A deceased friend and I tried something like glicol in the mid-80's. We hacked a different crystal oscillator on a Zilog SCC board design donated by our employer to make a MIDI interface. My friend coded 'lxm', Language for the eXpression of Music. My job was to 'mxl', Musically eXpressed Language - to capture from the Juno 106 we were developing with. We weren't able to market it at that time. For your project, maybe find a US-based partner, there are plenty of Magnet and Charter Schools that can independently develop curriculum for non-core subjects. A possible way in is to find ones with a PTO (not PTA), the parents can drive this sort of thing. PTOs are independent corporations that serve one or a few schools whereast PTA is a top-down org and they are not the place to try to drive innovation IMO.
The way I think about investors, they are an extremely high interest loan. I have a money partner in my startup, I negotiated his equity down to 70% from the 80% he wanted. So if this product hits (already have a regular customer) and makes a million, he'll get $700K for investing less than $100K. I'll get $300K for investing probably about $300K worth of my own time and hand half of that to the IRS. Balance that with keeping 100% of $0 = $0.
I agree with you about VC and you are obviously more experienced as well. At that time, I just thought, try VC. Later I could understand the track they wanted me to take, and I also had other options such as bootstrapping.
But if it has to be some exponential growth and I am forced to change the attitude of exploration, that is not my original intention. I'd rather do some other business and keep open source software going.
The way I think about investors, they are an extremely high interest loan. I have a money partner in my startup, I negotiated his equity down to 70% from the 80% he wanted. So if this product hits (already have a regular customer) and makes a million, he'll get $700K for investing less than $100K. I'll get $300K for investing probably about $300K worth of my own time and hand half of that to the IRS. Balance that with keeping 100% of $0 = $0.