💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week

#1 💡

• Andrej Karpathy announced that he’s building an AI + education company.

• As a response an interesting discussion took place on Hacker News.

• Building an education company is a very sexy startup idea but hardly anyone seems to understand what the real challenges are.

• The quality of the product is a factor but hardly makes the top 3 when it comes to the buying decision. The actual education component of most universities sucks, most employee training is horrible. And yet billions of dollars are spent since the main function isn’t really to educate.

• The only type of buyer that truly cares about the quality of the education product are self-learners that are actually doing it to learn something, not to get some piece of paper in the end. And this group is shockingly small and has little money to spend.

• Hence, I’m highly sceptical that AI will lead to any kind of breakthrough. Personalized education is valuable. The best tutors deeply understand what you already know and what you care about, and use that build bridges for you. But as far as I know current AI tech is not able to provide this kind of personalization needed.

• At the same time it’s obvious that new ideas and experiments are needed. As Conor White-Sullivan puts it: “Normal education is absolutely 100% child abuse”.

#2

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• I like this idea because it’s orthogonal to the whole AI+education idea and tackles imo the right challenges.

• Motivation through personal connection is a huge factor when it comes to learning success. Online courses have ridiculously low completion rates while students are able to sit through years of the most boring lectures at universities.

• I always thought it’s ridiculous that currently only a tiny number of people are lecturing which more often than not have little interest in teaching at all.

• At the same time there are tons of people who would love to share knowledge but currently have no real platform to do so. A hundreds views on your blog or YouTube video are just not motivating enough. Having 15 people show up in person to learn from you feels very different.

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#3 💡

Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

• John Biggs wrote an interesting piece on how TechCrunch lost its way that even Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, agrees with.

• This makes it obvious that there is a gap to be filled for another TechCrunch-like site reporting on startups.

• Honest, non-hypey, intelligent reporting on interesting startups and meta trends in the startup landscape would certainly find many readers.

#4 💡

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• “Don’t use blended reasons” is an incredibly powerful heuristic.

• Using a spreadsheet with a complex rating system you can convince yourself that basically anything is a good idea.

• But if you don’t have at least one extremely compelling reason, you don’t have any reason really. You will quickly run out of steam as blended reasons do not provide the fuel needed in the long term.

#5 💡

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• This is obviously a ridiculous idea. But it’s only slightly more ridiculous than the fact that in the US a “Committee To End Pay Toilets In America” succeeded in getting pay toilets banned but no free public toilets were built as replacements. So now there are no public toilets anymore.

• In Germany the pay toilet system works pretty well. You pay €1 and the toilets are always pretty clean. It works because there’s always a human cleaning the toilets 24/7. In addition, there are self-cleaning pay toilets in many

End Note

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Have a great week,

Jakob