创业与商业avichal.com
为什么教育创业公司难以成功（2011）
Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed (2011)
2011 — 2017，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
作者 Avichal 在 2011 年撰文分析教育创业公司为何难以成功：普通中产把教育视为支出而非投资，不愿为增量改进买单，且教育行业分散、决策链复杂，难以实现 VC 期望的指数级增长。这篇文章在 2017 年再次登上 Hacker News 首页，作者本人也现身评论区表示大部分观点至今仍然成立。
为什么经久不衰：它对教育行业结构性困境的分析历经多年仍被反复验证，对今天的教育创业者和投资人依然有警示价值。
HN 评论精选
作者本人确认文章观点多年后依然成立
啊，这篇博文每年都会被翻出来一次 :) 遗憾的是我觉得大部分内容至今仍然成立。我应该写个后续……（编辑：我会在后续博文中回应这里的评论和想法。很高兴看到这么多人关注这个领域，有创业者在这里耕耘对世界是好事。）
avichal查看英文原文
Ah yes, the annual resurfacing of this blog post :) unfortunately I think most of it is still true. I should do a follow up... Edit: I'll address the comments/thoughts here in a follow up blog post. Glad to see so many people thinking about this space. It's a great thing for the world to have entrepreneurs building here.
教育效果与成本的根本权衡限制了创业公司的回报空间
「普通中产把教育视为支出而非投资」——就我所知，堪萨斯城郊区的中产非常在意学校质量，愿意通过加征房产税和销售税来资助学校。成本和效果始终是权衡关系：一对一辅导是教育效果的黄金标准，师生比越高效果越差。这从根本上限制了质量提升的回报——如果你的改进效果只相当于每个年级多请一名老师，那你最好比那些老师的工资更便宜。而且想拿到验证数据本身就很难，没人愿意拿自己孩子做实验。
jldugger查看英文原文
> The average, middle class person thinks about education as an expenditure, not an investment. The way I remember it, middle class folks in Kansas City suburbs really, really care about the quality of their schools and levy property and sales taxes to fund it. Rural Ohio townships where dual earners are making 17k less than the national median for such households may not have a lot of middle class to speak of. Cost and outcomes have always been a tradeoff. 1:1 tutoring is the gold standard for educational outcomes. We know that from there, outcomes fall as teacher:student ratios rise. This fundamentally puts a cap on returns to improved quality -- if your improved school outcome is comparable to adding one additional teacher per grade level, well, you better be cheaper than those teacher's salaries. And good luck finding that data in the first place. It's not easy to convince folks to run the experimental treatment on their children to get that data.
B2B 大单模式虽非指数增长但回报可观，被 VC 低估
我几年前在一家教育创业公司工作。他们的数学学习产品在软件质量上远超竞争对手，但没有实现指数级增长，只是以不错的速度线性增长。诀窍是直接卖给学校和教育机构——一单学校合同可以卖出 1000 个授权，拿到政府公立学校的合同甚至可能一单 10 万个授权。我认为做大 B2B 交易的公司被严重低估了，VC 们太执着于追逐指数增长曲线，忘了地球人口有限、购买力正日益集中。
jondubois查看英文原文
I worked for an Education startup a couple of years ago. They had a really good math learning product which blew away the competition in terms of software quality but they didn't achieve exponential growth. It was linear growth but at a very good rate. The trick was to sell directly to schools and educational institutions. There are new challenges there but it's also very high-reward. You can sell 1000 licenses from a single deal with a school. If you get a government public school contract you could be looking at 100k licenses from a single deal. I think that companies which do big b2b deals have become greatly undervalued. VCs are so obsessed chasing exponential growth curves that they seem to have forgotten that the earth only has limited population and that buying power has become much more centralized and is becoming increasingly centralized.
教育领域存在工会等根深蒂固的既得利益阻力
每次想到教育领域，我都会想起 Steve Krenzel 写的几篇关于他创业经历的帖子。简单概括：工会政治可能在意想不到的地方冒出来 :( 这个领域应该有钱可赚，低垂的果实也很多，但你可能会撞上盘根错节的强大阻力。
Irfaan查看英文原文
Every time I think about the education space, I think back to a couple of Steve Krenzel's posts about his startup's experience. • http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343380 • http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343564 Quick summary: Union politics can rear its head in unexpected ways. :( There's probably good money to be made in this space. Goodness knows there's plenty of low-hanging fruit. But you may run-up against some terribly well-entrenched opposition.
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