Why Now?
Earlier in the year, I spent a few weeks raising a seed round of financing for Fedora. Rather than questions about our business model, traction or pedigree, the most frequent question I received was “Why now?” —- this is the (long-form) answer.
Everything we knew about education has now changed.
Never before in history has it been feasible for an individual to teach millions of people at scale.
Historically, people have always learned from local experts — your high school football coach, your community college professor, the pastor at your local church, the intensive coding bootcamp at the nearest city.
Chances are none of those teachers were truly exceptional. At least not compared to all the potential teachers for that specific topic in the entire world.
Have you heard the proverb: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”?
But now with a high speed Internet connection… the script has flipped. Why should you learn from anyone but the best anymore?
Why should you enroll in a social media course at a local community college when you can have Gary Vaynerchuk teaching you instead? Learn writing from a New York Times bestseller, screenwriting from an Academy Award nominee or running a record business straight from Jay-Z.
As a student, that’s pretty f***ing cool.
The Celebrity Teacher
Teaching is fundamental to what it means to be human.
As anyone with a younger sibling can attest, we spend our entire life teaching people around us — teaching makes us feel good.
Yet, a very small percentage of people ever end up doing it on a larger scale.
Historically, if you had a lucrative profession, the choice to become a teacher entailed a substantial financial tradeoff. You traded a large amount of potential income in return for the joy of teaching.
In economic terms, the opportunity cost of teaching was massive — leading to a lot of potential teachers being lost to other professions.
But now with a potential audience size in the millions, coupled with the ability to reach students without an institutional intermediary, the economics have irrevocably changed.
And this strongly ties in to a couple of core beliefs we have at Fedora:
1) It makes economic sense for the best in the world to teach.
If you are the best in the world at any given skill, it is now economically viable to teach.
Being best in the world brings with it a legion of followers that look up to you as a thought leader and would pay you money to learn directly from you. If you do not have the followers, being the best teacher of a specific topic is a great way to build that following.
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Unless you operate in a zero-sum game like high-frequency trading, it almost does not make sense to spend at least part of your time teaching in some form.
And that’s the other cool thing about teaching online — unlike in the past, you can now choose to be a part-time teacher. Analogous to how you would spend a few weeks or months writing a book about your craft, you can now put aside a few weeks to record a course and reap the benefits in perpetuity.
2) There is going to be a rising class of “million dollar teachers”.
Now that there are fewer intermediaries — and an audience size several orders of magnitude higher, it follows that there is more money in teaching for a particularly talented individual than ever before.
How much more money? In line with the most lucrative professions in America, we believe top teachers will be earning millions of dollars annually.
After all, with such a massive reach, aren’t the best online teachers just celebrities with a better business model?
And interestingly, this phenomenon is already well under way.
The Wall Street Journal reports of an individual teachers in Korea making $4m a year teaching hundreds of thousands of students. Similar stories with English language teachers in Japan.
And now at Fedora, after raising money on the promise of the emergence of the storied million dollar teacher in America — we have our first school on track to cross that threshold in 2014.
Meet John and Eliot
Looking at their numbers, I knew this was a story worth telling.
John Azzi (26) and Eliot Arntz (27), founders of Bitfountain.io are on track to make over $1m teaching iPhone app development this year:
In the last year, they have gone from making a few hundred dollars teaching on weekends to having taught over a hundred thousand people how to build iPhone apps while traveling through Europe.
Two college graduates who were working their way up the corporate ladder that had never in their wildest dreams thought they would be professional teachers are the new celebrities in this wave of online education.
Two teachers with no formal training in their subject of expertise — teachers that were until recently students.
Two teachers that had no online marketing pedigree and absolutely no audience when they started.
These two teachers are going to be amongst the best compensated in America in 2014.
Welcome to the future.
Shameless plug: If you want to learn more about how John and Eliot built their business, Fedora has partnered with Bitfountain to teach a course (a meta-course perhaps?) on building an online education business. Predictably, this course is titled Million Dollar Instructor and accepting enrollments until Friday, December 19.
