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Comment by avichal | Hacker News Reader

Kno failed because it focused on trying to make education better when most Americans care about getting the same quality educational resources for cheaper (textbooks in this case).

If anyone is interested, I wrote this blog post 2+ years ago that expands upon this hypothesis, based on my experience founding and exiting from an online education company: http://avichal.com/2011/10/07/why-education-startups-do-not-...

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I disagree. Kno was not focused on making education better. They were focused on making a bad business model a bit lighter, and more attractive on an iPad. This could be a nice business, but does not represent the type of mindset that would offer VCs the payoff that they need.

Textbooks as we know them are a bad business model in today's education system. Useful, but wasteful. Teachers assign an expensive book. Then students are only required to read 40% of it. Right there, you can see a serious disconnect and waste of resources.

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.

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.

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