10 lessons from 10 years of Educative
Note: don't repeat my mistake in #6
As we’ve celebrated our anniversary this month, I’ve had some time to reflect on the lessons baked into every launch, misstep, and success through 10 years of growing Educative.
A decade in tech leaves quite the paper trail. I have tried distilling these experiences into 10 key takeaways for developers and founders — including 3 predictions for what lies ahead.
Quick heads-up before we get started: this is the final week of our Anniversary Sale, and you can lock in 50% off any Educative subscription through June 30th.
I hope this list sparks an idea, a spirited debate, or (at the very least) a smile. Let's get started.
1. Tech is cyclical. And the next quantum leap is already here.
Things in tech tend to come in waves: layoffs, hiring frenzies, bailouts, and breakthroughs.
Engineering leaders need to be intimately familiar with the history of our industry, to better spot the warning signs and avoid the mistakes of our past.
When I was completing my engineering education, nobody prepared us for the paradigm shift that was mobile. And how could they have? The iPhone hadn’t even been invented yet. The mobile revolution was, without a doubt, the quantum leap of the previous generation. Within a matter of years, demand for app developers far exceeded the demand for web developers, and engineering teams scrambled to retool.
With artificial intelligence, we’re now witnessing the next quantum leap (that’s not a prediction, that’s just the reality) and the previous era offers a few other cautionary tales for companies to consider before blindly charging ahead:
First, beware of lock-in: some mobile giants clung to their old software and chips (Nokia’s Symbian comes to mind) and they were outpaced when touch-first phones came along. Putting all your chips on a single closed-door AI model or one cloud vendor could trap you the same way.
Second, keep an eye on the business model: the mobile boom wiped out one-time license fees and pushed apps toward freemium and subscriptions. If AI keeps driving costs down over time, we’ll need pricing that reflects ongoing value, not yesterday’s SKU list.
History always punishes the students who skip class.
As for the next quantum leap? Your guess is as good as mine, but it will probably be a while before AI exits the spotlight.
2. Being effective is better than being right.
Perfection feels noble, but it rarely ships.
I learned this the hard way, when one of our new courses missed its market window and a scrappier rival collected the feedback we were late to capitalize on. A product in real users’ hands (rough edges and all) is worth infinitely more than a ‘pristine’ build still waiting for consensus.
Software is for humans. And humans can’t react to what they never see.
In our field, the only certainty is that sooner or later — whether in days, weeks, or months — someone or something will upend today’s playbook. If your processes can’t bend with the change, your business will suffer.
So don’t let process or perfectionism bog you down: just do it.
(…unless you’re one of Nike’s copyright lawyers, then please just let this one slide).
3. PREDICTION: Imitation is still the highest form of flattery — and the 'flattery' will only get faster.
We’re all familiar with Picasso’s most famous contribution to capitalism:
“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
And by now, I’m guessing all of us are also familiar with the experience: nothing stings quite like a rival copying the feature you spent months developing.
(Or worse, cloning the whole dang product.)
But with the pain, go ahead and take the compliment — because their roadmap just confirmed you were onto something. Your competitor’s knock-off can also be viewed as free market research. Every tweet, bug report, and review they collect helps you sharpen your next iteration.
In the LLM era, these copy-and-paste strategies will start happening at lightspeed.
High-functioning prototypes will be produced in a matter of hours versus weeks.
I think this is where the value of doubling down on aspects of your company that can’t be cloned (or at least, less immediately) will be crucially important. Things like your brand’s relationship with its community, its proprietary data, and network of strategic partners.
Protect what copycats can’t produce.
And when you do spot a tactic worth incorporating into your own roadmap, just don't forget to copy-with-taste.
4. Human conversations > robot conversations (sometimes).
I’m already noticing a few unsettling trends regarding our overreliance on AI.
The temptation is obvious: it's a shiny, exotic, and wildly capable new tool. We’re now conducting business with a degree of efficiency that the world has previously never seen.
But from my perspective, business leaders shouldn’t forget to encourage positive dialogues among their people (versus simply redirecting employee questions to their favorite LLM).
Sometimes it's easier to have a 5-minute conversation with a coworker than engaging in a 2-hour fight with a prompt.
This dilemma also extends to the learning environment.
LLMs offer learners a private tutor that is on call 24/7, doesn’t take breaks, and is paid in peanuts. At the current pace, what will the classroom look like in a few years? What’s the solution to bridging the gap between organic brains and robot supercomputers?
Of course, I don’t have the answer.
But I know that maintaining human connection is critical.
5. PREDICTION: With new tech, expect new QA & QC problems.
Thanks to tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, software developers can now draft three times the amount of code we once wrote in a day. That boost feels like magic… until review queues jam and one shaky design choice ripples through hundreds of autogenerated lines. Suddenly, it isn’t your team that’s scaling — it's your problems.
A decade ago we aimed for 100 lines shipped per engineer per day. Push that to 600, and entropy creeps in: features ship before they’re polished, bugs hitch a ride, and users wonder why today’s release behaves differently from yesterday’s. The backlog for tests and code reviews balloons, while traditional tooling struggles to keep pace.
And just to add to the chaos, who knows what new tools will be available in 6 months, 12 months, or 5 years time?
TLDR; with increased production, don’t forget to set aside some time to account for a fresh set of quality control headaches.
6. Failing spectacularly is still failing.
Tech’s ongoing obsession with failure has me a little concerned that major hubs like San Francisco and Seattle will soon be adding “Fail Fast, Fail Often” to their welcome signs.
Sure, taking risks is important both personally and professionally. But don’t expect your investors to show up to your failure-to-launch party with a participation trophy in hand.
And yes, post mortems are a necessary evil that can ensure you don’t repeat your mistakes in the future. But this assumes you’ll be lucky enough to have a next time.
After a decade of serious trial and error, I’ve learned that disciplined experiments always beat reckless moonshots — only take risks that leave you solvent enough to try again.
And when you lose, be damn sure you don’t lose the lesson.
But if you happen to be in the 1% who have yet to experience failure (happy for you), you can always try this…
7. Reconsider your wins.
Every so often, zoom out and audit the milestones you once called “successes.”
Taking a high level view of your company’s history can be a helpful exercise to see what you previously valued, and how those values have shifted over time.
Knowing what we do now, would we have made that move? Would it still be a success given the context of our company’s current direction? What sacrifices did we have to make in order to get there?
Yes, hindsight is always 20-20, but I think that’s missing the bigger picture.
This exercise provides an opportunity to ensure your next set of KPIs or OKRs are focused on a more sustainable future. Invest time into developing metrics that reward durable progress: customer retention over raw sign-ups, platform stability over features shipped, and team health over heroic sprints.
In short, let yesterday’s “wins” inform tomorrow’s priorities.
Note: I realize these last two sections might be leaving some of you wanting in terms of more concrete, real world examples — so maybe I’ll have to address those over on my personal Medium or Substack here soon.
8. Culture compounds faster than code.
Frameworks change, databases get swapped, and yesterday’s APIs eventually break, but the everyday habits of your team outlast any tech choice.
A few years ago, a traffic surge pushed one of our flagship courses to the brink. What saved us wasn’t an auto-scaling script, it was a midnight Slack thread full of engineers who jumped in — unprompted — to patch the bottlenecks.
You can’t schedule that kind of teamwork. It grows from years of trust, safety, and a shared instinct to build.
Simple rituals keep the momentum going, like a dedicated channel for team member shoutout or open office floorplans that encourage collaboration. But culture cuts both ways — let finger-pointing or apathy set in, and those habits compound just as reliably, dragging every incident and sprint with them.
(Special shoutout to the delivery app Relish that has been fueling our team lunches day in and day out.)
A code refactor boosts performance once, but a teaching-first culture boosts it every sprint.
This is why I feel so strongly that Educative’s competitive edge isn’t necessarily our platform, but our two offices — on opposite ends of the world — that are full of humans who love what they do and share what they know.
9. PREDICTION: The final 30% will be more important than ever.
I’ll keep this one short.
Think of all the new products that will soon be flooding the market thanks to no-code app builders like Lovable and Replit.
Sure, even today these tools are becoming increasingly competent when it comes to the easy 70% of projects. But that’s why the 30% — which can only be tackled by skilled developers — will only increase in importance.
The reality is that 90% of those projects will never make it to market. And the 10% that do?
They’ll likely be riddled with architectural issues.
And classically-trained devs will be there to clean up the mess.
10. You always overestimate what you can achieve in a year. You always underestimate what could happen in a decade.
This is true for companies. But it's also true for individuals.
Despite everything we’ve been able to accomplish over the last 10 years, it’s actually that second part that really fires me up. Particularly when I consider the new direction Educative is headed in:
Courses have always been and will continue to be the key pillar of our learning platform. But with our latest product, Personalized Learning Paths, we’re giving learners a clear roadmap to success: it meets them where they are and helps them reach their goals in the most efficient way possible.
If you haven’t already explored it yet, I promise it’s worth a look. These resources are a great place to start:
And who knows? With the new tools available to learners, maybe I’ll end up wishing I wrote something closer to: “You overestimate what you can achieve in a month, and underestimate what you can achieve in a year.”
I appreciate you bearing with me on my trip down memory lane, and want to sincerely thank you for your part in creating the memories.
But the memories won’t stop here.
If it isn’t clear by now, the Educative team is pretty dedicated to building the next generation of learning experiences and helping developers take advantage of those tools in an increasingly AI-powered future. More on that in next week’s newsletter.
As always, happy learning!
- Fahim