The anti-commericialization wave of CN's edu industry force loads of hot money from edu fund to ran away.
They r clearly natively domestic money and be constrained by de strict money cross-boarder regulation. In this case, two way showed on: shifting to local vocational&skill education and transfer to TMT(espically crypto or so called Web3.0) segment w/ solid wealth effect.
De former one isnt sexy and groovy enough: fundamentally saying newborn goes down consecutively, ARPU story been proved wrong by a consumption ceiling, harshed red sea in tier 1+1.5 citiez, building a vocational school is quite heterogeneous and labor intensive(both teach&manage).
Edu department once a damn good cupcake for VCs in china. The narrative repeatly is CN in the period of the regrouping of urban clusters. Tier 3-4 cities' residents shift to de 3 major agglomerations. Once the grouping done, we could see a inverse urbanization like developed countries.
Then we could find dedicated ppl ho "understand edu paradigm", in other words, we "invest in people". Its quite similar to crypto invest in this early bird period. We find right people and relying on them to find students source, continuing to prove a horizontal bussiness model.
Hw, there are still some discrpancies. In edu the most we encounter SOE competitor, having to take care relationships with local even central gov's fist. We depends on de increase of average comsumption power of residents and de Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
I have met several experienced edu ventures recently, who are moving their ass to crypto now. Crypto ppl dont come to de ground for any personal improvement. They here implement for money. Thats it. No exception for gamefi, nft, socialfi, and most importantly defi proj.
And the whole industry still a seed. Fragile and stinky exploits happens incredibly often; Capital players chases for anything newer. De most signicantly different factor is not ppl can buy more. Conversely most ppl flooded in bc they cannot make this level of money elsewhere!
This bring many self-doubts to these prev edu investors. In such a flourish money pounds, ARPU of tools protocol(let’s say they’re non-native VC’s favorite) is crazily low. Users’ intention for paying a homogeneous code is incredibly low. Some found the key is BD or tokenomics.
But in EDU, ppl are willing to pay for "the other but nearly the same". Almost every piano teacher starts with MARIAGE DAMOUR, every math teacher starts with arithmetic but parents are buying dat! We do invest in ppl but the core logic changes. Crypto is boarder-less and open source.
I do rethink invest criteria and my bad bets from this. I got my case1: just ok dedicated code-driven team, fork tokenomics and so-so BD. We the "A on B" like "the Superfluid on S chain" "the Dydx on A chain". The excuses: market base is still potential. Hw, Horizontal fork would be iterated during dat certainly if your team dont keep up with the forked.
Case2: smart niche improvement on a popular mature service, smart team good at "techinical arbitrage". Horizontally value it and got a 8/9-digit numbers. Hw, no mkt reaction after online. TVL no booms since no proved demand. Ppl come for money not for horizontal compensation.
Thats all wat I think. Restructure invest thesis and refocus on more vertical innovation is more important than anything else in an emerging code-reined world. Some may argue the real different ones are solidly scratched by tier1 VCs but to discover a gem requires we need more focus.
Let the code govern do not let the rush of latecomers be the regent.