Netflix Founder Acquires Online Education Start-Up
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLERReed Hastings, the founder and chief executive of Netflix, used the Web to make it easier for us to rent movies. Now Mr. Hastings, who is also a former high school math teacher, is using the Web for a less entertaining, more educational cause — teaching math to kids.
On Tuesday, Mr. Hastings will announce that he has financed the acquisition ofDreamBox Learning, a start-up that uses online games to teach math, by Charter School Growth Fund, a non-profit investment fund for charter schools.
Mr. Hastings said that he thinks netbooks will be ubiquitous in schools in a few years, creating huge opportunities for online learning software.
“I think we’re on the edge of a real inflection point where the hardware becomes so cheap that Web learning is really throughout the schools,” he said. “But what I noticed is there’s really not that many people working on the software.”
DreamBox was started last year — I wrote about it at the time — and creates personalized lesson plans, hidden in games, based on which concepts children understand or need to work on.
“What makes their product so impressive is it adapts to each student’s learning, and that’s the Holy Grail of this field,” Mr. Hastings said.
He donated the the money to buy the company to Charter School Growth Fund. The acquisition price was not disclosed. He also invested another $10