The Operating System for Human Potential
We are building the most impactful company in the history of education.
The ambition
We are not trying to win education. We are trying to accelerate it.
Every company in this industry is competing for a share of the same classroom. We think that is the wrong game.
The bottleneck was never a shortage of good products. It is that none of them add up to anything. A thousand companies building a thousand islands, each one starting from zero about the child in front of it.
So we are building the layer underneath all of it. One place where the effort of the entire industry compounds instead of competing.
That is the only version of this that changes the number of people who actually learn.
- LMS
What we are doing
Accelerating learning.
Technology compounded for twenty years. Education did not. That gap is not a market inefficiency. It is human capability that never got built, and it is still widening.
We are closing it by changing where the intelligence sits. Not in another app. In the layer every app runs on, where every activity a student touches builds one model of how that student learns, and that model gets sharper every week instead of resetting every September.
A teacher becomes faster.
A student stops starting over.
A school stops managing software and goes back to teaching.
How we do it
Four things, in this order.
How we change the industry
We make education technology more competitive, and everyone wins from that.
When distribution is hard, mediocre products survive on sales teams and lock-in. When distribution is free, they survive on nothing.
We hand every builder in this industry the same distribution.
- A teacher can launch something on a weekend.
- A company can reach markets it could never sell into alone.
- The result is a market with more competitors, higher quality and lower prices, that is far bigger than the one it replaced.
Good products earn more because we exist. Everything else gets found out. Both of those are the point.
The promise
We measure ourselves by what we give away.
Most companies report what they captured. We report the gap between what people receive from us and what they pay.
Economists call it consumer surplus. We wrote it into our founding documents before we had a customer:
String is engineered to be the largest generator of consumer surplus in the history of education.
That is not a slogan. It is the scorecard. If the gap ever narrows, we have failed, whatever the revenue says.
Consumer surplus
An economics idea, in three steps
The term sounds complicated, but the idea is simple: it is what you gain when you get something for less than it is worth to you.
What is it worth to you?
It is the most you would agree to pay. The phone in your pocket, for example, may be worth far more to you than what you paid for it.
What did you actually pay?
It is the price you paid at checkout, and it is the number most companies count, because it is what reaches them.
The difference is consumer surplus
It is what stays with you after you pay: value you received without paying for it. The wider that gap, the more people gain.
What we measure
One purchase, two ways to keep score
Most companies look at what you paid. We look at what you kept.
What most companies count
What they captured from each purchase.
What we count
The gap between what people receive from us and what they pay.
That gap widens in two ways: the value people receive goes up, or what they pay goes down.
Read more: Why Start Ups Need to Understand Consumer Surplus, by Joe Merrill
Who it is for
Learning, as accessible as possible, to everyone, everywhere.
- Not the schools that can afford it.
- Not the languages that are profitable to support.
- Not the students whose parents already knew how to help.
We built this in Amman, in Arabic, for schools with no budget for a second attempt. That was deliberate. A product that works there works anywhere, and a product built for the easy market never travels the other way.
Every decision gets tested against one question: does this put learning in front of more people, or fewer?
What we refuse to do
A company is what it turns down.
We do not build administrative tools for their own sake.
If it does not help a teacher teach or build, it does not ship. If it does, we build it, even when it looks like administration.
We do not lock anyone in.
What a teacher builds belongs to that teacher. A school that leaves keeps what it made.
We do not pick one stakeholder.
Students, teachers, parents and schools at once. Learning does not happen in one of those places. It happens between them.
We do not sell teachers content.
We assume teachers can build better than we can, and we hand them the tools.
Why this company exists
A house of teachers
A house of teachers
I grew up in a house of teachers. Both my parents and both my sisters. So I had heard about the paperwork long before I understood it.
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia
I understood it in Saudi Arabia. I had spent a year designing the STEM program for one of the largest school groups in the country, and when the results came back I went looking for what had driven them. What I found instead was where the time had gone. Most of the effort from the teachers and the management team had been spent on solving software problems and administration. Not on teaching. On making the tools work.
Then I looked at what the school was paying for that privilege, and found we were being charged for capability that was available free elsewhere.
From every angle
From every angle
I had been in this industry from almost every angle by then. I had international clients at fifteen. I trained robotics coaches to become better STEM teachers and to win competitions. I have written curriculum by hand, sold software into schools, and designed products as an engineer.
Every one of those roles showed me the same problem from a different side: education does not suffer from a shortage of good software. It suffers because none of it shares a brain, and the teacher is expected to be that brain, for free, on their own time.
The decision
The decision
I left my job and stopped my other projects to build the layer that fixes it.
— Omar Abusalim, Founder
The team
Ten people, in Amman and Austin.
We are engineers and hackers who have taught. Most of us have stood in a classroom. Several have advised STEM programs and written curriculum. Almost all of us have built or worked inside other education companies, which is how we know exactly which parts of this industry are broken and why nobody fixed them.
That combination is rare and it is the reason the product exists. An engineer who has never taught builds features. A teacher who cannot build waits for someone else to. We do both, in the same room.
Where the product is built and where it was proven, in classrooms that would have cancelled within a month if it did not work.
Where the American market is.
Ten people. That is deliberate. A small team that has done the work beats a large team that is learning it.
Our constitution
Four principles, written on day one, unchanged since.
Act for the long term.
We optimise for the decade, not the day. A quick win that compromises the mission is a loss with better timing.
Empower, don't replace.
Humans amplified by machines. The teacher becomes superhuman, not redundant.
Student data is sacred.
We handle a child's information with the severity of nuclear codes. Privacy is not a feature. It is a right we defend.
Radical truth.
We report data, progress and failure exactly as they are.
We know what we are trying to build, and we know we can build it.
We are String, and we have barely started.
Get String