[Red Liner]

The real "ed tech".

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/2-ca...-4709737/amp/1

2 Cars In Garage Enough": Why Sal Khan Quit Plush Job To Open Khan Academy
Today, Sal Khan's voice is familiar to millions of schoolchildren worldwide. A whole generation that owes him for teaching them confidence and math, free of charge.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Red Liner

The real "ed tech".

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/2-ca...-4709737/amp/1

Absolutely! Not just school children. In the last decade, I took many advanced courses from Khan Academy in order learn college level mathematics all over again. The knowledge I gained helped me launch my second startup.

Edit: Of course, it was not just Khan academy. I also used lots of youtube videos from unknown teachers. But Sal Khan was the real pioneer.

[mayukh42]

There are also MIT OpenCourseWare, Coursera, and edX that qualify in "real ed-tech" category, top notch in quality (though the latter two seems to be more commercial nowadays - they were excellent in the first 4-5 years after launching in 2011-12).

But Sal Khan deserves more credit because he was not directly linked to any university, and producing quality content is more difficult for school students than college.

I remember a Stanford Professor Mehram Sahami whose CS101 was extremely popular. Video quality is 15 years old but content is excellent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMD...aG9kb2xvZ3k%3D

As often, the best things on the internet are free. It is a pity that many pay for substandard ed-tech when much better content is already available on Youtube, if one has the time to do a bit research, and perseverance to learn.

A business model that assumes lack of knowledge of the customer is only going to get so far.

[udzgodfather]

Originally Posted by 2000rpm

Your comment only proves my point to the T


To your point, my counter-argument is - Why is the greed of a retail investor to make a quick buck in an IPO more noble than a businessman's greed to make money? Greed is what leads to what some of the mal-practices we have seen. But this has happened quite regularly in the normal corporate world also, including the CASH-FOR-OFFER scam with a Tata Group Company.

Hi, without going into any other details, I would just like to shed some light on the IPO side of the startups.
For that I would like to divide the IPO's in two different generations, current generation i.e. anywhere from 2008 to till date and previous generation is IPOs before that.


When you will compare the IPO of current generation and previous generation you will find that the previous generations at the time of IPO had a face value of Rs 10, rarely bonus shares allotted before getting public or the major chunk of issue is offer for sale or the promoter is divesting heavily, all the points I talked about had a balance of creating long term wealth for the investor and also promoter having skin in the game, now if you look at the current generations of the IPOs, shares are already subdivided to the FV of Rs1, pre IPO bonuses are already allotted to the Founder, VCs, AIs or any other pre IPO investor, and then major chunk of the IPO is offer for sale (talking about Mamaearth here, ), we all are working on a daily basis for the greed only, the retail investor in a hope of making some wealth out of the company invests in the IPO, but a lot of them are so unaware about such fine details.


The startups through IPO are not raising capital, they are offloading there shares to gullible and retail investors, can't be more plain and simple than this.

[whitewing]

Finally Byju's reported its numbers.

Byju's reports a 1 Billion$ loss for FY22 !!
Boggles my mind that a services company is able to burn through so much money in a year, without building any significant infrastructure (the number also includes a write off of the white hat JR acquisition which as ~300mil$ IIRC, it still means ~700mil $ loss from its other activities).

https://thearcweb.com/article/byju-r...WZHKi0REGjA6g4

[Samurai]

From the VC grapevine... apparently the rules have changed since the funding winter.

1) VCs don't prefer younglings anymore. They want the founders to be in their 40s.
2) They want folks who have worked in corporate for 10-15 years and understand management. Chaos is not welcome.
3) College doesn't matter anymore. That is logical considering it shouldn't matter for experienced professionals.

[Samurai]

A new kind of startup shenanigan is in the news today... But what has this got to do with startups?

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india...818698049.html

A woman kills her 4-year old son. But the media decides to focus on the unimportant things like she is the (i) CEO, (ii) of a startup, (iii) which doesn't have an office. Almost every newspaper is focusing on these traits.

CEOs are humans too. Yup, even the startup CEOs. They are not some exalted beings floating in the cloud, picking funds from VC trees. She just happens to be a horrible mother, who killed her own child.

BTW, why did Hindustan Times focus on her startup not having an independent office, why is it the headlines? Are they thinking it is some kind of fraud? Just shows the ignorance of Hindustan Times journalists.

Almost all IT startups are launched from home or garage or in a co-working space these days. Until some finance is arranged, either via revenue or investment or loan, it is too expensive to set up a physical office with minimum furnishings. Plenty of startups simply use the accountant's address since they don't need a physical office. However, the company law insists on a physical office, so they are forced to take at least one dedicated table at a co-working center. I know this because we too did the same for over 3 years until we generated enough funds to establish two physical offices and reached 8 people. Until then we kept paying 27K for a single table at Regus, where we never really worked. None of our customers cared as long as we delivered the product.

According into Linkedin, Suchana Seth's company appears be a 2-person company. She doesn't even use the title CEO, she is named as co-founder. Why does Hindustan Times expect a 2-person company to have a swanky office? It is perfectly fine to be located in a co-working center. Even that, is simply a compliance requirement.

When will the media really try to understand startups? Instead, they glorify super overvalued startups with mindless millions of investments as the ideal startups.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by Samurai

But the media decides to focus on the unimportant things like she is the (i) CEO, (ii) of a startup, (iii) which doesn't have an office. Almost every newspaper is focusing on these traits.

2 reasons:

1. Keywords, eyeballs/clicks.
2. Lack of staff for investigative journalism.

They know their English-paper reading audience, using keywords like "startup" and CEO will make people click on the article and have better impact/mind-share/retention. It also helps reinforce some long-cherished beliefs (examples: "IT is ruining Bangalore", "Women working causes such family issues", etc etc.) of some sections of the public, so you get their attention too. Almost any sensational bit of news involving an "IT company employee" in Bangalore will add irrelevant details like which company the person works for (especially if it's a brand name - TCS, Infy, Wipro, Google, etc. etc.- even if the incident happened nowhere near the office or during the course of the employee's duty!)

Also, newspapers don't have the staff anymore. So, the way to pad an article in the absence of hard, relevant facts is for journalists to search online and grab any info from the social media accounts of the people involved. However irrelevant it is to the issue being reported. Actually sending a reporter to talk to people, police, investigate, etc. is a thing of the past in most cases.

[ex-innova-guy]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Instead, they glorify super overvalued startups with mindless millions of investments as the ideal startups.

What is even more disheartening is that some news outlets have not even blurred the poor child's face. Freedom of the press at its very best. Sigh

[d.w.w.]

Originally Posted by Samurai

But the media decides to focus on the unimportant things

Media houses are not interested in covering the facts. They want to publish

1. What they want you to read. (often political reports)
2, what they think you will like.(based on the analytics generated from the website)

Nobody is going to read a news titled 'women murders here 4yr kid', but when keywords like start up, CEO etc are involved people(moistly the non-IT crowd) jump in to know the inside stories.

Few years back, I was interviewed for a news article about something that I did as a hobby. The thing that I was doing was an uncommon art at that time, so I shared even the basic information with the journalist to help her with the article. But when the article was published, it had many factual errors. I tried reaching out to that journalist, she didn't even bother to open my chat. I realized people are just a news item for then and once the article is published, they just move on and don't care about your existence. Lost my interest to get featured on the media after this incident. Facts never matter, clicks does!

[SidTheChamp]

Originally Posted by Samurai

When will the media really try to understand startups? Instead, they glorify super overvalued startups with mindless millions of investments as the ideal startups.

Media's job is to go after sensational news. And they got it. In addition to horrible murder, trying to escape with body in suitcase and how she was caught, her profile also made the news. My initial reaction was she must be heading the next hi profile AI startup. Her LinkedIn and twitter bio are all bloated. Whereas actually its a 1-2 person startup.
Next media tries to strech this further. But they didn't succeed because
- Husband refused to speak to the media
- Her relatives in Kolkata refused to speak (they reached there too)
- Not much masala from housing society (they reached there too)

Soon this story will drop from public's radar

[Red Liner]

Originally Posted by SidTheChamp

. My initial reaction was she must be heading the next hi profile AI startup. Her LinkedIn and twitter bio are all bloated. Whereas actually its a 1-2 person startup.

This was my reaction too. The amount of professional hubris all over google about her is incredible!

[nirmaljusdoit]

The downward spiral continues, wonder what else is in store?

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/bl...-to-1-billion/

[pathik@2020]

Though I do not agree with the last part of this article on giving Byju a non-profit vision, it outlines the story of decline and possible routes to bounce back:
Business Standard / Bloomberg https://www.business-standard.com/am...1100049_1.html

[deathwalkr]

Originally Posted by Samurai

A new kind of startup shenanigan is in the news today... But what has this got to do with startups?

Today's TOI referred to her as a co-founder of a startup only. Maybe the writer is on tbhp?