[ Avichal Garg, co founder of PrepMe and most recently Spool. ]
Avichal Garg co-founded PrepMe in 2001, one of the first online education companies. Based on his more than 10 years of experience in the field, he explains why education startups do not succeed. Read Avichal's original post here. Syndicated with permission.
By Avichal Garg
I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Learning. In the last month, I’ve had 3 VC firms bring me in to chat with their partnership about education and 6 independent entrepreneurs reach out to me about their new education startup. This is a summary of what I tell them in person.
Note: I am going to make some generalizations below. Clearly there are nuances around education policy, economic policy, technology, and more. But this is a blog post, not a book, so take it for what it’s worth. These views are my own, not PrepMe’s (or Spool’s).
Summary
-
Most entrepreneurs in education build the wrong type of business, because entrepreneurs think of education as a quality problem. The average person thinks of it as a cost problem.
-
Building in education does not follow an Internet company’s growth curve. Do it because you want to fix problems in education for the next 20 years.
-
There are opportunities in education in servicing the poor in the US and building a company in Asia — not in selling to the middle class in the US.
-
The underlying culture will change and expose interesting opportunities in the long term, but probably not for another 5 years...
