EdTech

“Especially ones that are in the education area. Best in class is not very good. And best in class, you know, being Duolingos.”

“If you put this in a standard school day of six hours, it's not going to work. Like, ed tech generally has failed. And it's generally failed because the kids aren't motivated to engage with it. If you don't give them their time back, They're not going to engag…”

“Lots of VCs has funded lots of ed tech. None of it works. Right? There's our ed tech investment goes like this, test scores keep going down.”

“Every educator will tell you the two things you need to educate a kid. You need a motivated student, and we'll talk about when we get to motivation. The second is, you have to put them in material of the correct difficulty. And AI tutors, and EdTech, not even …”

“The problem with EdTech today and why it's failed and nobody wants to invest in it is you're trying to sell to a school system who actually doesn't care about academic outcomes back to the bundle. And you can't change the metrics that matter. And so you can't …”

“So motivation is 90% of the solution. Okay. The ed tech is 10%. And so this is actually just hitting the ed tech and the software and all that stuff. Even though I come from the software ground, the prob ed tech has failed, right? We keep putting ed tech into …”

“If you look at in multiples of 2021, there were companies in our space pulling down 10, 12 X multiples on revenue. And then they had these super inflated evaluations that they couldn't catch up to.”

“Usually more than that.”

“The issue is not the sales cycle. The issue is the resources required to make something, and the resources required to sell something, those numbers don't work well today.”

“One of the things that a lot of people don't realize about EdTech is it used to be a lot more lucrative in the nineties. When we think about games like Oregon Trail, Reader Rabbit, and all of those the way sales cycles happened back then was different. They di…”

“I think the fundamental innovation with EdTech is not technology. It is CAC. It is destruction of CAC.”

“On 500 investments, I think we have one ed tech company, so it's not a space I really know a whole lot about nor really have a, honestly, a passion for.”

“We've only ever had ed tech companies come on the show and completely fail.”

“You mentioned AI founders fund didn't really do AI. So even if you were dot AI the last 18 months, it was like a no-go regardless of the success of the business. We didn't love the categories of like health tech and ed tech.”

“Like this is not a tool that if you like it, you'll just use it for the rest of your life. Right. At the end of the day, whether someone succeeds with the product, Goes through the course, learns a ton, gets a job, or fails. They kind of get through the part t…”

“And 10 times more capital coming is not going to give you 10 times fast result. In fact, it's going to slow the process down.”

“I have turned down companies before because there is an amazing founder, but it's in ed tech, which just hell or high water. The churn is a complete bitch and Duolingo is the leader, but it's still not a hugely valuable company”

“This noise will settle. It will settle over the next few months, or maybe a year or so. And then a new crop of education players, and I'm consciously not using EdTech, I'm using education, because education is the goal, as I said, a new crop of education playe…”

“Education is inherently very, very driven by word of mouth. So if you have some short term fads coming in, you know, or some, let's say this advertising of this kind and so on. Yeah, it may take hold for a certain amount of time, but ultimately people will see…”

“With biggest of the edtechs, the problem that I've seen is CAC. Acquisition cost is through the roof. We have to make it work on performance only, because that's the only way to scale today, sadly, until you get true PMF.”

“I would say distribution is way more important. There's a lot of subpar products that have better distribution that are winning.”

“So I only invest in companies, which is related to edtech, fintech, or passion economy, because those are the specific areas where we can directly help the startups.”

“The bad part is we did not realize the idea was in ed tech, in HR tech and B to B. If you're doing all these three, you're dead in India, right?”

“What you're seeing in edtech is education historically had a strong bundle. So school is a perfect example. It's daycare, it's learning, it's socialization, right? All three together. You can't go to a school and say, hey, hey, hey, you know, I don't think the…”

“I think typically in edtech, I think consumer data, user data is a moat especially if you have someone, for example, who's on that, like, for example, take Doubtnut.”

“I would argue over time, people should think about a tech as even better than the offline education that they were getting. Because of because of democratization of content from the supply side, because you can get the best suppliers or best supply of content …”

“It is really the paradigm of education then changes that the lecturer is different from from doubt solver to is different from mentor which is effectively unbundling of the different roles that the teacher standing on the podium in the offline coaching insti…”

“People do not pay for content as much, but people pay for learning. People pay for the package.”

“Almost surely companies in both K-Six and continuing continued education would be very vertical focused to begin with. That you will deliver high quality output for one vertical, whether it's coding, learning as you are going in your job. So, so you would, you…”

“Bookish market size is perhaps the wrong number to look at when you're evaluating education companies”

“It's important to have focus and be the winner in your category, because number two will almost always surely get poorer quality customers and would have it more difficult to build a company.”

“We've, like I said, we have been tracking the sector for a while and for the right reasons that you mentioned, we've also stayed away because we worried about monetization. We also worried about the fact that this is a fairly regulated sector. So higher ed is …”

“Edtech has been around for a long time, but I've seen the monetization journey for edtech has not been as robust as some of the other segments have been, but I do see chance for edtech to emerge prominent in the next Two, three years.”

“I've never invested in an ed tech company, and again, I think the social impact is massive. I just think it's very hard to succeed, in part because there's nobody who is able or willing to pay in the US for the product.”

“And I think, especially in Silicon Valley, there's too much of a, Lens of, well, if it's not a billion dollar outcome or if it's not a ten billion dollar exit, it doesn't matter. And there are lots of motivations that people may have. And so the first step, I …”

“Out of the, you know, thousands and thousands of companies that have been funded over the last decade or so, only a handful, I would say probably 10 or 15, have really broken out past the, let's say, tens of millions in revenue milestone and, you know, are on …”

“Most people that have invested in EdTech have lost money in EdTech, and so, yeah, there's good reason to be skeptical.”

“Like you work in school years. So there's no point you being alive for like three out of the 12 months of the school year. You better be around in 12 month, like chunks.”

“And so when companies like are working in classrooms, I don't think that's acceptable at all. Like that's not like, that would be a really bad way to build and fund an education technology company.”

“If you're going to decide to teach something, there is a big problem, which is, I don't believe there's an easy way to do a really simple app where in some way kind of you crowdsource the teaching from one side to the other. Like, for example, think of Instagr…”

“Education is usually at the district level, at the school district level, where, where things are spent, so it's not like you can have a contract with the whole U.S. School system, or anything like that, and different district levels teach differently, differe…”

“Most people pursue education because they're looking for an outcome. So looking to change their life or their child's life in some way, as a result of that, trying to sort of create a build it and they will come style open education platform is really well int…”

“There was a period of time when it was a little overhyped and I think we're seeing a bit of a correction from that you know, from like the 2012 through 2014 period of time.”

“I don't. I think it's gonna complement the school experience and life, but I have a hard time saying totally replacing schools because, you know, a lot of the schools are owned by states, by and funded by the government, and it's gonna be a massive, you know, …”