

How much Kno sold for and why it failed - gluejar
http://gigaom.com/2013/11/11/how-much-kno-sold-for-why-it-failed/

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avichal
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-...](http://avichal.com/2011/10/07/why-education-startups-do-not-succeed/)

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dnfriedman
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.

~~~
avichal
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.

