An EdTech Deep Dive with Tony Wan from Reach Capital | On Writing, Nuance, and Withstanding the TechLash

Is edtech really just YouTube and i-Ready? Or has the backlash flattened a sprawling, layered industry into a couple of easy villains?

Mike Palmer welcomes back Trending in Ed All-Star Tony Wan, Head of Platform at Reach Capital, an early-stage venture firm investing across learning, health, and work. Before Reach, Tony co-founded EdSurge and served as its managing editor, and before that he built a math game startup that he figures he could now one-shot with AI.

The conversation opens with the edtech backlash. Tony takes the concerns about smartphones, social media, and screen time seriously and supports restricting personal device use in schools. But he argues that calls to ban edtech outright miss the difference between school operations tools, teacher productivity tools, and student-facing tools, along with how much daily compliance and reporting depends on them. Mike adds a parent's take on context: screen-free and voice-driven tech lands very differently than one more app on a phone.

From there, they turn to writing in the age of AI. Mike's hot take is that most AI writing is mid: high floor, low ceiling. Tony, an editor at heart, misses the messy, illogical, very human drafts that let you get inside a writer's head, and he's tired of seeing friends' voices sanded down into AI-flattened prose. He also declares his intention to reclaim the em dash for Team Human.

Tony then shares what Reach is seeing in the funding climate: a bifurcated venture market, a real AI premium for AI-native companies, little patience for AI washing, and why businesses built on human relationships, like training and placing healthcare workers and teachers, can tell a credible story about what AI won't replace.

We also discuss:

Reach's latest State of Fundraising report from Caoimhe Mac Reynolds and Jennifer Carolan, and the pushback founders should expect from investors

Why "impact investing" means different things depending on who's in the room

Rising ARR per employee, 10X engineers, and forward-deployed engineers at small AI-enabled startups

Blackboard co-founder Matt Pittinsky's contrarian case that building a company is still more fun with humans in it

EdSurge back in the headlines after Stephen Noonoo's post and Tony's appearance on The Grade, and what's been lost as the newsroom emptied out

The value of a feisty, in-person newsroom and a credible forum for "little tech" founders, many of them former educators

Tony closes with real concern for the state of edtech media and journalism, tempered by energy from the independent writers and newsletters who've reached out in recent weeks. Mike calls it a "probletunity." He's still workshopping it.

Links:

Reach Capital: https://www.reachcapital.com

The Wire from Reach Capital: https://thewire.reachcapital.com

Tony Wan's Substack, edtech after dark: https://tonywan.substack.com

In Defense of Education Technology (Tony's interview with Alexander Russo): https://alexanderrusso.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-education-technology

How ISTE Turned EdSurge Into Slop by Stephen Noonoo: https://alexanderrusso.substack.com/p/how-iste-turned-edsurge-into-slop

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