Great observations. I've been in the edu (coding school) space for over a decade and it tracks with my experience (though it seems you've tackled a lot more market segments than I have). I'm very bullish on AI + Education. If Karpathy's announcement doesn't track, what do you think might work instead?
That's a good question to which, unfortunately, I don't have a good answer. None of my startups managed to make our edu-focused products long-term successful. Fortunately, we designed our major technology stacks so each could result in products in at least two different markets. While our edu products never did better than break-even for us, our non-edu products usually did much better with several becoming breakout hits. Personally, I'm very passionate about the need for innovation in education, likely due to challenges I had with traditional school. But after spending many years and substantial funds, I eventually stopped trying to do edu-focused spins of my products (despite clear potential of the underlying tech). Although I now understand many of the reasons the edu market is so hard and counter-intuitive, I also learned succeeding there requires vastly different skills and interests than I have (or want to have). K-12 was especially frustrating for me because success there is so untethered from actual product effectiveness, along with being unbelievably bureaucratic, largely opaque, and having a glacially slow sales cycle. As someone who started out so idealistic about making education better, actually trying to build a successful tech startup selling to K-12 can be soul-crushing.
I agree that in terms of increasing actual learning, AI could be revolutionary. I commented here because my experience was specifically being a startup trying to sell products based on revolutionary new disruptive technologies into edu.
I'm B2C and selling ed to students is an eye-opening experience. It's actually very easy to get people to pay, so the problem isn't conversions. The problem for me is that if you keep following the money, it's natural to become predatory because the most vulnerable need the most education. The more vulnerable, the more likely they'll buy hype. You're essentially selling to the most needy, which feels like payday loans and that sort of business. I don't have it in me to deploy the sales/marketing playbook on vulnerable audiences.
So, the advice of selling to businesses seems better, but I also hear you on selling to K-12 or higher ed as having all the negatives of enterprise sales without the lucrative upside.
So then we're left to selling ed to businesses. But I feel despite all the lip service paid to training and upskilling, corporations don't *actually* want to upskill their workforce. Or at least not at the sacrifice of productivity.
Education is very unnatural, but that's what makes it a worthwhile problem to solve, too.
There's a difference between the educational-industrial complex (or the ed landscape in terms of market), and motivated learner-centric models which can be done independently.
As much as degrees and certs are important in the current paradigm, it's long been the case in tech that credentials matter less than output, skills, and soft skills.
As much as I personally believe in a stronger credential system, the shift is toward individual learning. The popularity of coding bootcamps in the tech space I think demonstrates that.
Personal AI tutor? Without the pesky SME credentialing? Sign me up!
IMO, a lot of that leads to sink or swim. Not that elite institutions are perfect (by a long shot). But largely cater to kids (and families) that can do things on their own with help from qualified people and you almost certainly get better results--and lower costs--for them.
