It’s the early 2010s.
Alex Zhu, a sharp futurist at SAP, is deep in research on how tech could transform education. By 2013, he thinks he’s cracked it. A billion-dollar idea?
Take Coursera’s depth, mix it with Twitter’s speed. The result? An app for bite-sized educational videos. Fast to make, easy to consume. Smart, simple, scalable. What could go wrong?
Wrong. It bombed. Spectacularly.
But Alex Zhu isn't the type to cry into his pillow. He got out his scalpel and dissected the failure. The core lesson? You can't strong-arm human nature.
People, especially on their phones, weren't craving micro-lectures; they wanted fun. This epic fail, ironically, was the compost from which Musical.ly, a global teen phenomenon, would bloom.
- The Pivot: "Ditch the Books, Grab the Mic!"
- Hacking Growth, One App Store Title at a Time
- Decoding American Teens from Downtown Shanghai
- Building a Digital Nation, One Star at a Time
- Learning from China's Mobile Magic
- Show Me the Money (But Keep it Fun!)
- Making Friends with the Music Biz
- The "Lip Sync Battle" Epiphany
- The Secret Sauce: Hustle, Heart, and (Yes) Fake Accounts
