We’re #3 on Paul Graham’s Frighteningly Ambitious Idea List

I think you're looking at it wrong. You shouldn't be comparing yourself to universities. Don't compare your prices, duration and accreditation with them. You should be building something completely different from the ground up. Something that is viable in today's world, not trying to bandage existing university models to today's world. Like pg said, build your own thing, if it's really good, it will eventually replace universities without you even aiming for that.

Personally, I think you should focus much more heavily on the accreditation side than anything else. Just try to build a certification system together with existing tech employers, something that they would sign and put a banner in your website saying "company X approves this certificate as important for our selection process". That would get early adopters interested. After you have that. Offer your classes for free, make those as widely available as possible. Charge for the certificate and one on one help with those who feel they need it to get your certificate. Well, that's how I think this universities will actually get disrupted.

Within the next decade, we will see the rise of the teacher superstar. They will have salaries/compensations comparable to movie stars except their performance will be teaching online to massive amounts of students.

We can already see a beginning of that trend with Salman Khan or Peter Norvig teaching an AI class online.

I always browse without javascript enabled. Sites that load, and/or warn me correctly get a subtle mental nod and (maybe) even an addition to my safe-list. Obviously a blank white page isn't going to bring anyone back a second time...

I don't think you can beat the current universities by playing the game by the rules they've set up to manage their competition. Just seems like you've lost before you've even started.

The whole concept of being able to mix real world (trade school) courses with heavy theory is a tricky question. We have traditional theory heavy courses in the pipeline, but realistically, it is extremely difficult to bootstrap with theoretical courses. It's been tried before and typically fails quickly. Oddly enough, you can give away theoretical classes, and you can charge $10,000 a class for them, but you can't really sell enough at our $200-$400 price point to pay for the cost of developing the class. We believe you can teach both, and should teach both, but I'm well aware that we'll always have people saying you can't or shouldn't even attempt to do so.

Oh, one note on the textbooks for the course. Of course there is an image issue when you use Oreilly and Apress texts, but honestly, for that subject there just aren't any traditional texts that come anywhere near the level needed to teach the subject. Even those three have serious holes that Dr. Ostrowski has worked with the authors to plug in this course. If you know of a better text that we somehow overlooked, please drop me a note and we'll see if we can integrate it as we create V2 of the course.