Welcome to Ed Tech insiders where we speak with founders operators investors and thought leaders in the education technology industry and report on cutting edge news in this fast evolving field from around the globe. From AI to xr to K 12 to l&d, you'll find everything you need here on edtech insiders. And if you liked the podcast, please give us a rating and a review so others can find it more easily.
Sam Walder is a violinist, a computer engineer, and the co founder and CEO of trolla, which he founded as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Charla is a tech powered online music school, founded in 2017. Their mission is to make world class music education, accessible to every single person on earth. With over 600,000 downloads and violin students in 193 countries. Tr LA has received support from top musicians and investors at Duolingo and
LinkedIn. Sherlock closed an $8 million series A in March 2023, putting their total funding at $15 million. Sam Walder, Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Thank you for having me.
It's really great to speak with you. You have such an interesting company. And I was looking into some of your background you met charlas co founder Vishnu into Korea, maybe mispronouncing that you call him Vish, at a hackathon in college where you're both in school in the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, you're both engineering students, you are also a violinist. And why don't you take it from there? What is the story of trolla and how you get to, you know, 600,000 downloads?
Yeah, hackathons were my introduction to building product vision, I sort of figured out how you could just win any hackathon. They're like these coding competitions, 24 hours, 36 hours, all these like really smelly ces kids trying to build stuff. And we just sort of figured out a way to win all of them. So we could go for a weekend, get 10 grand from Stanford, or whatever, and bring it back. And we thought, gosh, we really love building
products. And the thing that we always did was we connected it to the real world. Anytime we built a product. We didn't care about FinTech, we didn't care about some b2b thing we loved connecting things to the real world. So that meant we built things like a scanner that a blind person could use to read any arbitrary book, just using a phone, a smartphone, or we built this thing where you can compose by playing an instrument, and there's an AI composer that
works with you. And that was the first time we had built something that combined music and computer engineering, which are sort of my two loves. And that naturally led into building a company together.
So it sounds like you sort of hacked the hackathon, you figured out how to how to always get in the top tier there and what trolla really did, you know, you mentioned it combines music and engineering, it really makes violin playing in this case, incredibly accessible and very natural for anybody who has a smartphone. And you know, one of the things I noticed that you talk about a lot in your social media presence, and it's sort of on the Sharla mission, is this idea of democratizing access to
music education. You talk about how your students come from all over the world. They're from different ages, non traditional backgrounds. I'm sure you have a lot of stories about this. Tell us a little bit about the reach of trolla. How it's provided violin education to people all around the world, and what type of people download the app?
Yeah, so basically, anybody can learn. And that's our vision. anybody, anywhere on Earth can pick up any instrument, not just the violin. And trolla is the default place like the household name brand place that they go to learn. So some of our students, there's a sort of famous student of ours who was a long haul truck driver. He started using trolley at the age of 55. He was playing violin out of the trailer of his truck at truckstops. People would come over and bang on the
door shut up. And he practiced for about 300 days consecutively on trolla. And now he plays in a local Symphony Orchestra. That's one example. We have blind students. We have students in 193 countries. There's an NFL player that use trolla. There is a US Congresswoman. There's also lots of children, grandmas anybody who wants to learn can pick it up. So sometimes I give the cop out answer when people ask who's trolla for? Say it's
for everyone. But it really is like if you map trollers demographic background onto a map of demographics, it's the exact
same. It's really interesting. I'm envisioning a whole Long Haul trucker playing in the trailer of his truck, it's really quite a visual there. It's amazing. So you know, you talk about winning these different hackathons and how you invest, we're really always focusing on how to bring tech into the real world to, you know, help people in very
specific ways. I think that the scanner for blind people to read is a really cool example of that, I want to talk a little bit about the technology that you developed for trolla, that has sort of been the underlying engine for it. I've looked a little bit into a company called Joy tunes, which I'm sure you're aware of it's Israeli company that does some music education.
And one of their big breakthroughs is sort of the idea that without any plugins or tools that you don't need MIDI connector, or sort of some of the old, old school tools, you would need to make music work with a phone or an iPad, you can just play and the phone will hear you. And that's really been a game changer for them. It feels like you have done that, you know, and then some child can hear music through a smartphone and teach you how to get better and better at it.
What does that look like? You know, tell us about the tech and why it is really changing the game for music education.
Yeah, and just to step back to talk about the full user experience for trolla. If you're a trial student, you practice with this app, you get feedback throughout the week. And then you go into a lesson with the teacher. And both the teacher and the student both know everything that you've been working on, they know what you've been struggling with. The teacher can say, oh, it looks like you're struggling with a
minor arpeggios. Great. We're going to talk about a minor arpeggios, you do your lesson. And normally you go into a lesson with a music teacher, and they ask you Oh, did you practice? Then you lie? And then you play for them? And they have to remember like, what did you do last week? I've seen 50 other students in between your last lesson in this lesson? Have you made any progress, I have no idea. So I'm winging it as a
teacher. And then you know, you play I tell you all the things that you're doing wrong, you go back, and then you practice on your own, but you have no feedback. So you make no progress. But with trolla. In the lesson, you know what's going on at the end of the lesson, your homework automatically goes into the app, and you practice with the app
throughout the week. So not only do you know exactly what you're supposed to be doing, and if you're on track, but also the app itself will give you very sophisticated feedback on what you're doing. So it can tell you things like showing your exact finger position and how to change that, hey, your finger is
here. And it needs to move down the fingerboard to here to actually play the right now, or, Hey, you're playing on the wrong string, which for beginners is incredibly helpful, especially for tonal instruments, right for the drum, it's like okay, you know, you're, you're playing the hi hat or the snare. But for any string instrument for even the piano, it's really difficult. And so you can make progress
throughout the week. And yes, the technology, it is a big differentiator for us because not only can we tell you, Hey, you played a note correctly or incorrectly, which is what something like simply piano or joy tunes does. But we can tell you what to change, which is the difference between let's say you had a teacher in a room just listening to you and just, you know, honking out a horn every time you did something incorrectly. Not only is that not helpful, that's actively
destructive, right? Whereas if you actually have a teacher saying, Oh, hey, you did that wrong. And here's exactly what you need to do to do it correctly, you actually make progress.
Yeah, that's the concept of corrective feedback. It's one of the types of feedback and instructional design much more powerful to get feedback and actually information about what to change than just knowing that you got
something incorrectly wrong. I didn't realize actually that Charla uses that sort of really interesting blended model uses the, you know, the artificial intelligence and the tech in the app for practice, and then uses human experts, and live classes, and you know, human feedback for some of the sort of really deep changes that you might need to do and accountability and all sorts of things. It's a really fascinating pedagogy. And you know, you are the architect of
charlas pedagogy. And it's designed to help musicians at different levels you just mentioned, beginners can obviously start there. But you have some very advanced students as well. Tell us about a user's experience with trauma and how it's different if you start, you know, from scratch, or if you come in already knowing some music.
Yeah, I mean, the student journey should be directly relevant to where they're at in life, not only how experienced they are, but also what they want to do with traditional music lessons. The student very much serves the teacher, the teacher says, Hey, this is the correct way to play. This is the repertoire, you have to play the Mendelssohn concerto or like some shit like that, and whether or not the student actually wants to do that. So for trolla, there's a couple
things we do. First of all, we match each student with a teacher directly. Again, we add that human touch in you mentioned that's a differentiator for us. A little bit of human touch goes a long way, a really long way. And that's also where the tech is very important, because if you just use an app, you turn All these apps have a massive
massive retention problem. Like you're not actually going to find people that are, you know, performing piano at a high level because they use simply piano, like look at their abs like they don't actually show actual students, which is fine. By the way, the apps are great as a as a low barrier to entry. But you also need to lower the barrier to entry to be a great teacher
as well. So part of going back to your question, part of the way we do that is we match students with teachers individually, which is great for teachers, because let's say you love playing Irish fiddle music, and you love teaching adult beginners, well, you shouldn't be teaching the six year old, his mom is forcing her to learn
Twinkle, twinkle little star. So at trolla, if you're a child teacher, you get 40 adult beginners who love Irish metal, which is amazing, you know, every lesson, you're doing exactly what you want to do. And for the student, it's perfect, because, you know, the student wants a teacher that's engaged, and student also gets a teacher who understands what they want to do. So that's, that's just every student should have a bespoke journey for them. And that's a fundamental pillar of how we teach.
Yeah, you know, you mentioned the sort of churn rate of pure asynchronous models or apps, which can be very high, especially for subjects that are, you know, really take dedication and motivation and music education has sort of been the poster child for many years of a type of learning that you can get very far with, with a lot of, you know, practice and dedication and motivation. But many, maybe even most learners don't always put in that
practice. You mentioned you lie to your teacher, and they don't stick around long enough to become proficient and really see the fruits of their labor. That's just I bet three quarters of our listeners have taken a music lesson in their life on an instrument that they feel like they can't play now. And there's also lots of research about music education, the Suzuki method, very, very famous music pedagogy. Deliberate practice is a instructional design concept that they've often proven and
shown in music. Talk to us about that motivation. You mentioned, the human touch goes a long way. How do you put together the pieces to make sure that your learner's on trolla Don't give up on themselves before they really see the progress? Yeah,
I think that's a great question. Let's absolutely acknowledge that people want to learn music, that we've been doing this for 100,000 years, one of the oldest human artifacts ever discovered, is a flute carved out of the tusk of a woolly mammoth, right, we've been doing this for a second. And so there's a big gap, as you mentioned, between the love that people have for music and playing instruments, and the reality of how many people actually learn a couple things
there. First of all, we need to make our music education more representative. I'm from Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has zero black string players. So how are we supposed to bring other people into our world when there's zero representation? Right. So there's huge race and class issues. In music, education, that's first of all. Second of
all, we need new methods. Suzuki method very famous, a lot of people started on that, you know, made Twinkle twinkle little star, the hit single that it is, for children around the world, it required a housewife, it was written in the 1950s. It's foundational text, it's called every child can. If you're an adult learner, that's really difficult, right? So we need new methods, we need better representation, we need new
methods. The third thing we need to do is start to use some of the learning science, education, science, and major major improvements in education that most of the rest of the EdTech world has brought into the fold, I think, especially for language learner, and we need to bring that to music as well. It is such a legacy industry. If you're not using Suzuki method, you're probably using a method that was invented in the 1880s in Czarist Russia, those are the two options that are available
for you. So no wonder people have a terrible time. You know, we're putting recorders in kids hands. It's like the worst possible instrument that is like, you probably couldn't cheat if you tried to choose a worse instrument, in terms of sound in terms of experience, like it would be really hard. So like, we are just killing the love on a societal level. So there's a lot of things we can do to improve.
I have always wondered why recorders are taught in school. My best guess is that they are very inexpensive to buy for schools, but it always bewildered me you say that, and I just picture you know, putting the thumb underneath and all that oh, man,
it doesn't seem to me it's like, the same kids. They're like tapping on their desk with pencils. Like they're, you know, singing they, we love making music and then you just hand them like the worst possible thing. So I'm not calling conspiracy here, but there's been a concern are in an effort accidentally, to gain love for music.
I love this thinking that you're bringing up the sort of race and class issues that come with music education. You know, it makes me think of some of the sports that were, you know, sort of traditionally associated with rich white players, things like tennis, and golf. And as soon as you had you, as soon as you had players break into those sports from other races, it just opened up the game enormously, you know, you just created a completely different societal
context for those sports. And I wonder, are you, you know, are you hoping to create that kind of change for music, or especially, you know, violin music for now, but music in general,
we're seeing this in our students that we get it. I mean, it's an amazing diversity. And part of that is coming from the way that we brand ourselves, right? We need to showcase students stories, there's so many students that we talk to they say, you know, I'm 65 years old, and probably the oldest person that you've talked with, we say, oh, no, we sign up a 91 year old last week, like, sit down. This is great. You are welcome here, you're supposed to be in terms of, you know,
geography as well. You talked about actually the long haul truck driver, I remember getting on a call with the student. And he said, you know, you'll never like believe this. But I'm a long haul truck driver. And you're, it's I'm probably the only one I said, Oh, yeah, no, you're like the fifth one that I talked with. There's there's a lot of people that drive trucks. It's like the most popular job in America. Right? So all these people, they think they're alone. So it starts with
representation. So we show that and I'm rounding, we back that up with our team. We back that up with our teaching staff as well. And we back that up with the repertoire in the curriculum. The repertoire right now for most teachers is 18th century Western European court music that is not relevant to most people. So again, it's just these basic things, which sometimes I you know, I'll talk, I'll do interviews and stuff. And it's just seems like insane, right? Once you actually say it
out loud. It's like, Oh, yeah. Why are we teaching everybody? music that was popular by the one percenters from Vienna, Austria, in 1791. Like, is that actually the best decision?
The power of inertia, especially in education, or you know, is very, very, very strong. One of the things I love about Ed Tech and talking to entrepreneurs like yourself is that when people start to bring technology into education, they often also start questioning some of the curricular decisions, like the ones you're talking about now, where people take for granted that the pedagogies and the music are just unbelievably out of date. They're coming from a
totally different tradition. You mentioned a Russian, Russian piano teaching from centuries ago. And you're right, as you say, things like that out loud. I mean, our higher education system was based on you know, Prussian, the Prussian military system of the of the 1800s. Like, it's totally absurd, but people get so used to it, they reify it, right. They think this is what learning violin is,
right? The sort of tiger moms stereotype, oh, you've got to learn violin, that's going to mean classical music of this era, because that's what everybody teaches. It's going to mean tons of practice that you don't like, because that's how it works. And I think you're really trying to turn that upside down. Yeah,
that's a really good point you just made is that we actually burn out our best students as well. The people that are the best are also the ones that just can't wait to quit, and then give up and never pick it up again, and then feel guilty. We get a lot of those students as well, people that played they were really good. And now they're in their 30s 40s 50s. And they say, actually, I kind of liked this. What I didn't like, was taking lessons with this intense
teacher that yelled at me. And what I didn't like is having my parents put enormous pressure on me to play music that I couldn't care less about. So we actually see that a lot. By the way, higher education comes from Prussian military academies,
I think so I should fact check that. But yeah, it definitely comes from the Prussian model. And the military mind might
be interesting, because the first structures universities were like these, like monastic things, right?
Yeah. Harvard was a divinity school. You know, the first universities in western world were Oxford and Cambridge. But in the US, it was Harvard and Yale. And they're basically for teaching people to become priests or people who you know, do Latin and Greek and we're able to, to move the religious world forward. It's all very silly, but you know, they've changed to some extent
over the years. You one of the instructors on the Charla platform is Joshua Bell, who is one of the most famous respected prestigious violinists in the world. And, you know, I'd love to hear a little bit about how you work with somebody like that. Are they you know, doing videos on the platform to inspire students? Are they teaching students into visually, how did that relation come about? And how are you working with somebody of that stature?
Yeah. So Joshua Bell has been an amazing partner for trolla. So far. And I feel like we're only just beginning to tap into sort of what this partnership can look like. A lot of what we're doing these days is around, actually teacher recruitment. So, you know, having the best violinist in the world, as part of trolla has been amazing for sort of
legitimacy. I think, first and foremost, like, he's a very, very forward looking individual, him and his management staff and everybody around him Park Avenue artists that represent him extremely forward looking. And they see that, hey, if we get more students learning instruments, then more people are going to be interested in, you know, music in general, buy more tickets, go to more concerts, stuff like that. So there's a virtuous cycle here
that we're trying to build. So it's not just around, hey, you know, making some content, doing masterclass type things, but it actually gets way more involved. There's a lot of students that they'll get tickets, you know, if they take enough lessons, they'll get free tickets, go backstage, meet him and talk
with them. That's like a can be a life changing event for many musicians, and also getting a bunch of teachers in a room together and organizations and saying, Hey, we're gonna have to hire 500 music teachers over the next 18 months, that's going to make us the size of a small public university. How do we do that? How do we make sure we make trolla? A really great place for musicians to work. And by the way, we're going to create gainful employment for musicians. It's something that
is very rare, I think. And so we've been working together a lot on how to get high quality teachers as well,
that's really exciting. And that is yet another reason why I think people often you know, don't stick with their musical education. Sometimes it's a tough teacher, but it's also, it doesn't usually seem like something that might serve them as a life skill or something they could actually use for a career. And it's really exciting to hear that you're thinking about that from a really broad
angle. It's really, you know, one of your investors is Luis von Ahn, very, very famous and impactful person in the ad tech world, the CEO and founder of Duolingo. And, you know, as you're mentioning, the trying to get the motivation there, making sure the app is is sticky, especially combined with the accountability coming from the instructor. I just have some questions about that. Can I ask you a little bit about the sort of relationship with Duolingo?
Sure. So how did you connect with Vaughn on and you know, what interested him in, you know, the type of work that you're doing?
One of our closest mentors, since basically, the beginning of trolla was Bob Meese, who's the chief business officer there. And there's so so so much that we've learned from Duolingo as a company, I think anybody that makes an edtech app has, you know, copied something from Duolingo. At some point, the nice thing about Duolingo is they're also really active in creating a tech community. So they are the first ones to go and email other people and say,
Hey, can I talk to you? I want to learn more about how you're doing your app. And they're talking with people constantly. So they're always open to a conversation, which I think is that is them living their values. It's an amazing thing about a company, a lot of companies, a lot of founders, they shell in, right, oh, I don't want to give any information out. But they are so so generous with their knowledge and their time. So yeah, it's been amazing to work with
Duolingo. And Bob was the one that sort of facilitated the introduction to Luis and saffron as investors.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right, that anybody who's building an app in education has spent a good amount of time with printouts or screenshots of Duolingo, sort of trying to dissect what they're doing. Right. They just put out an earnings call this week. And they're just doing tremendously well as an ad tech company really becoming sort of a standard bearer in the whole space. I have heard that Duolingo is also working on a
music app. They've gone into math, they've gone into early reading, and there was a TechCrunch article A month ago, about Duolingo starting to work on a music app. I'm curious what you think of that.
I think this is amazing news. I think that if more people built technology for musicians, especially beginner musicians, then more people are just going to learn instruments. So this is just amazing for the whole industry. I think that you know, Duolingo did such a good job of building this, like b2c ad tech industry kind of from scratch. Like they're the standard bearers there. So they said, Hey, actually, there's a multi billion dollar market here, where that just didn't
exist before. You know, you didn't have hundreds of millions of people taking French lessons before and so, you know, hopefully they do the same thing with music, and I think that'll be Good for every single company and every founder building something in the music space right now, especially with all the new things happening in AI, generative, I think, you know, Duolingo, being all in on AI is just so good for the field.
Because there's a lot of college kids right now that are graduating, that are building competitors, I think, to Duolingo competitors, probably to trolla, as well. And I think just the more people we have working on this, the better. I mean, just think about it, like let's have people work on, you know, go to FinTech and work for a hedge fund, or let's have them work on educational technology to make education more accessible to people like choose one or the other. Which
one do we want? You're preaching to the choir here, both for me and the listeners to this podcast. But yeah, 100% Agree. When I was growing up, I think when you mentioned educational technology to people, I always joke about this. They'd say, Oh, you mean Oregon Trail. That's what educational technology is right? The Oregon Trail. That's the only thing they could ever think
of. And now I think Duolingo has finally dis dislodged Oregon Trail and some other companies as well as the sort of number one representative of what people think of when you hear educational technology. If you're not already in the field. That's my personal stance, but it is really refreshing and very nice to hear you talk about how the entire industry will be served by this. And this is also something I think the EdTech community is really tends to be really great about is sort of
working collaboratively. Then thinking about, you know, the market size, the need, the different aspects of this are so endlessly enormous. We're not all fighting over the same few scraps. And you know, the pie is very big. It's really nice when when companies can work really well together. Absolutely. I want to ask this may be a little bit of a curveball question, but I'm really curious to hear you
talk about it. You mentioned that you investment at the University of Illinois, your you run Charla out of Chicago, where you you know, near where you went to school? Duolingo I'll stop talking about them soon, I promise. But Duolingo is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Carnegie Mellon, you know,
famously. And a lot of the founders and investors we, you know, we interview on the podcast, tend to come from the same geographical areas, that's less true since the pandemic, but you know, it's still true. And I'd love to hear you know, a little bit about the Chicago ed tech scene, what is it like building an edtech? company in
Chicago? And what do you see as some of the sort of pros and cons versus, you know, building in, you know, down the road from the the Sand Hill Road, or in Boston or New York or some of the larger cities? For ad tech?
Yeah, Chicago has a great tech culture in general. Yeah, very collaborative. I think it's a great culture for what the tech scene is going to look like in the late 2020s. Ie not so much about growth at all costs, much more about building things that people actually use with good unit economics. And shall I say, a trace of humility. I think we've had a, you know, 25 years of this, Uber, and other companies Theranos, right. Ones that that shall not be named Chicago, we have a really good culture
there. So I think, you know, in general, it doesn't matter if you're building ed tech, music, tech, climate tech, like Chicago is a really, really good place to be. And it's growing a lot as a venture community as well. So I think, probably a similar thing to Pittsburgh, right? People just probably working a little smarter, working a little harder, not going to as many VC cocktail hours, and actually talking to their customers instead.
Yeah. So you mentioned in passing quite a while ago, now that you are not just violin. So I want to ask you, you raised a series a just a couple of months ago, you have a total funding of $15 million, I believe, which is really exciting. What are you doing to expand to new places? And I imagine you are also thinking about AI? As you mentioned, what's next beyond violin?
Yeah. So our goal is to be universal, right? Any instrument anywhere on Earth, it's been really cool to focus on violin is our first thing because it's kind of the hardest instrument to teach. So we're at an interesting point, right now, this is maybe some more internal talk than the the other questions, but we are going to expand instruments, we have been highly served by being focused, and we're going to keep that
focus as long as possible. But we also know that we could sort of expand at any point if we wanted to. So I think right now, what we're trying to do is focus on really, really good retention, really good user experience, but not just suddenly go crazy, because we want to we want to build sustainably and I think that's good for the team. I think that's is going to allow us to care a lot more about the student experience. So we don't have a specific date for launching new instruments yet.
Suffice to say soon, but now I'd like next week.
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And that tension between focusing and really diving deep on what you're doing and sort of expanding to new subjects, or, in your case, you know, new instruments is one that many of our guests and many companies struggle with, they say, you know, because sometimes there's pressure to grow at all costs. And one of the ways to grow is by expanding subjects. But you know, companies can find themselves losing focus. So it's really nice to hear that this is Top of Mind.
Yeah, I think two things here. Number one, luckily, we're growing white a lot, almost more than we can even handle just with violin, which is great. And the second thing is our principle of expansion here is, whenever we expand to new instruments, it needs to make the student experience better for our current students. So for example, our curricula are going to intersect so students can play music with one another. And they're learning similar songs.
You know, community is a huge part of music, it's a huge part of what we do. So we're really looking forward to expanding in a way that creates ensembles that, you know, gets people to play music with people that they
would have never met before. And hopefully down the line like making, like, maybe there's going to be famous bands that that come out of trolla, there's plenty of bands that came out of, you know, kids just staying late after band practice, or orchestra rehearsal in middle school in high school, I think we're gonna do the same thing with trolla. So we need to make sure that we're not going to go be like a violin and trumpet app. Like that doesn't make
sense, right? It needs to be something where they're complementary to one another.
It's really interesting, you know, with your sort of somewhat of a two sided marketplace model. You know, you mentioned having instructors that want to specialize in a certain age of learner a certain style of music. And then you have students who want to learn who are of that age and want to know that style. And you can sort of connect and match people. I'm curious if you see that two sided marketplace, a sort of foundation for
community? Could we like, for example, can you imagine an instructor asking and then connecting two or three of her students to make a quartet or I guess, oh, yeah, for students to make a quartet
that happens already. I think that's an amazing part of trolla is that there's internal ensembles, and we do recitals. Teachers are putting students together and saying, hey, the two of you should meet and play together. We have students started to do in person meetups occasionally see, like, some people in Austin got together and like, went to a concert. And, you know, it's great. And then some students are getting so good that they're, they're playing in
concerts locally, as well. And so that's an amazing thing that we've transitioned sort of this online learning thing into real life friendships. I cannot wait to be invited to the first trolla wedding. It's gonna happen someday. But yeah, music brings people together.
Yeah. And education brings people together. So it's really cool. I'm glad that's already happening. It makes a ton of sense. Just to jump back. It was the Prussian reform movement in early Russia. It basically changed pressure loss to Napoleon, and they had to reform the education system. They made up basically the current Yeah. Anyway. So lastly, I want to find out a little bit about how you're thinking about apps
versus, you know, websites. This is something that we've often seen, when you look at sort of the top education apps, they often are either language apps or math. That's what sort of tended to dominate over the last few years. But you know, Charla is one of a number of up and comers that are trying to and succeeding and sort of breaking into and changing that structure i How do you see the benefit of being in the App Store? versus, you know, other types of delivery?
That is a really good question. Being an app to US versus a website doesn't matter. What matters is student experience. What matters is whether or not people are learning, right? So we are going to be cross platform. When you're playing music, a larger screen is generally better. And so but some people like using the app, so we're just sort of going to like build for everything. And we'll focus on whatever leads to better learning outcomes, and then communicate that to the student.
Right? I think for trolla, for example, if you're playing music, you're in your own home normally, you know, you're not like these apps, like use it on the bus, you use it, you know, while you're waiting in line somewhere. You don't practice the violin while you're waiting in line at the grocery store. So
not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Yeah,
that'd be the most annoying ad we could possibly make. But yeah, so you know, for some of these people, like the accessibility comes from being mobile for us the accessibility is in pretty much every other reach in terms of geographic accessibility, monetary accessibility, representation, all that stuff. We actually stopped calling ourselves an app company pretty recently.
That's really interesting. I know I said that was last question. But I do have one more for you. It could be a quickie. But you mentioned the topic of the year so far in passing generative AI. And, you know, we talk a lot about generative AI almost, you know, endlessly on this podcast, it is fascinating. And it is endlessly fascinating. But one thing we very rarely talk about is generative AI, when it comes to music, which is, you know,
incredible. The generative AI can compose, it can compose in particular styles, it can recreate classical music, it can pop music, it can extrapolate from a sample and continue it. It does amazing things. And we just almost never talked about it, I'd love to hear your thoughts. As a musician and music educator about what might generative ai do for music, education and music in general?
Well, let's start with music education and and talk about music. I think with advances in generative AI, and soon to be advances in augmented reality, I think we're gonna get to the point in the next 1015 years that you can put on some AR glasses, play an instrument and basically have like an avatar of a teacher there with you, that is entirely generated by AI, that is listening to you that is watching you and gives you really, really good
feedback. So like an amazing music teacher that is there anytime you put your glasses on, and want to practice. So I think that's sort of a logical conclusion of the tech that we're seeing happen right now, there's a couple of leaps that need to happen before that, that works. But you can sort of like draw the draw the line between where we're at now and that experience. And that's going to
change everything. Obviously, everybody knows at this point, or probably everybody who listens to this podcast, believes that generative AI is like going to change the whole world. And music at is, is a big part of that as well. Same thing with music creation, it's gonna be amazing to see what people come up with. And we haven't seen a chat GBT for music creation yet, but maybe Ableton or Fruity Loops, or any of these production platforms are going
to put this in there. If they don't, you know, by, you're not going to be around in five or 10 years. So I think it's gonna be amazing for creativity in general. I also wonder, and I'd be interested to hear what you think about this. For us, we're taking the attitude that there's going to be some stuff that remains stubbornly human. And so while some companies are going all in on generative AI, we are going all in on generative AI for everything outside of the
lesson itself. So we want to make sure that your time with another person remains sacred, and that you enjoy that and that you don't have to worry about anything else. That's where we think it's headed, I will be very pleased to be proven wrong and live in a different world. However,
I think that's the, you know, billion dollar question right now in education. And most of the founders who I've interviewed on this show, as of, you know, may 2023, tend to agree, and are building, you know, AI tools that complement enhance, expand the reach, or the impact of human educators, and instead of sort of seeking to fully replace them with a, you know, augment them.
Personally, I, my sort of sci fi, brain goes a little faster to the vision that you just named about augmented reality of sort of, you know, why shouldn't every student be able to learn from Joshua Bell? Or why shouldn't you know, an AI Joshua Bell? I don't believe in replacing teachers don't don't get me wrong. And that's not what I'm saying at all. But I am
not fully sure. Just when I go to my own philosophy, I'm not fully sure that there is any type of intelligence that is purely human that couldn't, over time, be at least replicated pretty convincingly by AI, including, you know, teaching in that way. I spoke to a fascinating entrepreneur recently named nada Lockroy, who runs a company called Bold voice and she has a model actually reminds me a little bit of what you're doing with Charla it's
for accent modification. And what it is, is they see Hollywood accent coaches on video, not in person, but so to understand how to you know how to change their accents, but then an AI feedback app to actually tell them what to do differently. So it's has a little bit of that. Yeah. And one of the things she said that stuck with me and she's like, well, one of the reasons why AI can't do accent modification is that it's incredibly physical.
You literally have to see another human putting their lips in a certain shape and their tongue in a certain place to know how to say the right thing. And you know, our AI is nowhere near that yet. And that struck me is such an interesting comment, obviously true for now, but exactly the kind of thing, which will certainly not be true in five years. It's just a really weird changing space,
I get the feeling that everybody in their own space as well, there's this core, which just can't be replaced. And then when they look at any other space, they say, ah, that can be totally replaced.
Exactly. Not in my backyard, you know, everybody, everybody, but me. Yeah, exactly. I've seen that a lot. Either way, if there is a core of human intelligence that can never be touched, and we need people for all sorts of things, or if artificial intelligence can begin to approach that, either way, the world is going to look very different because of the number of things that it can already
do. You know, I've talked to some people who basically say, it's just a matter of what percentage of each job will be tackled by AI, some will be 80%, some will be 10%, none of them will be 0%. It's just not where it's gonna go. And it's pretty nuts to think about it. But this was six months ago, that it sort of exploded in this particular popularity, which is it's so it's the fact that these conversations are so advanced is yes, really fast. And there's
an interesting story here with the violin world, actually, with Joshua Bell. So that 10 years ago, people were starting to try and synthesize musical instrument sounds for producers to use on Ableton. So instead of, hey, I want a violin sound in my pop song, right? Either I could go hire a violinist like a studio violinist, and have them play it. Or I could just use this plugin in Ableton and make a violin sound. But the problem was, the sounds were really bad.
Like, you could tell if you're an actual musician, you could tell Hey, this doesn't sound right. So Joshua Bell got in contact with a company that was doing the synthesizing. And every other musician was like, There's no way you could do this. You can't replace us, this sucks. And him. The greatest, basically said, Hey, I've got the Stratovarius. It's one of the most incredible instruments ever crafted by humanity. Let's just try. Let's see if, if we
can't replicate this. So he sat down in a studio for, I don't know, countless hours, and played every single, every single combination of things that you could possibly play on this instrument. And he worked with just a team of two people, these two engineers, called Ember tone is the company. And he was ahead of the curve there. And he saw even though you know, he would be in the position normally, to reject this and say, How could you possibly do
it? I do. But just how forward thinking he was, was amazing. And I think there's an opportunity for many artists, business leaders right now to be forward thinking there. And that means trying to disrupt yourself. And for him, I mean, that made them a lot of money as well, I think it's a really good business decision, as well as a good sort of cultural decision, because it increased the quality of people who are going to use synthesized violence anyways. Right? So it increased the
quality. And so you said, I just made art better for everyone.
You're welcome. Yeah. Fascinating, fascinating story. One of the things that's interesting about the potential future of AI music education, is that just like you the story, you just told where, you know, people are going to use synthesized violins, who have never touched a violin who've never played with the violin, but they can still compose with it. In the AI world, the barrier to entry, as you've said earlier, you know, at to music can really
disappear. I mean, you can imagine people with nothing resembling musical training, being able to compose pretty amazing things with AI co pilots with feedback with, you know, with these enhanced tools. And I'm curious how you see that world? Is that a better musical world where there are more people in it? And it's just, you know, maybe more creativity less, you know, 18th century Russian playing styles? Or is that sort of the end of the
line? Because it will take the actual skill of playing like a virtuoso, you know, out of the equation?
Yeah. So I think the question you're asking is, are people going to stop playing instruments? Yeah, I guess my question to you, is, do people play instruments, because they want to create the best sound in the world or because they enjoy it as an individual. And if you find any enjoyment in the act of learning and playing an instruments, just even for yourself, if not for others, then this is still going to be a thing that you do. When I'm
making music. I could just sample another musician, but somehow, I enjoy sitting down at the piano and playing on my own sitting down. I'm learning the cello right now. It's just an amazing Beautiful experience of meditative experience. It's just one of the greatest pleasures that I could experience. So, if other people feel that way, then we're good if they don't want to do is make a nice sound. And, you know, that's great as well, music will
be good. Maybe in a world where AI does all the work, we will all play music a lot more, that would be an incredible way. I love that answer. So, okay, I always end the podcast with two questions. So let's wrap it up with this one is what do you see as one of the most exciting trends in the EdTech landscape right now, from your particular perspective as the CEO of trolla,
the combination of the human touch with tech full stop, that's we there's 10 years where we said the robot is going to teach you everything. And now we're saying, hey, let's, let's include humans. And let's see what happens when we when we build with people in mind. I think that's incredibly fascinating. It solves all the retention problems of the last 10 years event tech.
Yeah, accountability is an interesting piece of the human experience. You don't want to let a human down, down, at least not yet. But sometimes it's a positive emotion. That reminds me of chess, right? That was what people discovered with chess A while back, you know, AI, started beating the best players. And then they started to say, but you know, what AI with a human can be aI without a human. And that's really, really interesting.
And like more people are playing chess now than ever. Absolutely.
It's incredible. How many people are on chess.com, it's completely been popular as what is a resource that can be a newsletter, a book, a blog, a anything that you would recommend for people who are fascinated by this conversation, and want to learn more about any of the topics we discussed. I can be
cheesy, but you know, like, reach out to your local ed tech founder and just give them a shout out. Email them. I think the best thing about the tech community is how close we all are, and how generous people are with their time. There's nothing more exciting than talking to another founder. So that also goes for people listening. If you want to reach out, just send me a note. Say I'm at trolla.com.
I would love to talk. I could vouch for that. Ed Tech. I think it's the nicest people in the world, the nicest industry. I just I never lets me down in terms of the generosity of people. So I'm there with you. Thanks so much. There's been a fascinating conversation. I'm really excited to see what you're doing next with trolla Sam Walder, CEO of trolla, the app that is going to change music education and make it accessible to everyone everywhere. Thanks for being with us here on Ed Tech
insiders. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the Ed Tech community. For those who want even more and Tech Insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.