The Web Has Finally Gone Live and Education Is Leading the Charge

Wow, how much has covid changed the world in six months ?!?

Six months ago, we considered k12 and higher education laggards in innovation because huge public subsidies and regulation had made innovation so difficult. Some mission-driven founders had created the next generation of education, but it was a well kept secret. Then covid hit and education for parents moved from ‘someone else’s problem’ to ‘a big problem’. While this was going on, the need to connect with others exposed the whole world to the fact that you could connect live with people whenever you wanted. Like that, people’s expectations of the web and of education evolved.

Companies offering live learning like outschool, galileoXP, Lambda, SV Academy, and Juni saw astounding growth.

Let’s back up. My own journey towards the live web started when I heard about Khan Academy. Everyone thought it was great. and then came the MOOCs. But i was running rocketship and this type of dead web approach didn’t work at all for our students. They were motivated by other people. So in 2013, i started Zeal do do live math instruction with audio and whiteboard for students. We used the new webrtc protocol to create live interactivity between students and our tutors. It was magic. Sadly it was also far too early. the technology sucked, twilio’s early api for webrtc was barely functioning. After a few years we sold it, but i was convinced that live should be a big part of education….

So I invested in all of the companies above, and that turned out to be a good call. My thesis was that the web would move from dead to live over the next five years. Covid just fast forwarded us five years.

So what’s next? The current thesis I am investing on is that as the masses come online, we will move from one on one and small group live interaction, to live large group and peer/community supported interaction. The main driver here is that people want live for the motivation, but want to pay Netflix prices.

Folks like getsetup and beanstalk in my portfolio are already figuring out how to make large-group live motivating when combined with peers and community. An enormous number of companies are coming into all of the spaces in future of learning and work where I invest. I’m really looking forward to working with a handful to see if we can make this work. I think this will be as significant a change as moving from apps to MOOCs or MOOCs to live were. Large class live is really going to make compelling education accessible at costs that remove equity concerns.