Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Request for Education Startups

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 171 posts

Re: Request for Education Startups

#121

Post by ChicagoDave »

If I didn't have five kids, one in college, and monthly financial minimums that preclude taking time off from regular work, I'd jump at applying for YC. I even _had_ a great ed-tech startup... 5 years ago ...

Textfyre Final Presentation, 2012 http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Prese... (The slide with the team has been removed...no need to share that info)

We were in talks for a couple of months with Gates Foundation, but our timing was off. They had just pivoted away from helping startups to giving millions of dollars to big education publishers like Pearson.

I gave up after realizing that I'd vastly under-estimated the networking (and cash) requirements in even proving the plan. Education is a really hard business to crack and we were targeting textbooks.

Fast-forward a couple of years, maybe 2014-15, and I'm listening to a gal from Pearson being interviewed on NPR. She's essentially spouting many of Textfyre's ideas (embedded testing, interactive content, variable reading levels).

I laughed and cried at the same time.

The funny part is, not a single person ever told me the plan was bad. They just told me the education business sucks and it would cost a lot of money. But bar-none, everyone _loved_ the plan. And this goes through to today. I chat about this plan once in awhile with someone that's peripherally interested in ed-tech and they all say, "Why aren't you still working on THAT!"

I'd love to. Write me a check.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#122

Post by foxylad »

hydrox24 wrote: post #117
KGIII wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are two of the major ones with multiple facilities. That doesn't bode well for the industry. Also, kudos on grundles. That is my new favorite word.

Make sure you know the definition before you start using it casually as he has! > Noun. grundle (plural grundles) (US, slang) The area between anus and scrotum in a male or between anus and vulva in a woman. [0] [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grundle

Intersting. In NZ and Australia, "grundies" is slang for (usually male) underwear.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#123

Post by withdavidli »

KGIII wrote: post #114
austenallred wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, two of the 100 closed, the industry is fine. One is going to start up again in the same place with the same people and a different name. The other was purchased by Kaplan, which is as close as you can get to a death knell. Most are making grundles of money. We’re not really a code bootcamp but we get thousands of applications per month and have employers incredibly hungry for our grads.

They are two of the major ones with multiple facilities. That doesn't bode well for the industry. Also, kudos on grundles. That is my new favorite word.

Never even heard of Iron Yard, being funded by Apollo (U of Pohoenix) makes me think it was nothing but a cash grab, likely same as the reviews of Berkeley Extension school’s bootcamp.

This is a business where poor level of service sinks a company fast. Reviews get online from the first few cohorts, if they’re bad the high caliber students who do their research will opt out of applying. These are the students likely to get jobs from career fair which the bootcamp makes their recruitment fee.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#124

Post by austenallred »

withdavidli wrote: post #123
KGIII wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are two of the major ones with multiple facilities. That doesn't bode well for the industry. Also, kudos on grundles. That is my new favorite word.

Never even heard of Iron Yard, being funded by Apollo (U of Pohoenix) makes me think it was nothing but a cash grab, likely same as the reviews of Berkeley Extension school’s bootcamp. This is a business where poor level of service sinks a company fast. Reviews get online from the first few cohorts, if they’re bad the high caliber students who do their research will opt out of applying. These are the students likely…

Iron Yard was successful in one rural area, and decided to simultaneously open up 16 new spaces at once. Turns out that's like building 16 separate companies simultaneously.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#125

Post by austenallred »

KGIII wrote: post #114
austenallred wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, two of the 100 closed, the industry is fine. One is going to start up again in the same place with the same people and a different name. The other was purchased by Kaplan, which is as close as you can get to a death knell. Most are making grundles of money. We’re not really a code bootcamp but we get thousands of applications per month and have employers incredibly hungry for our grads.

They are two of the major ones with multiple facilities. That doesn't bode well for the industry. Also, kudos on grundles. That is my new favorite word.

Lots of bootcamps with multiple facilities do very well, but that makes costs high, so if you make a few missteps it's game over.

Most are clearing millions in profit.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#126

Post by KGIII »

hydrox24 wrote: post #117
KGIII wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are two of the major ones with multiple facilities. That doesn't bode well for the industry. Also, kudos on grundles. That is my new favorite word.

Make sure you know the definition before you start using it casually as he has! > Noun. grundle (plural grundles) (US, slang) The area between anus and scrotum in a male or between anus and vulva in a woman. [0] [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grundle

Oh, I'm going to use it for everything - except what it really means.

"I will take the 8 oz steak, smashed potatoes with gravy, cauliflower with cheese, a side salad with house Italian dressing, and can you please make it grundle?"

"Thanks for stopping by. When you get home, tell your grundle I said was thinking about them."

I realize this isn't good HN material, but I couldn't resist.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#127

Post by graniter »

matt4077 wrote: post #107
graniter wrote: post #47

It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instr…

> own "industrial revolution / doesn't seem to scale well / it's inefficient / improvements are [..] cost prohibitive / that parent pay for / can't we reward the best / We need tech / scale the classroom / deliver it cheaply / separation of concerns I'm not disagreeing that it's a good idea to always look for ways to improve schools. But i'd like to point out that you're framing these issues in almost exclusively eco…

Yes I used those terms intentionally because I think the current problem with education is being able to scale good teaching. There are good teachers, but we don't have a good way to scale them. The industrial revolution provided a way to replicate and scale good manufacturing. So maybe we can learn from that. I don't mean that education should be done like manufacturing, just that the lessons of how to scale may apply.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#128

Post by graniter »

germinalphrase wrote: post #70
graniter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I think about the analogy of interchangeable parts and if that might apply to education. Maybe teachers should just teach and assessors should assess. Interchangeable parts made it so equipment could be more efficiently be manufactured. But that didn't preclude there being a lot of different types of equipment. In fact, there's probably more types of equipment because of interchangeable parts. So for educatio…

I agree that we need more and better assessment - but I don't understand why we would allow a private body to do what should be a utility function of our educational system. Currently, the College Board is able to fill this niche (at great cost) due to a lack of trust in the assessments of individual instructors. Rather than further increasing the cost of assessment by expanding the use of private arbiters, we should…

Why not have multiple assessors? Let people/parents/whoever pick who they want. Some schools use ACT and others SAT. Having a single assessor seems suboptimal. Alternatives tend to keep things more in check.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#129

Post by graniter »

graniter wrote: post #47

It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instr…

Before audio recording was invented, each town had it's own musicians and musicians generally didn't make much money. Same thing for other performing arts. And if you wanted to hear some music, you had to go to the musical hall. To see a performance, you had to go to the theatre. A lot of people didn't go because of the inconvenience in timing, distance, or cost. And the best performers likely weren't know beyond their town. Their reach was limited.

Once LP records and movies came out then these performance were more accessible to more people. And some performers became superstars. Not everyone would be superstars but a huge industry was born that really didn't exist before.

It seems to me we may be on the cusp of something similar with education. I don't think we've figured out how to do it yet, but at some point there will be easy access to quality education, just like now there's easy access to quality entertainment. I think the revolution will be in the replication and distribution at low cost, not in a change of educational methodology or in-classroom technology.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#130

Post by alexashka »

shanev wrote: post #84

Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…

The best teachers are absolutely not on the internet. How do you even make that claim?

This is a typical 'technology is going to save the world' rant. No, it isn't. Technology is not a solution to short-sightedness that humans possess.

Education is not in trouble - the economic model that makes it difficult to go study, learn and get to apply that knowledge and those skills to solving real problems is.

Go ask engineers how many of them get to engineer anything. Go ask how many people in science get to work on interesting problems or can even get a job in the area they studied.

We have the smartest people ever, with access to the most information and the best technology of all time, to make incredible things. It's just hard to get to do those things - when the economy is in this frenzy of quarterly profits.

The decision-makers are 'buy for a dollar, sell for two'. Their worldview is incompatible with education, because you don't need education to make profit, you need someone to exploit to make profit. That's the world we've always lived in by the way, this is not new.

The traders sometimes believe some specific technology, would make them incredible profits, so they become interested in education for a minute, and then get busy with everyday business as usual. This is why science has become toxic via the grant system - 'promise a miracle to get money for research.'

I don't see a world where tradesmen relinquish their powerhold - creative people are always going to either be starving artists, with dignity, or shameless shills. Since the idea of starvation only appeals to a few, we have 'desire to learn is scarce.' It's against human nature to choose starvation you know :)

Post reply on HN