To anyone considering App Academy, don't

One of the challenges in the EdTech industry is there is a frenzy to incorporate AI and all the investors are about AI... but the EdTech industry doesn't attract the best of the best product people and engineers the way that OpenAI, Google, Meta hire in droves and pay $1M a year. Sure there are good engineers in EdTech, high potential engineers maybe too, but not the best of the best who have the experience of building and scaling products. Why? There are no/few EdTech companies that have gone past $10B and a lot of those larger don't have the growth rate or margins to attract those top talent and pay them competitively. So the best people generally don't go to these companies. But the market is one of the largest in the world, trillions so people keep trying and keep getting funding. Without trying we're not going to make progress... it's just hard to experiment with people paying $20K like you might know Instagram, and it takes incredibly strong product experience and skill to push the envelope while offering a valuable product. Anyways, mini rant haha.

I definitely agree. product market fit is number one. That's table stakes. Companies can succeed with product market fit and lack of talent if they're able to catch up because their product market fit is so strong. If you have super strong product market fit, like some boot camps did during the boom, then you shouldn't be hiring back your students. you should be hiring Meta Engineers for $500,000 a year. And if you can't afford that then you don't have product market fit yet. If you have all the talent then you have one of the boxes checked but you still need product market fit. but this is why former employees or these companies get so much funding because they've already checked off some of the boxes. and the biggest question is just product market fit where people who don't have those backgrounds have more unknowns for these check boxes. I completely agree that it's not even clear what AI and education means. My personal take on it and this is also my company's take and not just my personal point of view, is that AI is going to make operations more efficient. going to make quality better. but people shouldn't really know that. the reason why I mix these things better is irrelevant because the ultimate product is a product that has nothing to do with AI. it's just an experience if that experience is improved with AI, I think that's a major advantage. like a hotel that uses AI behind the scenes to allocate rooms or to identify issues ahead of time to make your experience better. like you don't really care if they're using AI or not. you just want to have a great experience of this hotel. I can see a world where people also want to see AI as a signal that you are on top of things, but ultimately it's the experience that matters in a service business.