The five most common mistakes founders make in trying to find Product Market Fit (PMF) I spend time with the twenty or so seed founders in my portfolio every week searching for product market fit. My guiding document is this one. I believe that there is a lot of…

One of the defining moments for many education startups is deciding what they want to feel like. Often, founders start by wanting to be a library, where students will go and learn things. That feels like the purest mission. After all, that’s the reason we started the company, right? The…

About 75% of my portfolio is consumer edtech, and half of that is k12. I’m proud to be an investor in Outschool, Epic!, Lingokids, Juni and many more. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that there are basically two kinds of consumer edtech companies, ones where the student adopts…

I have many companies in my portfolio focused on talent acquisition and development for the tech ecosystem — Lambda School, Major League Hacking, Fourthrev, Contra, Marketerhire, Reforge, and Maven. Here is my message to tech — stop whining that you can’t hire enough senior and diverse people and figure out…

Burn It Down After I sold my first company, NetGravity, I taught elementary and middle school for three years. Before starting my second company, Rocketship Education, I spent about a year as an entrepreneur in residence with the NewSchools Venture Fund. NewSchools was started by John Doerr, Brook Byers and…

This week, my college age daughter and two friends are staying with me. My daughter is working for Breakthrough Collaborative. One of her friends has two internships. The other is taking two classes. What’s amazing in watching digital natives is how well they have tuned their lives to the post-covid…

One of the persistent myths which provide comfort to both founders and investors is that you have a company once someone invests. And then if higher profile people and funds invest, you have a better company. In an ecosystem full of ‘fake it until you make it’, this may…

As a three time founder, and now investor in thirty founders, some patterns are pretty clear to me about the things that make most founders tick and the way that can cause problems as the company grows. Here are ten of them: 1 — You are extremely hard on…

The entire back catalog of Dunce Deals is now on SubStack. Enjoy! https://dunce.substack.com/publish?utm_source=menu