Learning Playlists and Edtech Crowdfunding with Joshua Wöhle of Mindstone

mine stone. Joshua Wöhle, has started multiple technology businesses in the past, helping scale them to over 150 people and over $100 million in revenue. Today, he is CEO at mine stone, focusing on building a platform that helps people learn faster, remember more and get things done. Previously, Joshua was co founder and chief product officer at super awesome, the biggest kids technology company in the world, which was acquired by Epic Games

in the summer of 2020. Before that, he was a co founder and CEO at targets as well as CJ online works and worked for Richmond International to build their IP database systems. Across multiple confidence. Joshua was born in the Netherlands attended high school in Switzerland and speaks five languages. After studying computer science at King's College London, he finished his MBA at the Open University, and has completed MOOCs ranging from the science of learning to the application of artificial

intelligence. Joshua has an edtech enthusiast advisor and investor. Mindstone is a platform that allows users to automatically create learning pathways from content available online to help learners reach their learning goals, while at the same time inserting elements of discovery to try to bring the joy back into learning. Joshua Wöhle, Welcome to EdTech insiders.

And I guess, when I got to the point where the motivation grew beyond having a paycheck at the end of the month, when it was really about where do I want to spend the next 2030 years of my life and where are there problems that are really worth solving, outside of the fact that they can generate financial returns, I always thought that education was a great place to

be. And so I started investing in the education space, whilst I was still it's super awesome, as a way to sit down with other founders or their investors understand what problems other people were solving, why they were solving them, and what people thought the longer term trends were of the space with the overall idea being, I wanted to figure out where I thought I could be most effective, then started discovering quite a few things over the years of

investing. So there's a very good book called how we learn by Benedict Carey, that I would definitely suggest anyone that's interested in in learning, read, because it goes into a bunch of the techniques that we know improve the way that people learn, but that somehow very few people are aware of. And so I thought, well, there is something really interesting there, combined with the fact that I was a self taught coder.

And so my default to learning anything is to go online and try and find something that explains it to me, I know what if you could build a platform that would leverage all the content that already exists online, allow people to learn from that, and then accelerate the learning at the same time by just leveraging these different techniques that very few people are aware of. So the very high level, that's how I got to thinking and starting monster.

confronted with online. So web pages, articles, PDFs, videos, podcasts, images, anything really, for an individual, it means you can keep all your information in one place, extract key insights and engage with it. And if you're not sure where to begin, anyone can create playlists of that existing content. So have existing podcasts, videos, articles, put them in a playlist

and share them with others. So that you can just use one of those community generated playlists that somebody else has created for you, and dive into a subject area of your choice. So think about economics, one, based off of the best 100 videos, podcasts and articles that already exists online, someone has taken the time to put those into playlists. And you are then able to just learn from that, for teams and businesses that actually allows them to do the same thing

internally. For like, onboarding, rescaling upskilling, creating this playlist using the combination of content that's available online, as well as some internal resources. So that discussion happens around these pieces of content, and then the insights that are generated from them actually stay within the company as well. So there are various aspects of that, if that makes sense.

a promising idea in edtech. So I wanted to dive into the you mentioned Benedict Carey, and how we learn and some of these sort of learning principles from research that are pretty well known to researchers and those who study pedagogy, but often don't make it into edtech products, things like the testing effect interleaving, multiple modalities Spacing Effect, how do you leverage some of these learning concepts in

the Mind Stone product? And even more generally, how do you recommend that edtech founders think about incorporating learning science into their products more generally.

frequency. And where it becomes really interesting is that we know this and hundreds of different studies have proven that so this is not like the ad hoc study that might or might not be true. But there's a bunch of different evidence on one hand, and then the other end, you've got the majority of the world that is just not aware of it. And so that bridging that gap can only improve the way people learn the way that we

looked at it. And Spaced Repetition is really where I think it's the easiest example to grasp. So there is an ideal frequency at which your brain is exposed to information if what you're trying to do is to optimize for the retention of that information. So instead of spending an hour looking at the same piece of information, you could spend an hour so the exact same amount of time, but spaced

over specific frequencies. So obviously, there's a proper algorithm behind but just for argumentation sake, you could see a piece of content today that another time two hours later than two days later, and then two weeks later, and so on, spaced over those different periods. And the retention of that information that you're trying to remember, could be increased by 40 50%. Just by doing that, the way we implemented that in mind, stone, for example. So you can highlight anything that you

imported in Mind Stone. As you go through it, you can highlight any piece of text, image, video, anything, and just tell the system that you want to remember it. Now what it does is that it takes that piece of information it actually asks you, the system asks you to put yourself a

question. And then we automatically transform whatever you highlighted into a flashcard combining both the testing effect and the spaced repetition effect, automatically putting your attention to the information at the right time. And trying to get you to remember it and combination of those two again, just leads to dramatic improvements in retaining the information that you are exposed to. Does that make sense?

on the same page. I'm I'm curious sometimes the learning research can feel very dense or it can feel very intimidating to those who a few years out from reading research papers and books like Benedict Kerry's attempt to take all of this research and synopsize it in ways that are used Ball. I'm curious how you would recommend that other ad tech founders or those who want to sort of absorb the impact of some of these learning principles, you know, where should they start?

rigorous approach. So they go a little bit deeper into the different studies and they talk a little bit more about how the studies were conducted, and so on. Obviously, you could do the same thing with how we learn and just look at the studies yourself. But so depending on your level of scientific rigor, in terms of preference, if you want to look at it just at a high level, how we learn is probably the best way to start.

If you really want to dig into a little bit more of the science then make it stick could be a good starting point as well.

agree. So one of the things that struck me about mine stone, I think it really made it stand out in the tech landscape is that you actually did a crowdfunding campaign, which raised almost 2 million pounds, which is over 2 million US dollars in late 2021, on a platform called cedars. And that really struck me and it made it got some interesting press

around that. So tell us a little bit about you know, as an investor yourself, why you decided to crowdfund some of mine stones funding and what that process looked like.

getting better and better. If you think about crowdfunding, not as a way of replacing traditional finance, but rather think of it as a way to engage your audience and to enlist a lot of different potential users to your product and get the word out there that there is a new thing when you are a b2c brand, crowdfunding could be an enormously or can be an enormously powerful way of doing

just that. So if you think about our aims for the crowdfund being the generation of a community of people that are passionate and incentivized to make milestone a success, rather than looking at the crowdfund as a number that we got to at the end, that everything makes a lot of sense, because obviously, we could have gotten the money privately if we just gone and talk to more

private investors. But we would not have had what almost 300 people investing in the company, out of which now what over 60 or so actually joined a special milestone community workspace where we engage them, we can talk to them about new features, try and figure out what they think we should be doing next. All of those things, which make a big difference, on top of the fact that we are able to jump on calls with them, and the fact that they now are ambassadors of the brand, being investors in

the company to start with. So it really has a bunch of secondary effects that you just can't get by funding privately. If that makes sense.

the platform. So they have to actually be using the platform. And that's obviously for us and important but because we don't just want to go and look and build towards what investors or people that put in a little bit of money say we should be doing it when they are themselves not

using the product. But the combination of the two, those that actually invest them that are using the tool, make for really great uses and really great interviews and just a lot of great insight that we can use to accelerate the pace at which we discover problems, the pace at which we are able to solve them and the pace at which we are getting feedback. Yeah, and

year into end. And then if you raise only for a year, then basically only have a few months of product development before you have to start raising again. So here, this means that we have, or I am able to spend more than a year building product before I have to think about doing another round. Now. We initially we already have that runway, we as I said, we didn't do the crowdfund for the sake of

raising more money. But that did mean that we put ourselves a cap, because what we also didn't want was dilute too much in the company from an equity perspective. And so we put ourselves a cap, which is actually where we ended up at. So in our case, it was just we wanted to leave as much available as we could for the community, because we thought it was a strong way of getting secondary effects more than just the money. But we also wanted to make sure that we didn't dilute

too much. So we didn't need more than what we ended up actually raising. And that's exactly where we came in at. So we were it was interesting how all of that kind of came together in the last few days of the campaign as well.

mentioned from the crowd. But you can be careful not to overly dilute the shares that the VCs are getting, and thereby undermining their investment and sort of get get the benefits of both worlds. I find that a really interesting model. And I'm curious if other companies may pursue it in the future.

Yeah, absolutely. So you have this amazing background with super awesome, as you mentioned, it was one of the biggest children's media platforms in the world, or the biggest, and you've worked as an investor. The European ed tech system is really interesting. Right now, it's seen a enormous resurgence just in the last year or two. There's been a tripling of VC funding in edtech, between 2020

and 2021. I'm curious, given your background in the European system, both from a tech and a technology generalist standpoint, what do you think is catalyzing this incredible rise in edtech? Within Europe,

interested in solving them. At the same time, you had a massive amount of liquidity in the system that was due to different governments injecting more money in the system due to furlough and other types of plans and stages that were were rolled out. And then last but not least, it's a sector that was historically under invested in. And so you had those three things happen at the same time.

And I guess the under investment, and the realization that were problems are somewhat correlated, because it was under invested in for such a long time. Once people had to move remotely and actually start using the remote learning products that existed, it became so clear that they were terrible, compared to what we were used to. From everything else. Everything else actually worked pretty well. The rest of the economy worked pretty well you could work remotely and do.

Most people are able to do their job entirely from home. But try and be a student and do that. It is an entirely different context. And the tools just aren't anywhere near the quality of the tools that we are now expecting to be using everywhere else. And that problem became so apparent that everyone started pouring money into it. And Europe has had a good track art. The education space as a whole has been going up. But Europe has always had a strong past

with education. And so with as one of the systems that they say transitioned online, lots of European founders found themselves in the position of thinking they could potentially change some of that and so starting new companies or scaling others that were just ready to go in and tackle some of the problems. And here we are with what I think it was like, three times more investment in 2021. It was in 2020, which was already three or four times more than it was in 2019. So it's crazy.

is missing. Obviously, you have different dynamics, around motivation around productivity, and all these things. Now everyone can do some of that. But we definitely have never had to learn how to work productively in those environments. And so they're basically building a suite of tools around how to achieve just that. And I think inserts itself very nicely with a company that is more traditionally around or that would be more clearly put in the attic space, which is a

company called steady stream. I don't know if you looked at any of these, at the start of the pandemic, there was this big trend that really became much, much bigger overnight, which was study with me on YouTube. Right? It's basically YouTube videos of other people studying for like, three hours. And the only thing you do, there was no talking no nothing, just someone silently

studying. So that on the other end, when you were behind your PC, and you were trying to motivate yourself to study to focus on the thing that was in front of you, you felt you had somebody there with you. And I think there's something really interesting Aaron, how we leverage these dynamics, because we are all at home. We are all alone, in a way even though we're communicating through all these different means. But how can we leverage tech to make

that feel less lonely? And so both loan and study stream work in that space of flow and more on the deep work side and steady stream more specifically around students? Like how do you allow people to study have that idea of connection, and allow people to motivate themselves and to get into the right mindset to be doing their best work. So So those two are really interesting. There's a company called study smarter, that I did not invest in, I probably should

have earlier on. But they are doing some really cool stuff as well. So they basically allow you to create flashcards, notes, explanations, plan, your studies, all of that based on just accelerating your current stay environment. So they're independent of the university independent of whatever course you're studying. And they're helping you with those challenges. And then last but not least, there's really interesting, it's not a tech play, but it isn't startup, which is the London

interdisciplinary school. Not sure if you're aware of this, but it's a whole new take on learning, which is a university of rather than being boxed into the traditional categories of economics, computer science, biology, or whatever. They have the entire curriculum based around problems. So you take a problem like COVID, or viruses, and then you analyze the problem from an economic angle. What does this mean for economies

around the world? Then you analyze it from a biology perspective, which is how does this virus actually interact with the human body? How does it spread? Then you analyze it from another angle. And so rather than the curriculum being based on traditional subjects that we know the entire curriculum is based around problems and how they affect the world. And I thought that was really interesting as well. If I had to go back to university that would be it.

VCs. So I hear about brainly, and multiverse and places like that, the set of companies you named all sound not only fascinating, but they have in common, this sort of thesis, that education should be interdisciplinary education should be social education

should be collaborative. And that if COVID is really changing the world, which I think it really may be, that we should all start to think about how to meet it, how to meet the new world in a different way and use technology to bridge gaps rather than to isolate and one of the three lenses of this podcast I won't talk long about this is that I think Ed Tech, maybe 1.0, if you want to call it that, was really about sort of bringing people and content together, or making existing classes putting

existing classes online. But there was very little understanding of what technology can do to bring people together in new ways. And the companies you're mentioning here flown and steady stream feel like they're really pushing on that question of how can technology make education truly more social in a way that than it even could have been in person?

Oh, well never delivered. But the thing is, these companies that are being built right now, they're going to deliver in five to 10 years from now, you're not going to liver next year. And so what I'm really excited about is what this cohort of companies will be able to do once they hit scale in five to 10 years, and what that world will look like,

2012, and 2014. Things like Duolingo and Udemy, that are now becoming household names. So they're going to be Yeah, I think that's a great prediction. So speaking of predictions, you recently wrote a really interesting article about the future of learning and edtech, and a couple of ideas, and it stood out to me. So I'd love to do something where I'm going to quote a paragraph from your article back to you. And I'd love to hear you sort of expound on it and tell us a little bit

more about it. Does that work for you? Yeah, that works. So here was one paragraph from this article. The article, of course, will also be linked in the show notes in 2022, at Tech is going to increasingly become a consumer industry. Learning in the next 10 years, we'll be going through the same transition as physical fitness did in the last 10, in terms of the role it plays in our lives. And one point there was a distinction whereby only athletes did fitness in order to

compete effectively. These days, we all do it to stay healthy. The same will be the case for learning, high performers did it to shine. But now we all needed to be part of our lives to maintain our professional development. As a result, in the next year, the share of the overall education wallet coming directly from consumers will grow. Yeah. Tell us more about that prediction.

Now that 30% will have to be replaced by something else, whether it is changing jobs entirely, whether it is acquiring new skills, and so moving up the ladder where whatever you were doing before that a computer now does, you end up doing something else But that means that a bigger and bigger part of the students sector, if you want the learners are adults, those adults have higher disposable income, and they can spend on their own

development. And that's the first key, which is that the people that are learning are more and more often going to be in a position to pay for the learning should they want to do it. Now, obviously, the shirt is a big part there. But you combine that with the fact that because of the acceleration of automation in the workforce, the capability the capacity for somebody to learn is going to become a bigger and bigger

differentiator. As time goes on, you can think about if automation accelerate, then your capability of continuously adjusting however you are responding to that automation becomes a bigger and bigger differentiator. And as it becomes a bigger differentiator, like anyone, you end up with a fairly simple economic equation, which is if I am able to improve the speed at which I learn, I will be better at my job if I am better at my job, I can earn

more money. So it is worth it me investing that money in order to access a better job or in order to differentiate myself from everybody else. And because for the first time that learners are in a position to actually pay for that themselves, a bigger proportion will do so. And in the same way that happened with fitness, where 10 years ago, nobody was thinking about it, only athletes were actually investing themselves in trying to get to high performance. And

now everybody does. And I mean, not everybody, but the majority of people today think about fitness as part of their at least weekly routine. And I think a very similar thing is going to happen with learning, because it's going to be so key in differentiating what we do at work, which, ironically enough is the same thing that happened

to fitness. Right They one of the key reasons we think about it much more is that we now understand that being fit physically leads to better performance at work, the same will happen even stronger, most likely, with learning. Terrific

workforce in the future. And as such, the buyers will be the learners rather than the buyers being districts or universities or places that are traditionally tasked with providing learning makes a lot of sense. I want to do one more quote and reaction with you. If you're open to it, I thought this was another fascinating idea. So forgive the slightly long quote, I will try to speak quickly. In 2020, the global education market was

worth $5.5 trillion. However, a huge portion of that is represented by charitable institutions. For example, universities, and governments of the entire market, private companies make up just 200 billion pounds. However, in the next year, we will begin to see education move in a similar direction to healthcare, with an increasing collaboration between the public and private sectors.

edtech is the bridge between these worlds, traditional educational institutions are increasingly realizing not just the commercial benefits these innovations can bring, but also how they can enhance and improve the educational experience as a whole. I love this idea of edtech as the bridge between the public and the private sectors. Tell us a little bit more about that.

the market size. So the rest is basically charities, governments and so on to kind of go through that take up a part of that in the education space. Depending on the number you look at, you look at 5.5 to $6 trillion overall, but only $300 billion is represented by the biggest education company's global market cap. So that's 4.9% Compared to 62 and a half in the healthcare space. That gives you an idea of the imbalance of where that money is currently,

stat, what it's doing. So you've got big universities that tend to be either charities or non government organizations. that they don't operate as commercial entities at the moment. And through the same trend I was talking about before, where you have this consumerization of education, I think that that is going to grow dramatically. And leveraging the agility and the

speed of private enterprise. In order to get to this now fairly clearly defined goal of helping people learn faster, remember more deal with the overload of information that we're being confronted with every single day, there is an enormous gap between where we are and where we could get to there. And attack is perfectly positioned to be able to take those ideas of scale, if that makes sense. Absolutely.

edtech. For many years, there's a very, very deliberate strategy to sort of lean into almost every different type of Ed Tech there is including, of course, online learning, but all sorts of tutoring platforms and finance platforms and everything. And it's been incredibly beneficial to that university system. But it's also been incredibly beneficial to a lot of ITT Tech players who get a really sizable and meaningful

partner in ASU. And I think, you know, other universities are starting to pursue those types of paths. We've seen universities purchase technology boot camps recently, with Southern New Hampshire taking over Kenzie, and Purdue global sort of rebranding, Kaplan. And I think this is a really poignant prediction that in the US, its nonprofit institutions or universities aren't really going to collaborate.

lot to be done there. Study Smarter is one of the platforms working in that space, for example, which I wouldn't be surprised if at some point, they go more into partnerships with universities there, for example, that would be the biggest part of that look at the other thing is just linking learning to

actual outcomes. So not just the outcome being well, I've got a degree, but actually being able to demonstrate that it is useful that it gets you a job, I think the people that push this to the extreme or lambda school, if you're familiar with them, I think they just renamed to bloom Technology Institute, I think something like that. And that they're that you literally don't even pay before, or unless you at least have a demonstrated

return on your investment. Now, they are not famous for partnering with current institutions. But making that link clear where a university is able to in a world where they have to differentiate more and more able to demonstrate that what you walk away with by taking a course, is useful and pays itself back is a very big space. It's a very big space for

multiple reasons. One, the not the least of which is that it's in serious doubt for many universities, if spending three years and spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars is actually worth it or not.

movement in universities. And it's a really interesting comment you're making that might be an interesting way for universities to differentiate to start leaning into that type of aligned incentive. of style financing. Yep, very intriguing. As we wrap up, I always ask our guests first, in a nutshell, what is the most exciting trend you see in the EdTech landscape right now, literally this week? Or what's the most sort of cutting edge thing that you think our learners might find? Interesting,

available online? But how do you think about this within entirely virtual worlds? Where you can go jump from environment to environment, one of the things that I'm excited about is what if you could think about content that's available digitally as more than what is just available online? What if you could reuse the gaming worlds that have been built for a bunch of amazing games, and there was billions of dollars going into them often reproduced to historic detail?

In order to run a history class? What if you could just take that world and run through it and run a class on it, rather than having to play the game with a

bunch of people? And what if you do that with any content that we as a society produced digitally, and you could just go from one wall to another, if you want to explain the economics crash, there's probably a game somewhere that somebody built, or a piece of movie that goes into detail, or what if you could be in that movie, you could see it happen, you could be on Wall Street as the crash happened, or at least the reproduction of the crash happened, the way that your

brain will draw connections between what you are learning what you're seeing, and how you can take that with you and how you relate that to other information that you already know, from what we know about learning science is going to be dramatically better. Yeah, I mean, this is a little bit further out. I don't think we're going to really be there even in five years from now, if I'm honest. But between five and 10, we might actually get there. And I'm really excited about that. Yeah, the

required. Sometimes you have to hit your head against the wall 20 times, and it's the 21st time that somehow works. But it's a really interesting one, just to try and see what not to do. Yeah. Now, there's another one, which is class disrupted, which it takes the approach of disruption theory and applies it to the education space. And I think that is really interesting. It's written directly by Clayton Christensen.

And yeah, it was one of the better books from a strategy perspective to think about the space and where disruption might come from, and what disruption actually is. And then last, but not least, actually a very new one, which I'm reading right now, and which I, I really can't praise highly enough is the cold start problem by Andrew Chen. It's nothing to do with a tech directly. But it's how to build products with network effects.

And education being such a network space, where at the end of the day, social learning is a key part of learning. I think any product that genuinely wants to help people learn has to have a strong social aspect to it. And so the cold start problem has many different things to say about how to do that in a better way.

really appreciate your time. and your articles and predictions about the future of Ad Tech have really been eye opening to me. Well,