First thought: The most e-mailed article today in the NY Times was “With Turnover High, Schools Fight for Teachers“.

Unsurprising given the huge number of teachers that are retiring. I wrote about this in a past post “Retiring Teachers, Evergreen Knowledge.” These mass retirements are compounded by the fact that the echo-boomers are a larger generation than the baby boomers and by the transition in teaching styles brought on by the expansion of broadband access and the maturation of the Internet and mobile communications.

Second thought: I noticed today in my MyBlogLog widget that I had a new reader. So, as I usually do I clicked on the associated icon. It ends up that crummychurchsigns (that’s his mybloglog name) is a teacher. His real name is Joel and he blogs at crummychurchsigns.blogspot.com. I intend to get around to reading his blog soon, since I definitely have seen my share of crummy church signs.

Now for the interesting part. When I clicked on the “Joel’s Profile” link on his blog to find out more, it was revealed that I could take one more step into the blogosphere. When I clicked on Teacher, I was led to a page that listed the 35,400 blogs written on Blogspot by self described teachers…seemed like a lot more teacher bloggers than I had suspected are blogging.

Third thought: PlansForUs is a business founded in New York City. We love New York City. Steve has lived here for 17 years and I have enjoyed the past 6 years here in the city. We love it for its culture, its vibrancy and the fact that there are more educators here in NYC than in any other city in America. It’s also interesting to see how Bloomberg is messing around with education.

What we are a little intimidated by is the climate for start-ups. As many of you know, New York is synonymous with Wall Street. Wall Street guys own the big apartments, the fancy cars and the luxurious vacation houses. Wall Street is also a culture that despite its swashbuckling culture is devoted to eliminating risk and maximizing returns….sometimes by collateralizing it and selling it off to buyers who have no idea what it is really worth; but that is not really what I want to talk about.

Founding a startup company is not an exercise which necessarily mitigates risk. While I would love to collateralize my financial risk, the wizards of Wall Street have not quite figured out how to pool me and my fellow entrepreneur’s risk, therefore we are forced to try to sell our crazy ideas to a pool of investors that by and large made their money in endeavors much less risky than a startup. Despite this it seems that NYC is becoming a place for startups. Today’s post from Roger Ehrenberg was a real boost for Steve and I, because NYC is where we want PlansForUs to be and a vibrant startup culture is a huge asset as we attempt to get PlansForUs off the ground. I look forward to sharing PlansForUs with the New York City angel/venture investment culture soon. In the meantime I will work on mitigating some of our startup risk.

Finally, A quick thanks to the History Channel for including us in their Back to School emailing, we will share the impact of that inclusion with your team soon.

by Tyler, CEO