Giving Compass' Take:

• AT&T Aspire Accelerator is a company that recruits, develops, and invests in edtech companies. Recently, it shared a mock board meeting in which members gave advice on how edtech companies can improve their practices in 2018.

• What are some ways that edtech companies can partner together to support each other's growth? Does a network already exist? 

• Read about the ongoing trends in education data. 

AT&T Aspire Accelerator, AT&T’s program that finds, develops, and invests in promising edtech companies from around the world, hosted an afternoon of mock board meetings with its 2018 cohort.

Here were the tips that the mock board members, comprised of education technology investors and founders, had to offer.

  • Don’t reinvent the wheel: If fast growth and lean operations are the goals, then they need to limit their labor creating content and instead work to repurpose existing educational resources.
  • Don’t try to beat ‘em. Join ‘em: To scale in 2018, companies need to look to others in their spaces and see how they can build bridges to work together to support each other’s growth, instead of looking for ways to cut each other down.
  • Don’t fear freemium: Scaling a business to profitability while operating on a freemium model is nearing urban myth status. That said, freemium can come in a lot of different forms, and when used correctly can lead to the teacher visibility that it takes to create a groundswell to get to district and school level sales.
  • Give users what they want, sometimes even before they know they want it: One of the biggest challenges for an ed tech company is getting their foot in the door. One way to increase the chances of that is to give prospective clients exactly what they want.
  • Cast a wide net while maintaining a clear focus: “You can focus on growth, or you can focus on revenue. If you focus on both, both are slowed down,” Speakaboos’ Jay Rappoport counseled. In other words, companies need to narrow down on the number of strategic goals on which they focus—and equally important, measure outcomes.

Read the full article about edtech challenges in 2018 by Colette Coleman and Nasir Qadree at EdSurge