In fairness, the next sentence is "If we fail, you get a check.", so I'm taking that more as an attempt at dry humour. Watching a random sampling of videos, the feedback is pretty thoughtful and polite. Of course the valuations aren't going to be the highest bearing in mind the tiny amount invested and absence of due diligence.
I agree. this is just a poor attempt at dry humor. That being said, If you read his manifesto, he sounds very angry about the need for connections to get investors and his anger comes off as crude and disrespectful in general. Maybe it's just me, but he can do without all the contempt and anger and net the same or a better result.
Reminds me of Vancouver VCs who would tell local technical founders that it would be better if they got hit by a bus so they can flip the company.
Nobody likes to work for sharks and it definitely sounds very aggressive, not the type of people that you would want for long term visioned business startups.
VCs are looking for one thing: return on their capital. They are not your friends.
I can totally understand as I have experienced the exact same thing. But... I do believe that this is the way to go, because, imo the difficult part for a working professional is to get into a schedule.
In my view, MOOCs are really revolutionizing education because they provide options for smart willing people that are locationally or financially disadvantaged to learn from top tier professors/institutions.
Absolutely. Every time the cost of tertiary education comes up on HN (and elsewhere online) a lot of people reccommend doing the first year or two at a community college and then going to a good state college as a transfer.
The problem with that is not everyone has access to a good community college. If your local CCs focus on remedial education for people who are barely ready for 10th grade, let alone college, then the quality of instruction, broadness of course catalog, and peer group will reflect that.
I think one possible future for education in CS might be for people to combine electives, pre-requisites, and any remedial classes at a CC with low-level in-major classes from an MOOC.
That would reserve the expensive on-campus years of a degree for a combination of seminars, small tutorial sessions, and project work.
The most recent article on the list also notes, correctly, that at many less prestigious universities students already spend most of their time in large lectures with little faculty contact. It's not really honest to say that an MOOC can't replace contact with highly qualified faculty when most students in the American system are not getting that contact anyway.
Finally, that same article also covers the fate of people who are culturally rather than financially disadvantaged. Students who don't know how to learn, how to schedule their own time, or how to choose courses. I'm torn on this, on the one hand you could say that this is the fault of poor secondary education and that universities shouldn't have to deal with it at all. The former is certainly true but I think it's a bit of a cop-out for tertiary education to collectively shrug their shoulders and write those students off as not college-ready.
I do think that colleges play a factor in filtering for their students a general idea of what they should know and be able to do before they get a degree. I don't see any reason why there won't be a time in the future when someone puts together a course sequence online that leads to a full degree.
This is right. The best thing MOOCs have going for them are their prices. And it gets more compelling every year as traditional universities continue to price more and more students out of the market.
A lot of people use MOOCs at work. Even though some companies offer tuition reimbursement, it's usually partial and very few companies allot working time for coursework, and most working professionals are more time-poor than cash-poor. With MOOCs, people can usually sneak away 1-2+ hours per day on education and no one needs to know.
