GGV managing partner on edtech’s post-pandemic future

When GGV managing partner Jenny Lee started investing in edtech in 2014, it wasn’t exactly the hot sector that investors pined for.

Back then, mobile internet had just started to transform the way people lived their lives, as they used it to do everything from shopping to commuting. But among all the opportunities, education (along with healthcare) is a hard sector to crack.

GGV’s Jenny Lee / Photo credit: GGV Capital

Because education is deeply ingrained in an established system, innovation in the space requires alignment from a wide spectrum of stakeholders. But then, a global pandemic happened years later, and every stakeholder in that spectrum was forced to adopt innovation.

“Thank goodness we invested in those online learning tools,” Lee said to me in a recent conversation we had while reflecting on 2020.

The job of a venture capitalist is to identify and magnify an upcoming trend. Lee has been doing that in edtech for the past six years, with a portfolio spread across the world.

We recently sat down with her to learn her insights into the sector. Among other things, she covered why edtech is not a “winner take all” game and what makes a solid edtech product as well as the things she wishes edtech founders knew before pitching to her.

Q: How did your interest in edtech come about?

I started looking at the edtech sector six years ago, around 2014. It was also opportune timing in terms of infrastructure readiness.

If you go a little further back, the mid-2000s had seen the introduction and popularization of commercial broadband, which was much faster and more reliable than dial-up internet access. This was the era of PC and desktop internet.

A significant crop of offline education companies sprouted in China, but infrastructure technology remained too primitive for most of them to grow far. A select few emerged from that era thriving, including New Oriental and TAL Education Group.

In 2014, smartphone penetration in China was at 53% and showed no signs of stopping. Around the world, the rapid take-up of mobile devices such as the iPhone catapulted countries into the digital economy and transformed digital infrastructure. This changed everything for edtech and enabled the sector to grow, thereby becoming a prime candidate for startups and investment.

Q: How do you define edtech? What are the key characteristics of an edtech product or service that catch your attention?

We know the term edtech (sometimes called edutech) is a portmanteau of “education” and “technology.” The key driver for edtech is the continuous need for humans of all ages to seek out additional information to learn new things.