LaVonneReimer
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@BenSesser @LaVonneReimer Thanks!
Great analysis. Where would you place Splunk and Jive Software? Or LinkedIn.
Good piece overall but you are missing a vital element which is gaining support and encouragement as you execute to grit, rules and discipline. Your somewhat simplified coverage of GED outcomes misses this point as well. I've never known a student who went for GED because they didn't want to do the hard work. Usually it was inability to stay the course and often that due to absence of a strong support network. When they do achieve the certificate, their ability to build on it is similarly constrained. In other words, you are right that empty calls to optimism miss the mark but you left out the importance of knowing you have supporters who will hang in there with you and have your back.
Implications extend to commercial credit, the space with which I'm most involved currently. Check out Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. http://pde.cc/ Kaliya "Identity Woman" Hamlin is the founder and exec director. This is a topic worthy of its own month worth of dedicated coverage.
Great clip.
Dave is refreshingly blunt. I sense you are as well. Pando too which is why it's on my must read every day list. Refreshingly blunt is beyond welcomed. Most of the time I can parse the real objections behind the stated objections of investors but truly it is such damned hard work. There are plenty of other challenges to launching a new company that are more deserving of that kind of intellectual effort. I'll take blunt any day.
But to another point already made and admitting I'm more an observer of Dave than someone who really knows him, I see a man who has his heart in the right place and shows it with his actions day in and day out. Shout out for that.
@TheWritersDoula @LaVonneReimer Indeed! And then we must go for an exercise walk and the virtuous cycle of background processing just keeps revolving!
@TheWritersDoula The value of domestic tasks as you state is a point very much worth underscoring. I've taken to hand-washing all dishes for that reason. And at a time when I was unable to write an exec summary because I honestly couldn't figure out what the business needed to be, I took to cleaning out the garage. It was partly permitting background processing but also the tangible reward of seeing I'd made progress on something. Hard to feel that as viscerally in the context of building software.
Excellent piece and encouraging too from the vantage point of someone building team. It's so easy to get caught up in the hype of rock-stars even though my experience was getting great teams out of "the rest of us." Thanks.
This has been a great series. Thanks! I too wanted to comment earlier but just assumed a glitch in displaying the comment box. Here I would just say I will watch closely to see if Lynda.com (and all the other participants in this latest e-learning wave) can truly break the $100M/year run rate. That was the ceiling I saw back when I started into this, concurrent with Lynda.com but without the staying power to survive. It kept me awake many a night. Only Apollo Group had done it and that through multiple subsidiaries and not just University of Phoenix online.
Francisco, you succeeded! You got a passionate debate underway with a boatload of substance in the comment threads. Repeating from my other comments in this series, I founded and led a higher-ed focused (and venture-backed) startup in the 1st e-learning wave. The hype was strikingly similar back then. Here's how we/I looked at the need. There are people who cannot get to a campus, in our case super-busy working adults. How do we make the most of available technology to create a great online learning environment for them? That was our driver. Our competition was the glorified correspondence course. It pains me that we still see that a lot of such "cheap hacks" but I understand why. It takes a deep understanding of and investment in instructional design to do anything else.
I'm so relieved. I had just linked to Sarah's interview for Lynda.com in our corporate blog and thought I had violated a very important rule. Thankfully I understand very few of the cultural references above but was highly entertained.
This is a great story and interview. It's the combination of pragmatism and passion leading to a successful venture that probably exists for most entrepreneurs but is sometimes lost in all the drama of Silicon Valley.
@Chris van Loben Sels Well put including the potential alternative tweet.
Anyway, Reddit is my pick and that of my daughter who is trying to calmly study while less than a mile from all the action. For family of the maternal type, not tracking any of it is probably the most healthy thing to do.
"We already have the “sage on the stage” model in big lecture halls at
every college and university, so let’s use MOOCs to explore a range of pedagogical models instead of just delivering the standard lecture digitally." That may need to be said over and over again. I've commented elsewhere in this series having founded and led a higher-ed focused startup in the first e-learning wave. Pedagogy (technically androgogy when you're reaching working adults as we were) was top of mind for us. We regularly disparaged the sage-on-the-stage approach as a cheap hack. I took a quick look at your corporate website. It appears this is your focus. I hope you are massively successful!
Thanks for referencing Engine.
Great post and interesting comments too. You inspire great conversations Francisco! Seems to me that the greatest benefit of shared hero stories is also the greatest risk. I don't know any entrepreneur who hasn't experienced the extreme roller coaster ride. When it's super dark, it may be the only thing we can cling to is a great overcome-the-odds story. The danger is that it in understating the real messes it may leave us feeling even more defeated. I remember the first time I heard that cereal box story. I thought what's wrong with me? I'd never come up with such a creative survival tactic.
"Thank you, Silicon Valley, once again your groupthink and complete
disconnection from the rest of the world is going to be an incredible
asset for me." Love it!!
@fierroocho @LaVonneReimer Sorry. Just saying that I feel we learned about online educational methods that are transferable beyond the student base we served.