The eduFire Blog

Very early on with eduFire we set the intention to only grapple with extremely meaningful problems. We set out to do something very challenging and yet very meaningful: Revolutionize education. There are a million other things we could have done and to be honest a lot of roads that would be have been “easier” depending on how you define success (be it raising money, getting acquired, etc.). However, that didn’t have much appeal to us. Instead we want to take a really big swing and try to shake an industry to its core in the hopes that something much better would emerge on the other end. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with eduFire.

Umair has a great post up on the HBS blog which I think everyone who’s an entrepreneur or a VC needs to read. In it he takes issue with the incrementalism that he sees coming out of the Valley.

But today’s revolutionaries are sheep in wolves’ clothing. They’re lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they’re cutting deals with one another to…try and sell more ads. That is, when they’re not too busy partying.

I gotta say it…Umair’s dead on. Instead of looking for the New New Thing that could revolutionize the *fill in the blank* industry it seems that a lot of people are instead looking for the New New Alert Thingy. You now, that service that aggregates all of my friend aggregators which in turn aggregates all of my friend feeds that aggregate all of the things that my friends do on all of the social networks that aggregate all of my friends…

I agree with Umair that there’s something more out there that we’re missing. Our time has an opportunity cost which is that the time spent on the trivial and banal is not time spent on meaningful innovation and creative disruption. In a world with so many (real) problems to solve my concern is that so many young, creative, ambitious people are chasing after stuff that while cute and cuddly perhaps doesn’t solve these real problems.

Maybe we have the luxury to not worry about food and education and energy and health. Maybe those problems will take care of themselves.

But maybe not. Maybe we’ll all look back one day and see that we spent way too much of our time focused on the stuff that didn’t matter and not nearly enough time focused on the stuff that did. As Tony Robbins puts it, maybe we’ll realize that we “majored in minor things.”

And that I fear is indeed the real Serious Business at hand.

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1. What is the Future of Teaching? ...
2. 7:36 Worth of Video I Couldn’t Stop Watching ...
3. eduFire Classes Goes Live! Let Social Learning Begin! ...