The education software industry today can roughly be divided into two camps:

  1. Software that enables the delivery of educational material over the internet (e.g. Coursera, Skillshare).
  2. Software that enables the operation of schools and universities (e.g. Tophat).

Put even more critically, both camps fall into the category of software that recreates in-person educational experiences. Software is a perfect innovation space for rapid experimentation, and it has been underleveraged for education.

I’m interested in what happens when we approach this problem from first principles - breaking things down to their essential truths and building upwards. In this case, the essential truths are students desire to learn and achieve a specific outcome.

Everything else can and probably should change.

I think we still have a ways to go to create software native educational experiences - ones have no physical equivalents at all and simply cannot exist without software itself.