Assertion Supported
Li Jin: Mental health startup Basis uses unlicensed community coaches as therapists
“So one startup based in San Francisco is called Basis, and they're using unlicensed but trained people in the community to basically serve as therapists.”
Insight
Jin: ISAs force education providers to shorten programs and focus on employability
“And the result of that business model is that The programs themselves then are changing to sort of drive that positive outcome for everyone. So the programs are getting shorter because they're incentivized to get that payback sooner. They're incentivized to ac…”
Assertion Supported
Jin: Top business schools like Harvard and Stanford face declining MBA applications
“The number of applications is shrinking across the board, and the institutions that historically were thought of as immune to this, so Harvard Stanford, GSB, Wharton, the top, top business schools, They're now experiencing this, too, where they're seeing year …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jin: Academic accreditation will erode as a quality signal for employers
“But I think with the internet and now with all of these programs and like the availability of reviews and the availability of like various assessments and other measurements of a student's competency and mastery of a subject, I think the era of accreditation i…”
Insight
Li Jin: Top marketplace companies face constrained supply rather than demand
“One of our observations about the best marketplace investments and the best marketplace companies are that they tend to be marketplaces that have more constrained supply than demand. So the biggest marketplace outcomes that we've seen, or the biggest marketpla…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Li Jin: Regulated services are the next major marketplace category
“And so in other words, we're looking for categories where there's a lot of demand that is being unfulfilled today. And so that leads us to what we think is next, which is regulated services and marketplaces that address regulated services.”
Assertion Supported
Jin: Only 50% of university presidents say college is for job placement
“And I think that same question was posed to university presidents by Pew Research, and I think only 50% of them said that the purpose, the main purpose, was to get a job.”
Insight
Jin: Lower-tier colleges are prime targets for edtech disruption
“I think brand is a huge piece of what's protecting traditional institutions from being disrupted. And I think brand is very closely coupled with exclusivity. So at the lower levels where the brand is less strong, I think that is a prime target for disruption a…”
Insight
Jin: Liberal arts degrees function as high-cost luxury consumer products
“Liberal arts education, and things that perhaps aren't as practically useful. But I think they are somewhat luxury goods, like they're very expensive products that some people want to pay a premium for, and maybe they're not completely useful, but like there's…”
Opinion
Jin: Liberal arts education unfairly gets a bad reputation in Silicon Valley
“Well, I think liberal arts education unfairly gets a bad rep in Silicon Valley, which I don't agree with.”
What-if
Li Jin: Uber and Lyft required unlicensed drivers to reach scale
“And without that kind of unlock, without expanding it to the unlicensed pool of potential drivers there's no way that Uber or Lyft could be anywhere near the size they are today.”
Assertion Supported
Jin: 80% of UCLA students say college is for getting a job
“I think UCLA ran a survey a few years ago, surveying their students as to, like, what is the purpose of college for you? And 80% of them said to get a job.”
Assertion Supported
Jin: Alternative education programs are shifting from tuition to ISAs
“So in the past few years, the nature that these programs are monetizing has really shifted from upfront tuition payment, which has been the traditional higher ed business model to now more and more programs are offering income share agreements or ISAs.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jin: Coding bootcamps have not yet produced large venture capital exits
“To date, there haven't been large outcomes in this space, so we're keeping tabs on it, but wondering if there can be a large exit or a large outcome here.”
Insight
Jin: Traditional alumni donation models are Income Share Agreements on steroids
“I think of that business model as like income share on steroids, where instead of just monetizing for this fixed window for the student's life when they first get out of school, you're actually potentially capturing the upside as they grow their income through…”
Assertion Supported
Jin: K-12 teaching in China is an extremely competitive career path
“In China, it's like an extremely competitive career path. Very few students are accepted to teaching schools. Very few of those graduates get accepted to actual teaching jobs.”
Assertion Not yet assessed · timeframe Dec 2018
Li Jin: Only 7% of consumer services are digital
“I think the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a statistic that only seven percent of the services that we purchase are digital.”
Insight
Li Jin: Directory marketplace models fail for high-trust service categories
“Listings, it's not only tedious and a lot of work for consumers there were also problems with trust, so for services that required some component of trust where you were potentially letting someone into your home or letting someone interact with your child, it…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jin: Every Craigslist category now has its own specialized marketplace
“And basically every single category now has its own specialized marketplace that tackles just that particular category.”
Insight
Li Jin: On-demand marketplaces require simple, atomic transactions for algorithmic matching
“And so the on demand model of marketplaces was really conducive to simple services that were very atomic and simple transactions that could you could do matching for in a very quick algorithmic way without, you know, matching on various different complex dimen…”
Insight
Li Jin: 'Uber for X' startups failed by misapplying the on-demand model
“Where a lot of the startups that were trying to become Uber for X didn't ultimately end up lasting and surviving as standalone companies, and we think that that's because the model got applied probably a bit too liberally to service categories that weren't as …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Li Jin: Airbnb and Uber were consistently constrained by supply
“So, during the entire lifetimes of both of those companies, there's always been an excess of demand, and supply has always struggled to keep up.”
Assertion Partly supported
Li Jin: Most psychiatrists are out of network and charge up to $600 per hour
“Psychiatrists are out of network, and so they can charge prices of, you know, even 600 dollars an hour, and so this is really a product that most people can't access”
Assertion Supported
Jin: Outschool builds curriculum bottom-up from parent and student requests
“And instead of taking the top-down approach of they decide what the class should be and what the curriculum is, it's instead of A bottoms up motion where they actually collect the request from parents and from students and send that along to the teachers who h…”
