Paul GrahamVerified account

Brokenness = potential energy. Anything badly broken is a dam holding back a lake of unrealized desires. A startup that can bore a hole through such a dam can liberate all that energy.

The opportunity that comes from brokenness = the number of people affected times how much it hurts them. For example, US higher education is massively broken. In exchange for degrees that are often worthless, millions of people get into debt that will burden them for decades.

The source of the brokenness of US higher education is a mixture of social custom, institutional rigidity, and government policy that would be extremely hard to unravel. But Lambda School just bored a hole through the dam.

Lambda School may not be a complete solution to the brokenness of US higher education, but it's an immediate one. And the hole in the dam is still small, but it's growing at startup rates.