These 100 strangers who need bursts of computation can pay $5 to spin up a powerful Amazon EC2 instance for a couple hours. That seems like a good deal for the value they’re getting, and very hard to undercut. So I see no startup opportunity.
Re college...
If “flexible schedule, great peers, extremely good teachers, excuse to be a student” is really what you want, I can easily get you all that for only $10k/year, a fraction of what you’re probably paying now. But the truth is, college’s main value-add is the expectation of a better career.
These days, college is doing a pretty terrible job of helping people get any careers at all. I know 4 separate people who got their college degree, couldn’t get any jobs, trained a few months in software engineering through bootcamps or online, then got 6-figure software engineering jobs.
Khan Academy and various coding bootcamps are already becoming a viable alternative to college, and I don’t see an obvious niche for a new startup.
Re college, you shouldn’t compare to “regular education” graduates people who went to college AND a bootcamp, you should compare them to those who did NOT go to college at all and instead only took courses online or went to a bootcamp.
I don’t have any data, but my feeling is that the latter will consist of two starkly different categories: those at the right end of the IQ tail who’ll succeed regardless; and those who decided to be cheap and are fucked because “you only have a high school diploma??” is going to be the standard reaction at their prospective employees.
RE amazon instances: I recall that amazon EC2 had a “free tier” where they allowed you several hundred hours of CPU time (albeit not very powerful). So perhaps for half the strangers, it would cost them $0. Even less opportunity for startup.
These 100 strangers who need bursts of computation can pay $5 to spin up a powerful Amazon EC2 instance for a couple hours. That seems like a good deal for the value they’re getting, and very hard to undercut. So I see no startup opportunity.
Re college...
If “flexible schedule, great peers, extremely good teachers, excuse to be a student” is really what you want, I can easily get you all that for only $10k/year, a fraction of what you’re probably paying now. But the truth is, college’s main value-add is the expectation of a better career.
These days, college is doing a pretty terrible job of helping people get any careers at all. I know 4 separate people who got their college degree, couldn’t get any jobs, trained a few months in software engineering through bootcamps or online, then got 6-figure software engineering jobs.
Khan Academy and various coding bootcamps are already becoming a viable alternative to college, and I don’t see an obvious niche for a new startup.
Re college, you shouldn’t compare to “regular education” graduates people who went to college AND a bootcamp, you should compare them to those who did NOT go to college at all and instead only took courses online or went to a bootcamp.
I don’t have any data, but my feeling is that the latter will consist of two starkly different categories: those at the right end of the IQ tail who’ll succeed regardless; and those who decided to be cheap and are fucked because “you only have a high school diploma??” is going to be the standard reaction at their prospective employees.
RE amazon instances: I recall that amazon EC2 had a “free tier” where they allowed you several hundred hours of CPU time (albeit not very powerful). So perhaps for half the strangers, it would cost them $0. Even less opportunity for startup.