Earlier this week, Union Square Ventures announced that it was leading a Series A investment in an online education marketplace targeted at K-12 students. The platform is called Outschool, and you can think of it as a form of homeschooling.

Today, there about 55 million K-12 students in the US, with around 9% enrolled in private schools. Charter schooling is on the rise (somewhere around 3 million students), but so is homeschooling (similarly around 2.5 million students). Data here.

Homeschooling, at least in the US, largely started within religious groups. But that is starting to change and it is becoming more widely adopted. USV has made a bet that this trend will continue.

If you look at Outschool's model, you'll see that it shares a lot of similarities with other successful internet marketplaces. It is direct-to-consumer (the internet has a way of getting rid of intermediaries). The courses are significantly cheaper than traditional classroom schooling ($10-15 per course). And the supply-side of the marketplace (the teachers) is far more open and accessible to non-traditional participants.

USV gives the example of a human rights lawyer who is teaching on the platform and now earning more than $10,000 per month in additional income. I've never enjoyed online classes, but now that we have reliable video chat, maybe that starts to change.

In any event, where my mind goes with all of this is the impact on our built environment. We are heading toward more flexible spaces and we are doing a lot more from home.

$UBER went public on Friday. Notwithstanding the initial stumble, Uber will go down in history as one of the most lucrative venture capital investments of all time.

The stock is down from its IPO price of $45 per share, but at that price, the initial seed investment of $510,000 that First Round Capital made back in 2010 was worth about $2.5 billion on Friday.

Here is a list of some of the other notable investors from Uber's seed round and what their initial investments grew to over the course of 9 years (chart from the WSJ):

Of course, for every Uber, there are many more failed companies. And for every investor who turns $5,000 into nearly $25 million, there are many more who decided to pass on the opportunity.

In the case of Uber, many early investors couldn't see how the product could go mainstream. It initially started upmarket with limousines, which was actually a clever way to hack the chicken-and-egg problem that plagues marketplaces.

Many also wondered how many metro areas outside of San Francisco had the kind of urban density and supply and demand drivers to support this kind of a service.

Today, some nine years later and many billionaires later, lots of people -- including myself -- are still wondering: Will Uber turn out to be a great (i.e. profitable) business? Hindsight is always 20/20.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (US) created something known as Opportunity Zones. These are low-income and high-poverty census tracts that are designed to attract investment by offering a number of different tax benefits. I first wrote about it on the blog, here.

Now that some time has passed since the final Opportunity Zones were announced, Zillow Economic Research decided to look at the possible impact of this designation on real estate values. In other words: To what extent, if at all, are the tax benefits getting capitalized into the value of the properties?

Below is a chart showing the year-over-year change in the 12-month moving average sale price for low-income census tracts that were (1) eligible and selected as an Opportunity Zone; (2) eligible and not selected; and (3) not eligible.

My understanding is that the "not eligible" category represents census tracts with similar characteristics to the other two categories but, for whatever reason, were not eligible to become an Opportunity Zone. There are criteria.

The program is still quite new, but what Zillow found was that the eligible census tracts (green and yellow lines) seemed to exhibit similar sale price increases after the Act was signed, but before the final Opportunity Zones were announced. Once the final Zones were announced, sale prices in the selected category (green line) began to surge and move away from the pack.

This may be evidence that the tax benefits are starting to get capitalized, or it may not be. One question I have is about why pricing in the selected Opportunity Zones seems to be a lot more volatile -- even before the Act was announced.