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I believe a great product in this area is certainly possible and Karpathy probably has the technical chops to create it. I'm skeptical that the product describ
by mrandish 2y ago
I believe a great product in this area is certainly possible and Karpathy probably has the technical chops to create it.
I'm skeptical that the product described in the announcement will result in a business able to generate VC-level returns. Based on my experience as a tech entrepreneur with edu-focused products across multiple startups and decades, scaling sales revenue to significant levels in edu is extremely challenging for unique and non-obvious reasons. None of the edu-specific challenges are directly related to the effectiveness or relative value of the product itself. They are structural problems related to the three main types of buyers, which are: 1. Schools, (K-12, Univ), 2. Companies (employee training, compliance, etc), 3. Individuals (self-learners). There are other types of buyers but they don't represent nearly as much aggregated potential revenue as these three. Note that these are the economic buyers not the product end-users.
Each of the three types presents different challenges from the others, however there recurring meta-themes. The main one is that their purchasing decisions are often driven by factors unrelated to the product. For example, the primary focus of schools is, sadly, not maximizing net student learning. While that is a consideration, it's swamped by other external requirements, many of them wickedly complex. For companies, employee training, whether a regulatory requirement or purely to increase employee effectiveness, isn't core to their actual business - meaning it's a cost not revenue. Individuals on the other hand break into two types, those doing it to actually learn something for themselves, and those seeking certification or external validation like a degree to increase their future employment earnings. Learning lovers are a pure consumer, non-essential, discretionary spending-type sale with all the same well-known LTV and customer acquisition cost challenges. For certification/validation buyers, they aren't primarily focused on the learning but rather checking a particular box that has high perceived value to external parties.
While I agree that creating a new large and growing type of customer in addition to these three is possible, it's a huge lift that's risky, expensive and will require substantial sustained investment over time - all ahead of meaningful revenue. So, I wish Andrej et al the best and I'm rooting for them but I'm not optimistic they'll build a high-growth, high-revenue sustainable edu business around AI as the primary value differentiation.
- xxbondsxx 2y agoThanks for saying the quiet part out loud here -- everyone wants to believe in education improvement but there's a harsh reality of the industry that is pretty unpleasant to confront. I think the only hope would be to run a pilot and show such an improvement in student testing levels that it would be fast-tracked or mandated for approval.
- shermantanktop 2y ago…or be accused of cooking the books, labeled as anti-union, or other ad hominem attacks. I’m not a fan of SV edutech ventures for various reasons, but the school districts that they hope to sink their pointy teeth into have very effective immune systems against change.
- mrandish 2y agoYes, I LOLed at your comment. K-12 is especially soul crushing for tech startups, which is why I now think of K-12 school district buyers like Obi Wan thinks of Mos Eisley.
- notjoemama 2y agoMaybe part of it is seeing education as a massive untapped wallet? There's a reason Teachers Pay Teachers exists and frankly, given the greed of Silicon Valley and existing ED companies, isn't it an environmentally created immune system?
- bongodongobob 2y agoMaybe. I'd love to see whatever the Apple + MECC version would be today.
- shermantanktop 2y agoTeachers and administrators have decades of experience at getting treated as targets for culture-war grandstanding. Having a 28yo tech CEO barely older than their students tell them that a cool website will reverse the effects of poverty is probably just a different flavor.