{"id":193,"date":"2014-06-16T18:00:16","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T18:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neurecall.com\/blog\/?p=193"},"modified":"2025-06-03T01:57:43","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T01:57:43","slug":"ed-tech-and-silicon-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.syngli.com\/blog\/ed-tech-and-silicon-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"Edtech and Silicon Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Christopher Nyren writes about \u201cThe EdTech Failings of Silicon Valley\u201d in an EdReach<\/em> piece<\/a>. The article highlights \u201c10 EdTech Startups that Silicon Valley Loved\u201d during the 1997-2001 Internet Bubble: UPromise, Lightspan, Advantage Schools, Saba Software, QuinStreet, ApexLearning, SchoolPop, TrainingNet, Academic Systems, and Varsity Books. Most of those startups have not persisted, or delivered much return on investment. He then proceeds to identify four reasons why Silicon Valley (and \u201cthe highly correlated \u201cSilicon Alley\u201d of NYC\u201d) have failed to generate \u201csustainable, scaled successes\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. \u00a0\u201cAd Supported and B2C models rarely work in education and in the case of the K-12 markets (the primary market for investment in Silicon Valley today), they are largely forbidden by schools \u2026 or face limited paths to monetization\u2026 Far too often, Silicon Valley investors confuse their own household budgets\/motivations with the actual mass addressable market.\u201d Also, echoing an observation by Michael Crosno, \u201cthere has still yet to be a true B2C EDU success: successes have either sold to administrators or just sold textbooks. Today, Silicon Valley still has yet to find out how to break through entrenched publishers, intractable institutional delivered \/ contracted education and strained \/ disinterested consumers.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. \u201cOther Enterprise SaaS may outdraw Corporate Learning SaaS in Silicon Valley \u2026 nearly all of the recent Corporate Learning SaaS successes have been based outside of the Valley\u201d;<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. \u201cSilicon Valley\u2019s exclusive focus on shrink wrapped software product for its inherent scalability and margins (and greater exit multiples) ignores the value of services and customer funding to find and fit a solution to a real market problem\u201d; and<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. \u201cSilicon Valley start-ups are ultimately just too expensive\u2026 [R]eturns [are impacted] by limited industry M&A capacity, with \u2026 sub-$50 million deals account[ing] for 80% of all activity \u2026 And with rising size thresholds in the public markets, EdTech has not been able to keep pace, effectively closing the IPO window.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    \n
    \"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Photo by Domenico Loia<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The \u201cUnicorns\u201d that did<\/em> emerge from the 1997-2001 period (among them \u201cBlackboard, Skillsoft, K12, Higher One, Wireless Generation, SchoolNet, Connections Academy, Archipelago\u201d) were not \u201ctypical case studies on Silicon Valley venture capital\u201d, taking \u201ca median of 14 years to achieve scale\u201d and frequently being bootstrapped along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christopher Nyren writes about \u201cThe EdTech Failings of Silicon Valley\u201d in an EdReach piece. The article highlights \u201c10 EdTech Startups that Silicon Valley Loved\u201d during the 1997-2001 Internet Bubble: UPromise, Lightspan, Advantage Schools, Saba Software, QuinStreet, ApexLearning, SchoolPop, TrainingNet, Academic Systems, and Varsity Books. Most of those startups have not persisted, or delivered much return on… View Article<\/a>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,36],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-silicon-valley","tag-venture-capital"],"yoast_head":"\nEdtech and Silicon Valley - Syngli - Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.syngli.com\/blog\/ed-tech-and-silicon-valley\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Edtech and Silicon Valley - Syngli - Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Christopher Nyren writes about \u201cThe EdTech Failings of Silicon Valley\u201d in an EdReach piece. 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