[clu3]

#4:"global education" I agree with you completely that KA is far from a "global" player. It's interesting you mentioned Vietnam there because I have actually been building a kind of KA clone here in Vietnam for the last ~2 years or so. And here's my analysis when I started it.

- A very large percentage of Vietnamese students wouldn't be able to understand KA's videos because of their English proficiency.

- Even if the content was translated & subtitled, the videos' topics were in a way "foreign" to most of the students, especially the K1-K12's videos

- Other players like Udacity, Coursera ,... mainly focused on specific topics and that will be more relevant to Vietnamese students/workers, say software developers. But again, it's only relevant to those students with pretty good understanding of their field's terminologies in English. Those students are the minority.

- Say, if I were to start a trello's clone, I would have little chance against trello because most of Vietnamese would be able to use trello with out any problems, so yeah, they might prefer trello.

So starting a KA clone would be "safer". And on top of that, I've always been passionate about software & education & English language, so I started it. I started with English courses, which I thought were what the Vietnamese students would need most in their career later in life.

So in case anyone thinking of making a KA clone like me, please read on. It's not an easy journey at all, especially when your resources are limited. Building the platform AND the content at the same time is real tough. It's not easy to convince good (English) teachers to go online and give lessons. Giving lessons offline is still fairly lucrative for good English teachers. Or they are shy acting in front of the camera and going to be seen by "everyone". Or they are not passionate enough a teacher. Or they simply didn't believe in us.

I haven't been successful yet, still struggling but the journey's been great and I'm really proud of what we've built: a stable platform (has most of the features from KA or udacity), found 2 young passionate English teachers and together we've built a few English courses.

So yes, that's my startup journey so far. The final results? 2015 will tell, right now we're running a little short of cash but I'm hopeful. Sometimes I just wish I was Salman Khan and met "that" investor, Bill Gates. Gates' note on online education is exactly what I've been thinking as well: It is still at an early stage and improvising for maybe 10 years to come.