolingo. Super sticky, but doesn’t teach you a new language after a year of using it daily.

Distribution

It shouldn’t assume people can learn stuff just because there’s a lot of content available online. It needs to be as respectfully invasive as universities, but hopefully not as inefficient in use of time.

Human-in-the-loop personalization

Nobody is trying to collect feedback about how people learn and take action on it at scale, the way Grab and Uber and Lyft collect feedback about their riders and drivers and improve the experience. Why? Primarily because that’s not where the money is right now. 2021 edtech companies must make sure money is indeed there

Content loop

There’s enough content on the internet, but no matchmakers to put the existing content in personalized new context for different people’s learning goals.

My life and entrepreneurship journey from here on are gonna be a recursion of me iterating until I unlock education innovation on all these levels, and I'm always looking to connect with more smart people that I can learn from/with. Know someone who's also a nerd for these? Please connect us :)