What kind of education do you need to build a great tech company? || Startups Weekly

Startups Weekly: What kind of education do you need to build a great tech company?

 

Easy start-up ideas have all been made — those that just required some homebrew hardware hacking or PHP dorm-room coding to get it off the ground. You may need several advanced technical degrees to achieve something significant these days. At least that's what Danny Crichton is gloomy about this week, in an essay entitled "Today's Two Ph.D. Problem of Startups." Here's a new example:

 

Take synthetic biology and the future of pharmaceuticals, please. There is a popular and very well-funded thesis on crossing machine learning and biology/medicine together to inspire the next generation of pharmaceutical and clinical treatments. The datasets are there, the patients are ready to buy, and the old ways of finding new candidates for disease treatment look positively ancient against the more deliberate and automated approach of modern algorithms.

 

Moving the needle even slightly here, however, requires an enormous knowledge of two very hard and disparate fields. AI and bio are domains that become extremely complex extremely quickly, and where researchers and founders quickly reach the frontiers of knowledge. These are not "solved" fields of any kind of imagination, and it's not unusual to quickly get a "No one really knows" answer to a question.

 

Even when you try to build teams with the right combinations of knowledge, he argues, each domain is now so complex that the mesh of skills required is far more difficult to achieve than previous efforts.

 

In part, I disagree, because innovation does not map existing domains in such a simple way. Computer scientists in the '60s didn't expect personal computing to be a thing until the homebrewers at Apple proved it. Enterprise software industry experts last decade did not expect the developers of consumer apps to apply their bottom-up growth skills and beat the sophisticated offerings made by the incumbents. I expect all sorts of arcane academic ideas to be blended with market demand in unexpected ways that break apart the models we have today, led by people who might not check all the boxes in traditional fields.

 

This includes the Ph.D. itself and the education sector. Which is where Danny and I are in agreement. Applying software to education has been a struggle because success requires understanding two disciplines, and he concludes that the way we learn will have to be broken down and reformed:

 

"We can't wait until 25 years at university is over and the people have graduated. Haggard was 40 years old before they could take a shot at some of those fascinating intersections. We need to build bridges to those gaps where innovation has not yet been achieved.

 

 

Edtech 's top Future

Almost to prove Danny's first point, some of the biggest companies in the world. Today, edtech was founded by technical experts who were also university professors. Companies like Coursera are now raising their late-stage funding rounds to the top of a pandemic-fueled online higher learning boom.

 

A potential gig economy for education created through online small-group learning would have a significant impact on both the supply and demand side of online education. Giving educators the ability to teach online from home opens up the opportunity for many more people around the world who might not have considered teaching otherwise, and this can greatly increase the supply of teachers around the world. It is also capable of alleviating the discrepancy that exists between the quality of teaching in urban and rural areas by enabling students to have access to the same quality of teaching independently of their location...

 

Companies in this area, such as Outschool and Camp K12, are pre-college. But take a look at all those who are trying to teach data science, product management, and other concepts that traditional industries need to incorporate to innovate more quickly, and you can see the solution that Danny hopes will emerge. One day soon, you might be able to quickly learn a new skill that you need to get a job — or a medical breakthrough.

 

 

 

Planning your own equity after an IPO

Do you think the next Amazon or Google is your unicorn employer? Are you ready to hold on to the stock of a potential winner through all the ups and downs that happen to any company? If you haven't already, consider diversifying sooner rather than later, Peyton Carr, Startup Financial Advisor, writes this week in a series on the subject:

 

Any stock position or exposure greater than 10% of the portfolio is considered to be a concentrated position. There are no hard numbers, but the appropriate level of the concentration depends on a number of factors, such as your liquidity needs, the overall value of the portfolio, the appetite for risk and the longer-term financial plan.

 

The company's "stock" in your portfolio is often only a fraction of your overall financial exposure to your company. Think about your other potential sources exposure, such as limited stocks, RSUs, options, employee share purchase programs, 401k, other capital compensation plans, as well as your current and future pay streams linked to the success of the company. In most cases, the prudent path to achieving your financial objectives involves a well-diversified portfolio.