I’m a big believer that education is going to be the ground zero of global competition in the years to come. The World Bank estimates that half the world’s population currently have to exist on $2.50 a day or less. They’re effectively locked out of both education and the world economy as it stands, because staying alive has to be their main preoccupation. As people move out of poverty in countries like China and India, they quite rightly are looking to get an education, get work and get ahead.
For both individuals and Governments around the world, this means one thing: more competition. Just as with companies, the only sensible response is to get better at what we do, continue raising the bar and create industries and ideas that didn’t previously exist. And that means getting better educated. With a finite amount of money to go round, start-ups in the education sector have a vital role in delivering new, cheaper and more pervasive methods to learn. Because if we rely on the State, it just isn’t going to happen. So to Edmodo, School of Everything, Beanbag, TeachStreet, Social Media Classroom, Startl and Revolution Learning . Keep doing what you’re doing.
I’m really pleased to see the emergence of an education specific incubator of ideas and new technologies: Startl. Regular readers will be aware that Jiva Tech has a heavy commitment to the education world and we’re firm believers in technology as a route to more pervasive, more affordable education within our society. We need more things like this in Europe/UK.
I’ve just come back from a trip to China, talking in a mixture of business and pleasure in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and Suzhou. It was my first trip to the country and what struck me was the single minded way in which they are pursuing the ‘betterment’ of their country. Leaving aside the political considerations for a moment, there seems to be a laser-like focus on improving things for the average man (and woman) in the street. One of the most striking aspects of this is the way that education is seen as a competitive weapon in the battle for economic success. Books such as ‘Built to Last’ have long championed the need to have the ‘best people on the bus’ in the pursuit of corporate success and China Inc. seems to have taken this to heart at a country level. Of course, they can’t choose who’s on the bus, but they can choose what skills they have and you can almost feel the frenzied acquisition of knowledge. Its been said before, but its worth repeating, countries as well as companies that ignore the education of their people and staff do so at their peril. Its a competitive world out there and todays heroes can too often become tomorrow’s zeroes. Education is set to become one the great global markets in the years to come and the challenge for both governments and corporations will be to deliver it in an increasingly low and pervasive fashion.
I’m back on one of my favourite hobby horses, financing startups in the UK. In this country, my experience with VCs has, generally speaking, been negative. Not bad people, I might add, but the whilst in the USA there seems to be a genuine drive to help build viable companies based on viable product and service ideas, in the UK it seems to be much more of a funds management approach. I’m not sure why that is because if you go back a few hundred years, we were really good at it. In our home town, Bristol, we had the Society of Merchant Venturers whose raison d’etre was to provide money for risky ventures. They didn’t just provide cash, but also established infrastructure to help out, like docks and navigation schools. They still exist, but mainly for charitable and social purposes, possibly because of the negative associations they garnered from their association with slavery. But putting that aside for one moment, how can we have been much better at this 300 years ago than we are now? I sit on the board of several other startups with promising stories to tell. Two are profitable, but when they’ve needed cash, it has always been the US VCs who are the first port of call.