I have seen the the boom and bust cycles of Bansal, Resonance, Aakash, and more recently Allen. They all did something right for a while. But this coaching space is - tbh - similar to a service industry as your scaling requirements are directly dependent on teachers. So well it’s the teachers who are the product.
Without teachers you can’t do much so all this IPO and brand - somehow deep down - makes me feel PW will also see the strain in the coming future.
Well good for Alakh and his peer, they will get their money out. But as the scale of these “services” increases - the quality has to go down.
I generally am ominous about this industry as a whole.
I actually feel the coming generation would do better by working towards and getting involved with good startup incubators like TiE and bring in the entrepreneurial spirit.
Well well, I hope the investors of PW don’t read my comment 😅😋
Hey Abhijeet, I resonate with what you are saying. Fundamentally, a business will do as good as its products and value add it is to the customers aka students.
Fundamentally teaching quality remains at the center of it and it is not un-intuitive to believe that quality may go down as scale is targeted.
But then again, each business is unique so is their strategy to solve such problems. It will be an interesting case study for both investors and operators in this space.
I see a big distinction between scaling a software startup and scaling people-dependent businesses.
With software, true scale comes from adding compute — serving more users doesn’t depend on a proportional increase in people.
In contrast, education models that map 1:1 to a few teachers remain fragile.
Unless there’s a very strong teacher training and replication system, the sudden loss of a few key people can destabilize the whole setup.
IPOs and growth stories often gloss over this structural difference, but long-term stability really depends on whether the model can de-couple scale from individual human competency.
I hope PW does something which breaks this notion, but when I say long term, I am saying like 20 years plus.
I have seen the the boom and bust cycles of Bansal, Resonance, Aakash, and more recently Allen. They all did something right for a while. But this coaching space is - tbh - similar to a service industry as your scaling requirements are directly dependent on teachers. So well it’s the teachers who are the product.
Without teachers you can’t do much so all this IPO and brand - somehow deep down - makes me feel PW will also see the strain in the coming future.
Well good for Alakh and his peer, they will get their money out. But as the scale of these “services” increases - the quality has to go down.
I generally am ominous about this industry as a whole.
I actually feel the coming generation would do better by working towards and getting involved with good startup incubators like TiE and bring in the entrepreneurial spirit.
Well well, I hope the investors of PW don’t read my comment 😅😋
Hey Abhijeet, I resonate with what you are saying. Fundamentally, a business will do as good as its products and value add it is to the customers aka students.
Fundamentally teaching quality remains at the center of it and it is not un-intuitive to believe that quality may go down as scale is targeted.
But then again, each business is unique so is their strategy to solve such problems. It will be an interesting case study for both investors and operators in this space.
Thanks for sharing your POV. Much appreciated.
I see a big distinction between scaling a software startup and scaling people-dependent businesses.
With software, true scale comes from adding compute — serving more users doesn’t depend on a proportional increase in people.
In contrast, education models that map 1:1 to a few teachers remain fragile.
Unless there’s a very strong teacher training and replication system, the sudden loss of a few key people can destabilize the whole setup.
IPOs and growth stories often gloss over this structural difference, but long-term stability really depends on whether the model can de-couple scale from individual human competency.
I hope PW does something which breaks this notion, but when I say long term, I am saying like 20 years plus.