GM. This is The Great Unlock, your weekly cheat sheet for the AI revolution. We filter out the noise, red pen fake news, and give out stickers to those deserving.

Today’s deep dive: a founder’s confessional just exposed the open secret of EdTech. Most of these companies are not education companies. They are software companies wearing an education costume.

Let’s unlock it.

A billion-dollar founder said the quiet part out loud. The question is whether your vendors are wearing the same costume.

An EdTech story went viral recently. Aza Steel, the original founder of GoGuardian, published a raw, unfiltered account of building the company from a dorm room, losing control of it, and watching it rebrand itself into something it never was.

One line cuts through the entire narrative:

Read that again. The person who built this thing from scratch is telling you that the education identity was a costume. Not a mission. A recruiting strategy.

Here is the GoGuardian origin story, stripped of the mythology. A college sophomore’s laptop gets stolen. He builds a Chrome extension for theft recovery. IT administrators start calling. One of them says the real problem is not stolen devices. It is having no idea what students are doing on them. He pivots from device tracking to student monitoring. The product is surveillance software. The market is school districts buying Chromebooks by the tens of thousands.

The company grows on the back of a distribution wedge: cheap devices going 1:1 in schools. The product monitors screens, flags search terms, tracks browsing. The value proposition is not student learning. It is adult visibility into student behaviour.

Then the costume goes on.

The slogan becomes “Safer Students. Better Learning.” A billion-dollar valuation arrives during Covid, when every student is at home and every district needs device monitoring. The CEO starts acquiring other education companies to build an “education data flywheel.” The flywheel never materializes. Multiple rounds of layoffs follow. The PE firm replaces the CEO.

This is not a GoGuardian story. This is the EdTech story.

The pattern is structural. It repeats across the industry. A company finds a wedge into schools. The wedge is rarely about learning. It is about logistics, compliance, security, or content delivery. The company grows on distribution. Then it rebrands as an education company because that story is easier to tell, easier to recruit for, and easier to raise money on.

GoGuardian fails all three. Its origin was theft recovery. Its value proposition was surveillance. And if you removed it, students would not learn less. Teachers would see fewer dashboards.

That is not an education company. That is a software company dressed in education clothing.

The founder himself said so. If you haven’t read the full story, the link is below and well worth the read.

Not an education company. A costume.

Framework: The real, unfiltered story of accidentally starting a billion dollar company called GoGuardian

Follow the money, not the mission statement.

The GoGuardian trajectory is not an anomaly. It is a lifecycle. A company finds a wedge, grows on distribution, rebrands as education, raises money on the story. When the story stops working, layoffs follow.

Stage 1 — Wedge: Solve a non-education problem that exists in schools. The story: “We keep students safe.”

Stage 2 — Growth: Scale on distribution, not outcomes. Chromebook rollouts and compliance mandates drive adoption. The story: “Schools love us.”

Stage 3 — Rebrand: Adopt education language. Acquire companies. Talk about flywheels. The story: “We are an education company.”

Stage 4 — Reality: The flywheel never materializes. Acquisitions fail to integrate. Revenue slows. Layoffs follow. The story: “Restructuring for efficiency.”

Not growth. Distribution dressed as impact.

The phrase every vendor uses. The evidence almost none of them have.

Every pitch deck in EdTech contains a version of this sentence. “Our platform improves student outcomes.” It is the industry’s most popular costume accessory.

Improving student outcomes requires a specific causal chain. The product must change what students do. What students do must change what they know. What they know must be measurable in a way that is attributable to the product.

That chain has three links. Most EdTech products deliver on zero of them.

Here is what “improving outcomes” usually means in practice: the product changes what teachers see. It surfaces data. It generates dashboards. It flags behaviour. It produces reports that administrators can screenshot for board presentations.

None of that is a student outcome. A dashboard is an adult convenience. A behavioural flag is surveillance. A report is a document.

Not student outcomes. Dashboards wearing an outcomes badge.  

She noticed something the data never showed.

The teachers already know which products are costumes.

They know it when the monitoring software tells them a student is on YouTube but does not tell them why the student disengaged from the lesson. They know it when the adaptive platform shows 85% completion but the student cannot explain a single concept from the module.

The teacher who deserves the sticker this week is the one who closed the dashboard. Not because the data was wrong. Because the data was answering the wrong question.

The dashboard answered: “What is the student doing right now?”

The teacher asked: “What does this student need next?”

Those are not the same question. The first one is surveillance. The second one is teaching. And no monitoring platform in the world can answer the second one, because it requires knowing the student. Not their screen. Not their browsing history. The actual student.

The best teachers were never waiting for the dashboard to tell them who was struggling. They were reading the room. They were watching eyes. They were noticing when the pencil stopped moving.

The software could not do that. The teacher could.

🏅 Recognition Sticker: “Closed the Dashboard and Read the Room”

Not smarter software. Better teachers.

That's all the unlock for today. Tune in next week and remember to share The Great Unlock newsletter.

Stay awesome, you unlockers!

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