Why We Closed Our $1M ARR EdTech Company (And What It Taught Me About the Future of Learning)

When I started Galileo/Kubrio, I knew there was a massive unmet need in education. Traditional schooling was failing high-agency students; they needed something radically different. My vision was simple: create a guided marketplace where the world's best teachers could offer small, intimate classes (we called them "pods") to students who actually wanted to learn.

The model felt inevitable. Why shouldn't a brilliant physics teacher in Tokyo be able to teach a handful of motivated students from San Francisco, London, and São Paulo? Why shouldn't learning be personalized, flexible, and built around genuine curiosity rather than age-based grade levels?

Why We Closed

For a brief moment during the pandemic, we thought we had cracked the code. We hit $1M ARR with students from six continents. Teachers were making more money than they ever had in traditional classrooms, and students were actually excited about learning again. The unit economics worked. Retention was strong. We thought we'd found product-market fit.

Then the pandemic ended, and AI happened. Not gradually, but suddenly. I realized with uncomfortable clarity that our entire model was built on a foundation that was about to crumble. Why would parents pay premium prices for human teachers when AI could provide personalized, infinitely patient, always-available instruction? I watched Chegg's stock price collapse as ChatGPT made homework help obsolete overnight.

We tried to pivot. We spent months developing new strategies, exploring AI-enhanced learning models, and crafting compelling narratives about the future we could build. But when we went to raise our next round, we hit a wall. Our existing investors had grown weary of the edtech space. New investors looked at us and saw something even less appealing than a struggling startup: a company that had lost momentum and was trying to reinvent itself.

After months of fundraising rejections, we faced reality. We couldn't bootstrap our way to a new model. We couldn't convince investors to bridge us to the next phase. So we closed. Not because we were failing operationally, but because we couldn't convince anyone else to bet on our ability to navigate the transition.

What It Taught Me About Founding

If your pivot is major, start fresh. It's better to close the project, start fresh, and give investors the option to invest in a new venture at a better valuation than to convince people to invest in a transformed startup.

When you see massive shifts, there's nothing you can do. You're a founder because you believe things will change; this puts you in a strange position when you have to fight the trend. Sometimes the best move is to accept that the wave is bigger than you are.

If you see that closing is imminent, prepare while you still have money left. Avoid making promises you can't keep, especially to your employees. They have their own lives and depend on your commitments, and even if they want to help save the company, they still need their paychecks and job security. Close before you're forced to break those promises. I didn't do this in some cases and regret it.

Choosing the right investors matters enormously. I'm grateful to have had supportive investors who were experienced with failure and always offered great feedback. They supported my mental health because it's not easy to close when you've raised money.

What It Taught Me About the Future of Learning

Running a global edtech company for six years gave me a front-row seat to how learning works, and more importantly, how it's about to change. Here's what I learned:

Self-directed learning is the future. Anyone building tools should think about how they can empower students to become higher-agency learners.

The world will move more from education to learning. I now see education as what society and family want you to learn, and learning as what you want to know. Because it’s hard as society and even as parents to know what will be essential for your kids in the future, I would double down on startups focused on learning, not education.

Learning pods are amazing. A group of 5-6 students is ideal. We saw some pods running for 3-4 years, creating amazing connections between kids. Some even traveled to connect in real life.

I don't see a future for online teachers, but I do see a greater future for in-person teachers. Learning online will most probably be AI-powered, but I see an increased role for teachers and in-person learning experiences.

The teacher as a middleman will disappear. Today, you have curriculum designers, teachers who act as middlemen, passing that curriculum down to kids in classes, and in some cases facilitators for learing. The role of passing down as a middleman will disappear, and teachers will become curriculum designers and facilitators of learning.

Parents are redefining success. I see parents who are already shifting from wanting kids with high degrees to wanting kids with high agency. This trend will continue.

Startup Founder is the most natural role once you become an adult. The more kids become high agency learners, the more they're prepared to become founders, that's the most natural role for high agency learners, and today is probably the best time to be a founder. Imagine in 10 years.

Learning will be accelerated. Kids will be able to learn with the right tools in a high-agency environment even 10x faster than before. That’s like saying in one year they can learn what previously took 10. We're not there yet, but we will be.

Don't compete with ChatGPT and Claude—complement them. They want to be teacher assistants. As a startup, I would find different ways to use that and become a complementary tool, not create another online tutor.

Schools should become connection hubs. If you can learn anything by yourself with AI, school will be the place to connect and learn with others. The school of the future should understand that their main role is to connect, and they should design experiences to help kids connect and collaborate, not to educate.

Personalization isn't everything. If you personalize to the extreme, the experience becomes so unique that no other kid will join, and it becomes a solo learning experience. Some experiences will be like that, but we also need multiplayer experiences.

Games are the future of learning. Games were invented initially not for entertainment but for learning, simulation, and survival. We are getting back to this, and the difference now is that we can create amazing gamified learning experiences for almost anything we need to learn. The key is that games naturally create engagement, immediate feedback loops, and progression systems that mirror how we actually learn best.

There are multiple ways to learn everything. Running a global company, we saw that there are numerous ways to learn something. Let’s take math, for example. Kids should try various options and later choose whatever works best for them.

Agency is a muscle. There are levels of agency for each one of us. Once you understand this is like a muscle, you know you have to train this muscle, and sometimes you have to do it as a parent to enable this for your kids.

Teachers face a radical transition, but it could be amazing. I think their roles will transition to curriculum designers, in-person learning experience designers, or in-person facilitators.

Teachers who decide to become curriculum designers can have a higher impact. They can now use AI-powered tools and coding to create learning experiences like never before.

The in-person learning experience will be considered premium. Teachers who decide to create or facilitate an in-person learning experience should consider this a premium experience and not compete in pricing with an AI tutor.

A new business model for teachers can emerge. The ones in charge of someone’s education should be better rewarded if their students are successful. Imagine if you could align the financial interests, and teachers would become some sort of investors. This is totally possible in a tokenized economy, which is coming.

There are many other things to share, but I don’t want to make this too long. Let’s get in touch if you’re building something in this space and want to discuss this further.

What's Next

After 2+ years in startup Zombieland, the period since we realized we'd be disrupted and tried unsuccessfully to fundraise, I feel burned out, but not because I've lost faith in the mission. I just need fresh air and a new perspective. So, inspired by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, I'm experimenting with tiny projects and testing some new ideas without the pressure of venture timelines or board meetings.

I’m realizing there's never been a better time to build. The tools are incredible, and I'll explore what is possible until I figure out what comes next.

Despite my burnout, I believe the time to disrupt a space that has remained unchanged for 100 years has arrived.