4 ms·

I noticed several of your comments criticizing Knewton. Could you expand a bit? I am not related to Knewton at all, but interested in ed tech. If you don't want

• michaelochurch 13y ago
  I'll post half of it publicly and email you the other half. Their management is known throughout the industry to be unethical. Some recruiters refuse to work with them, and you'll hear some amazing stories if you hang around New York. They've existed for almost 6 years, pivoted constantly and recklessly, and delivered next to nothing. They're great at using the founder's family connections to raise money and get partnerships, but they treat engineers like commodities and have extreme architectural instability. There's also one high-profile case of the execs spending months trying to ruin the reputation of someone after he left. Ultimately, their true mission is fire teachers. That's a really terrible mission, if you ask me. Obviously, the engineers and data scientists (Knewton's management is scum, but they have good people at lower levels) are being told a different story about "democratizing education", but their real mission is to make teachers obsolete while making a few ed-pub incumbents (like Pearson) very wealthy. They're really damaging the reputation of the ed-tech space. It's a shame, because there are some really good companies trying to advance the field, and they're struggling to raise money due to the behavior (and declining reputation) of a large no-longer-startup that has nothing to do with them.