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STOA's Co-Founder Aditya Kulkarni on LinkedIn, essentially about why STOA shut down: "I have had a few months to think about why Stoa did not scale. Some context : At our peak, we closed FY22-23 with 16Cr revenue with <1Cr in losses and yet the next 12 months were terrible from a cashflow perspective. Service businesses with long service periods are a beast when short term fixed costs can't be reduced drastically while demand curve shifts. For now, let us come back to the original enquiry. Some would say it had to do with our ability to deliver placement outcomes. Zoom fatigue and change in learning preferences could be another reason. Layoffs in startups had some correlation too. And there is some truth to each of those statements. Yet, the fundamental reason is even simpler - Stoa did not have a clear "customer contract". A scalable customer contract delivers an easy-to-understand outcome (food from restaurant to your house or a clean cab from place A to place B or stories that help you sleep) for a specific persona (urban professionals on the move, households with a certain income level and so on - being flippant here). Within Edtech, two businesses who have got this right are probably Emeritus (Certificates) and Marrow (TestPrep). In our case, we served multiple personas - mapped to different outcomes (learning, community, jobs). TL;DR : Complexity kills. Still hesitant to write down all the unfiltered thoughts but let's see where we go with this :-)" What strikes me most about Aditya's candor isn't the 16Cr revenue (impressive) or even the relatively modest losses (even more impressive in the era of blitzscaling). It's the brutal simplicity of his diagnosis: "Complexity kills." Let's pause and appreciate this moment of startup clarity cutting through the noise. A founder who built an edtech with actual revenue is telling us they tried to be everything to everyone, the business equivalent of that friend who wants to grab coffee, hit the gym, plan a vacation, and discuss existential philosophy all in the same conversation. This is the edtech obituary that should be required reading for every founder mapping their TAM on a napkin right now. Stoa wasn't killed by competition or a lack of product-market fit, it was strangled by its own ambition to serve multiple masters with conflicting needs. We often celebrate complexity as innovation, there's something refreshingly sobering about a founder admitting: "We tried to be too many things. It didn't work." The real question: How many other startups are currently disguising a lack of focus as "optionality"? 🤔