cglee

Yes, it feels like the future every time I put it on. For work, the ultra wide has been wonderful when I'm not at my desk. I also get to have the NBA playoffs to the side on a 10ft screen while I work. For videos, it's a complete game changing experience. They're slowly but surely releasing more "immersive" features. Eg, I recently watched an immersive Lakers game and immediately thought I'd pay to watch games like this. It reminded me when HD became default and we finally realized what we were missing. I don't want to watch games where I'm not courtside anymore.

The two things that consistently delight me are AI and my AVP. I'm trying to combine the two.

15 years on Heroku, absolutely no regrets and would do it again and again and again. It's one of those "no one goes there because it's too busy" type of situations. Don't fall for the noise, just use Heroku and move on with your life.

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.

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?

We have a saying at Launch School: habits over enthusiasm. I've noticed that wanting it isn't enough. Desire is fine but what the real key is a commitment to studying. I think we're saying the same thing with different phrases.

Agree that ISAs can be useful. But it's a tool that can be used to harm or help. Elevating it beyond a financial tool to some sort of educational breakthrough was a disservice, imo.

We agree on the value of community colleges. I wish they were better funded and more people worked to drive CC graduates to six-figure jobs.

How far along are you? I like what Recurse Center is doing, for example.

I think you have to be careful about looking at the diverse student body as "giving them an opportunity". For example, predatory for-profit universities specifically target low-income minority populations not to serve them but because they make for easy prey[1]. I'm not saying Lambda or any particular bootcamp is in this category, just that having a diverse student body isn't a feature unless you know for a fact that you're helping 100% of the students.[2]

Education has a couple of unique attributes that makes it difficult to assess:

     1. the value cannot be perceived until much later after the service is rendered
     2. alternatives are mutually exclusive; eg, people usually just attend one university or coding bootcamp, not all of them (or even two of them)

This is in contrast to, say, a restaurant where diners can immediately determine if they like the food and can compare it with competitors (because they dine at all the restaurants).

Those two attributes make it very easy to lead with hype and marketing and vulnerable people are particularly susceptible to it. imo it's not appropriate to deploy the standard startup playbook in edu, especially if you find yourself attracting vulnerable students.

Ok, now combine that with ISAs, which has some positive qualities but are not as incentive aligning as marketed. And then if you sell the ISA in bundles, then it becomes even less incentive aligning. Well, I guess it's now aligning with investors and loan brokers. But it's certainly not aligning more with student outcomes.

It all makes for a very delicate situation where you have vulnerable students biting on the ISA bait.

I know it seems like I'm just complaining but I've been thinking about these problems for a long time and I come with solutions. Or, particularly, a solution: imo the best thing an edu institution can do is allow students to leave easily.

Why do we never think of restaurants as predatory? The idea is ludicrous to even consider. There are of course terrible restaurants but we can just not dine there again and eat elsewhere. There are lots of restaurants around.

And here's the issue: there are also lots of edu institutions around but every single one of them deploy the marketing->entrapment playbook.[3]

How does marketing work when you have a bad school? Because of the time-lapse between value received and service rendered. The ISA is easily abused in this environment because it's both the marketing and the trap.

Anyway, I'm just riffing here... btw, huge fan of your books and work! Despite what I wrote above, I knew Lambda was making an honest attempt at their curriculum when they hired you.

  [1] https://failstatemovie.com/
  [2] imo, edu institutions need to be judged on how they treat their most vulnerable students, unlike startups who are judged on their best wins (https://twitter.com/cglee/status/1781129096250179640)
  [3] https://medium.com/launch-school/educational-entrapment-f5cc0472051e

I'm the founder of Launch School and I have been thinking about ISAs, coding bootcamps, and software ed for over a decade. I've tried to insert my thoughts here and there, for example:

     - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30782967
     - https://x.com/cglee/status/1232512904953335808

Always happy to chat about ISAs and how to best deploy them. Or, find better alternatives.

Interesting observation and aligns with my experience of really enjoying small focused tools and apps. This website is a good example.

Further, it feels like there's a corollary here to companies, where financially constrained companies who are smaller and more focused provide better customer experience than cash-flush competitors.

For me it's not shocking that any one person can be this cruel. What's difficult to process is how entire social structures and institutions can be this cruel.