Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dnfriedman 4609 days ago
Do you still think everything in that post holds? Would be curious to read an update from two years later. A number of changes seem to be happening much faster than anyone was predicting (i.e. adoption of MOOC's, the pending adoption of online into traditional universities). I'm curious if that would have you changing any of your theses.
1 comments

Unfortunately I think most of it still holds. The underlying psychology of the typical consumer hasn't changed. I think it will take a lot of liquidity to stick around long enough in this market to see the underlying market dynamics shift. This means you either raise a ton of money (at which point the returns don't make sense to anyone except the later stage investors), you run it as a non-profit where you can have a very long runway from grants, or you scale slowly but surely for the next decade before the market catches up. It will happen eventually but I think it will take more like 10 years, not the 4-6 that most VCs need to generate returns.