Getting Started

I love Outschool.  Last week, my son was sick and needed to stay home from school.  When this happened when I was young, it meant a day of I Love Lucy reruns, broken up only by Price is Right at 11am (Channel 9).

By 8am, he was set up with a small group Minecraft Math class, a 1-1 reading assessment, and a 45min virtual escape room.  He loved all three. (By the way, he wasn't that sick, we kept him home mostly out of caution).  My wife and I worked through the day, and his time was well spent and enjoyable.

Two quick takeaways from this small moment in a busy life. First, I live a privileged life. Having the resources and support to be working from home, to pay for supplemental classes and to have time to care for our children is a privilege most parents don't have today.  

Second, digitalization, the transformation of products and services from the physical world to the digital world, continues to reach new markets.  Over time, technology, like online learning, will open up access to more learners who today don't have the same access due to geography or affordability.

I don't know how big a company Outschool will become, or even if it will be successful.  But the idea of online digital learning feels so right.  I don't know if it will be replace schools full time, or serve as a complement to the current model. If it will be live or recorded. If it will be individual or small cohort, market priced or subsidized.  

I deeply believe that entrepreneurs will keep iterating until the 'right' collection of products and services provide a massive, positive contribution to the world.  

It reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story from Amazon executives when the first Kindle came to market.  The product was clunky. Download speeds weren't great. There was a limited library of online books.  People mocked the product and the vision.

This executive replied:  I don't know if the Kindle will work.  I don't know what it will look like as we learn from customers and the market.  But, I do know this:  In the future, when a person comes up with a new idea, develops that idea and wants to share it with the world, the best way to disseminate that idea is not to walk into the woods, cut down a tree, send the tree to a sawmill, pulp the tree into little small pieces, press the pulp into paper, ship all that paper to a different building for someone else to print little small letters on all the pages, then ship all those pages with all those fixed letters to people all over the world.   And then, do that same process again each and every time someone else has a new idea.

I encountered that quote over a decade ago, and it still floors me to think about.  It was so simple and so obviously correct, even then.

I'm thinking a lot these days about what the digital transformation of the world will mean for us all.  Albert Wegner's World After Capital provides a useful framing of the issues.  

We are still in the early days of appreciating how everything will change in the digital age.   Something as sudden as a sick day home from school brings it all into focus.