Jason Palmer in EdSurge: Why I’m Optimistic About the Next Wave of Education Technology

New Markets’ Jason Palmer pens an oped for EdSurge on his optimism regarding the near term future for education technology:

“Working as an entrepreneur, executive, philanthropist and investor over the past few decades, at some of the very organizations Watters bemoans, I’ve had a unique vantage point for observing numerous successes, failures and—most importantly—long-term trends that make me optimistic about the next wave of education innovation. Although the pessimists correctly observe that many questionable edtech startups have been over-funded and over-hyped these past few years (and some of the biggest are likely to crash to Earth in the near future), it’s simultaneously true that the next decade is likely to see the birth and growth of some of the most transformative education companies of this century.

My bet is that by 2040, our children will look back on this period between 2015 and 2030 in education technology much the same way internet historians look to the period 1995 to 2010 as the birth of the commercial web. The new millennium started with the dot-com crash which decimated 78 percent of the value of the NASDAQ and hundreds of first-wave internet startups went bankrupt. But during that same fifteen-year period, we also witnessed the birth and growth of highly influential firms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba.”