Welcome to Season seven of Ed Tech Insiders, the show where we cover the education technology industry in depth every week, and speak to thought leaders, founders, investors, and operators in the ed tech field. I'm Alex Salin. And I'm Ben Cornell. And we're both EdTech leaders with experience ranging from startups all the way to big tech.
We're passionate about connecting you with what's happening in EdTech around the globe. Thanks for listening, and if you like the podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review. For our newsletter, events and resources, go to EdTech insiders.org. Here's the show.
In this very special episode, we bring you a series of interviews held at the EdTech Asia Conference this year in Bali, Indonesia, EdTech Insider Fung do hosted all of these conversations with EdTech investors and CEOs from the fastest growing EdTech region in the world. Enjoy our conversations with Adriel Yang from Ascend Angels, John Tan from Debi Minan Kim from RIID, Raphael Noden.
From Amy Ryan O'Hare from Key Path Education, Ruben Yen from Curious Sandeep, and Gav from Kaizen Vest. Andan from Elsa. Enjoy. Welcome to EdTech Insiders podcast. My name is Fong and I'll be your host for today. And then I'm very excited to talk to you about your thoughts on like the trends and the insights in the EdTech space in the region.
'cause a lot of the listeners from SI insiders don't have a lot of knowledge and information about the ethics space outside, like the US or Europe market. So it'll be very interesting to hear about your work and your experience with the Asian market. For start, can you introduce a little bit about yourself?
What are you doing now? Thanks Fong for having me. My name is Adrian, born and raised in Singapore. You know, always had fun in school in the ironic sense. Um, was very notorious for skipping school and going off to do my own little projects on the side. I remember when I was in high school, I would cop over to the university to attend like public lecture talks on Joe politics.
You know, future materials and all the kind of interesting stuff that my high school wouldn't teach me in the classroom. And you know, I also got the privilege of studying at Yale College, which is the first liberal arts college in Singapore. And there, I think I really enjoyed education in the truest form.
Just being able to explore everything in the classroom and outside of the classroom. Um, and gotta go to many places to learn about all sorts of different things and cultures and people along the way. You know, at the start of college, you know, I was part of the founding team of an education social enterprise called Access Singapore.
We were building career exploration programs focused on low kids typically.
We initially started thinking we'll do like a two week bootcamp where we, you know, brought kids around to visit different companies. Hopefully they get inspired and then after that we send them off to do a one week work attachment slash job shadowing program. Mm. To just get a very like, tangible feel of what the future of work looks like.
And also to build like professional relationships. Because, you know, when we did research and spoke to different people, realized that there was a large social capital gap for students from low income, you know, disadvantaged backgrounds. So that was how we started. I think over the years we evolved, we started to run more module workshops.
We ran like project based learning programs that, you know, spend six months long. We fellowships, we, and the third year we. Funding to hire a full-time team. Mm-hmm. And that's why I have since stepped off, you know, the nonprofit operationally. And I now currently lead the investments team across Asan Angels and Ventures.
Asan Angels started out really as a group of founder operators looking to Angel invest back into the startup ecosystem across Southeast Asia. And very quickly over two years we grew to become of the largest angel networks in Asia. And we do everything from early stage growth stage, pre investments into funds.
We have about 80 plus investments to date off the back of that. We also, you know, operate and sponsor an early stage fund called OVO Ventures. So that's managed by ventures. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, and that's what, you know, I do in a nutshell, very excited to see some of you know, our portfolio companies in education technology here at Ad Tech Asia Summit.
So those include age Tutor, which is like a B2B tutoring, you know, provider standard education, which you know, is one of the largest tuition chains in Singapore. And they're also building an education tech product for primary school students, you know, and which is really about building 21st century skills for kids in Singapore and the region.
Wow. Very cool. And to clarify, you were talking about like the social entrepreneurship project. Yeah. And then you said you started like doing angel investing. Is that like connected or it's a just like two kind of like jobs that you interact with? I think that journey of starting to tip my toes into the world of venture investing happened because as I was building my nonprofit and I recognized that I was young, dumb, and not very sensible about how to build the best company.
Right. So yeah, I could sought out mentorship. Mm-hmm. So two people who sort of accidentally dragged me into the startup world. I think the first one would be Jeremy, who's currently the Chief of staff at Monville. Oh yeah. Yeah. I first met him to sort of pick his brain about how do you build a sustainable, scalable nonprofit because he built Conjunct Consulting, which is one the largest social impact organizations in Singapore today.
And yeah, over the years we worked on multiple projects together, including the Brave Southeast Asia Tech podcast. We launched a book featuring the top 10 podcasts we've had on the show, including partner Ian called, you know, the partner Nick Nash, Asia Partners, founding partner as well. And you know, even John, the founder of Yeah, sort of.
He sort of like roped me in and yeah, I had the opportunity to sort of go into venture investing. Then I think the other person would be John Tan. Um, the founder of, I initially met him because I was curious about education, technology and the use cases for, especially for low income students. And then over time, you know, I started learn more about John Tan's, like angel investing career.
And I was like, wow, John, how do I get started? Mm-hmm. So did my first angel investment in DO B and then that led to more and more deals. So John was very right in that once you start deploying capital, more deals would just show up automatically. So that's, I think those, those interesting two people sort of.
Kick started, you know, I think this slow immersion into like venture capital startup investing. Hmm. Wow. Very cool. Thank you for sharing about your background. I'm curious to hear the kind of investment trends that are you, you are seeing in Southeast Asia. Yeah. Especially like pre COVID, during COVID and like what are you Yeah.
Envisioning? Yeah. From 2023 and beyond. Yeah. So I mean, you know, I think there was a point during COVID where education technology was really hard. Yeah. Because schools were now forced to push classes online and students now had the luxury of attending education curriculum outside of, you know, the prescribed public, um, education curriculum.
So all sorts of alternative learning providers, um, started to pop up. Kids now had more time to attend, like, you know, language learning classes or, you know, I think coding schools or even like, you know, very exploratory project based kind of things as well. So, yeah, I think there was a massive surge in education technology funding and consequent to that was that there was a massive skill up of, you know, education technology companies.
Mm-hmm. You know, one might say it was not a thing after all because. Sustainably, right? I mean, if you have to hire like, you know, one person a day, 30 people a month, your company breaks at some point and you know, layoffs happen. Your economics do not hold steady or you know, constantly decrease because of that.
So yeah, we think we have seen that sort of layoffs across the board in some education technology companies. At a later stage. I think today we are also seeing a lot less interest in education technology funding. Mm-hmm. If someone was telling me that some report showed that there was like a 70% drop in do tech funding this year or the year before, I need to be fact checked on this.
Which thought. But I also saw I reading. Funding. Yeah. And if there was like a drop. Yeah. So a huge drop from 2022 to 2023. Yeah, a huge drop. I think there's also a few factors because of that, right? I think in Southeast Asia people often think of Indonesia as the largest market. So you know, when there was that search in education tech funding that were definitely a lot of people who invested in education tech and Indonesia massive population size.
But I think what has been demonstrated over the last two, three years is that from a cultural perspective, I think this market is more inclined towards educate rather than like education. So people are leaning more towards like educate, like, you know, entertaining content. You know, consumer brands and e-commerce have obviously done really well because of that.
Whereas I guess your test prep, um, folks have not been able to grow as sustainably. And you know, consequently we don't see that much like full on rounds in education technology in Indonesia. So yeah, I think that's what we've seen over the years. I think there's also a greater focus across the board in venture to look at B2B business models, which have much healthier unit economics.
Lower customer acquisition costs. Larger contract values, right? So we also see some level of that in education tech. I think Tutor is one company that focused B2 education providing tutors to like online.
So do you think that you would advise like companies building in the EdTech space to like consider the B2B model rather more than the B2C? Or what are the things that they need to consider between like the two models? I think, you know, like from a first principles perspective, understanding sending, what is it that education tag does that schools or you know, brick and mortar learning providers don't really do and don't really do well?
Mm-hmm. And then when you think from that perspective actually there isn't really that much opportunity, right? I mean, you know, like today if I wanted to learn English math, you know, there's so many like offline learning centers that I could go to. Yeah. Or I go online. And actually, if you think about it, human psychology such that people enjoy learning in a very social manner and they probably learn best in a very social manner.
And I guess that's why schools have formed. So I think that part is one piece is. You know, there's so many schools out there. So what are the needs of schools, right? What can you sell to them? Someone reminded me that, you know, one of the largest verticals within education historically is in procurement for schools.
And, you know, large companies, you know, even like your laptop providers and all that would splash a lot of marketing budgets on the procurement trade shows for schools. So in the same vein, I think, you know, B2B education tech companies can also look at what do schools need to buy? Like, you know, whether from a hardware or software perspective, like, you know, really understand the end customer here, what do they need mean?
You know, one obvious one is learning management, school management systems, right? I think that was a vertical that people were actively building products and companies. And the challenge with that I think has been that scaling regionally school management platform has proved fairly difficult. So I think, you know, there'll be consolidation through m and a where, you know, maybe the leading player in Singapore or Malaysia a in like Indonesia, Thailand, and then like a consolidate and go and live somewhere, right?
So I think that might. You know, be something we eventually see. Yeah. But I think the other part of the thing about it is that if you did B2C education, it was enough to have a very strong online brand go to market strategy. But you know, if you're gonna do B2B education, the relationships and you know, the ability to win over decision makers such as school leaders, government officials in schools, or you know, executives in private education groups become very important.
Yeah. So thinking about are you the right founder profile to build something like that becomes important as well. Mm-hmm. That's a very good point because I think with B2B, like, I guess like they will look at founder who have like established profiles, like the branding of it, right? Yeah. That's what schools would care more about.
Yeah. I mean, understanding how to incentivize school leaders and driving adoption within, you know, a school which is actually not a straightforward ecosystem of different stakeholders. Right? Yeah. Everyone has different incentives. I'm curious, like going back to what you said about everybody thinks that Indonesia is the biggest market Yeah.
Of EdTech in South Asia. Yeah. Has that always been the case? Or like how do you perceive the different trends in, I, I think it was market in South Asia, so I think two years ago, I think it was an extension of the logic that Indonesia is like the largest population size in Southeast Asia, and if I was to invest in education tech, I would invest in a country of the largest population size in the region.
I think fast forward two years, people have realized that. Market is more inclined towards like entertainment. Entertainment rather than actual education. Test prep. Yeah. Converse. I think people continue to see very strong interest in education in Vietnam. Mm-hmm. Whether it's in the tier one, tier two, tier three cities, you have different players building test prep solutions, leveraging technology.
Yeah. To increase access to education in Vietnam, I think similarly in Singapore, you know, people are now starting to. How they can leverage technology to scale their offerings. Because, you know, I think the education providers in Singapore tend to have very high standards just because of the sort of curriculum that the Singapore education system offers, as well as the quality of teachers that come out through the public education system.
Yeah. The natural question then becomes, how do you adapt that to a regional market in a cost effective manner? Do you use technology to enable that? Do you set up, you know, offline learning centers in different regional markets? One of our popular companies, again, in education is now figuring out which market in Southeast Asia to go after.
You know, especially with an education tech offering and coming from a traditional brick and mortar sort of setup. Wow. And you, from what you see, you find that Vietnam has like people focus more on education? Yeah. And like the, yeah. 'cause like I think being a Vietnamese, I find that like the biggest markets in Vietnam are like English learning.
Yeah. Like language learning and test prep. Yeah. 'cause the focus is so much on exam. Mm-hmm. And because that Yeah. Will determine a lot of the the different things in your life, right? Yeah. And I wonder if like in other regions, in other countries, in the region? Mm-hmm. It's similar because the entertainment part, I also have heard of it in Vietnam as well, in terms of like making learning fun or like you have to Yeah.
Like in terms of making it online learning, because. The consumption habit in online is not to learn. Yeah. Because people are still book smart. Yeah. Like you learn by going to a brick and mortar kind of like structures, you don't go online mm-hmm. To like consume content. Mm-hmm. So, because their online consumption is, is like scrolling social media or watching something fun.
Mm-hmm. So if you wanna enter like their consumption habit. Yeah. And the way that they are consuming content online, then you have to. Breach it. You can't just bring like a whole lecture online and expect people to consume it. Yeah. So I, I do see in Vietnam, like if you go the digital marketing route, for example, like you catch people where they are like, you do have to make content more of like entertainment.
But obviously that might not be the case if you sell to schools because they would be more formal and like, yeah. And then I think in general, like spending in education is. A big investment. Yeah. In Vietnam, like people care a lot about putting the money down for the kids. Yeah, yeah. No, I completely agree with you on those different points.
Right. I mean, I think the willingness to pay from a parent mentality is like very strong, very Confucius like, you know, Chinese culture I guess. Mm-hmm. I mean we see that as well. Like Singapore, there's a large Chinese population, so the, you know, parents mentality and their willingness to spend a huge amount of salary on education is just enormous.
So even though Singapore is a fairly small country, the market size for education becomes huge because on a per cap basis, people are willing to spend a lot more on education. Mm-hmm. And you know, salaries are also obviously much higher in Singapore than emerging parts of Southeast Asia. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean I think, you know, when we speak to different companies on the ground, speak to locals in Vietnam, definitely the sense we get is that the value of education and the importance of education and like socioeconomic mobility is very important and that's why people are willing to invest a lot of time, resources into it.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, even on the sort of ACU front we made an investment into, yeah, so they one of the largest, I think, audiobook players and Vietnam, I consider them a mix of both education and I think, I think something like. It shows that in Vietnam there is that really strong desire for education, right?
To read nonfiction type of books. I think those are the titles that have done really well on photos rather than the fictional stuff or the fun content. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I just find that in general, like in the tech space, have been a lot of like news articles on South Asia being the next like growing market.
Yeah. In the global landscape. Yeah. Plus I think people do have a love for learning. Yeah. It's like somehow rooted in the culture. Yeah. That it makes it like more, yeah. People just care a lot about education. Yeah. That makes things. Yeah. Better. And then I'm curious, like besides Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore, like the three markets that we talked about, are there any other insights that you have about other countries in the region?
Well, I mean, I think those have been the main markets where we have seen like education, tech, startups. Yeah. I mean, I've met one or two from Thailand or Philippines, but I wouldn't say I'm super familiar with education market and those companies. Mm. Uh, those countries. Yeah. And I think my last question would be for like people who are looking into investing in the ed tech space in South Asia.
Yeah. What are the things that you find that they should be looking out for? Considering like culture or values or, yeah, like consumption habits or what is it that people should be considering? I think if you look at it outside end, you know, the inclination is to see what business models have worked elsewhere.
I mean like maybe coding school has spoke about us and then trying to invest in the coding schools in Southeast Asia. But I think the challenge here is that, and obviously we have seen a few coding schools pop up in Southeast Asia, right? But you know, the challenge I think really is understanding whether there's real product market fit from a cultural localization perspective.
So that's the first challenge. And the second challenge is because it's gonna be labor service intensive, can that scale quickly across the country and then across the region, right? Because then you, again, each time scale education products or companies into another country, I think you have to go through a very painful like localization process.
Yeah. So, you know, I think those are, you know, two things to really like, think about. I think understanding how regional or global management teams are would be a big factor in that calculus of whether this company is something that can go regional or global at some point in time. Gotcha. Thank you so much.
And yeah, I think that concludes our interview and I think I look forward to chatting more and I think we'll learn more about the region as this progresses. And yeah, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, no thanks. Thanks for, and thanks for the great work you're doing to cover at Tech Asia. Thank you so much.
First of all, I just love to learn about who you are and do, and if you can give like a brief introduction. Yeah. The company and your background. Yeah. So I'm John, I'm CE. So what do does is we help kids to learn 21st century skills, real world ies, and also English language skills by playing facilitated online class in the Metaverse.
So the simple idea is we create these class, get kids to learn about real world like environmental literacy, climate change, financial literacy, and we manufacture opportunities for them to apply skills like critical thinking, collaboration, communication. And then on top of that, we work with the English teachers and of English to try to meet English focused outcomes.
Can you describe a little bit more about what these quest looks like? So, for example, we have very popular class called.
And either behind this quest is the kids tend to play the role of being an investigator, right? So they have to learn to read and discern information, tell the truth, and obviously all this well practicing. Skills, right? Like reading and listening, like critical campaign. And for the kids, they really enjoy it because it's like a game, right?
It's like a game, but digital and they get to solve with their friends collaborations. And so the idea behind each class is we need to look at engaging for the kids. We need to make sure that they have the opportunity to practice their first century skills. And we need to make sure that the English learning outcomes are met because that's what we want us to do, right?
So English language learning is a way for us to get into the schools. When you say kids, are they, what age range are they in? So right now we're mostly working with kids ages eight to 12.
Six. We pilot with students, so we just ran our first pilot with, uh, middle school or secondary school. So we're gonna up. Okay. I'm curious to know what inspire you to kind of like pick this problem to work on? Yeah. This started is I am an investor in tech startup, so that's something that I've been doing for 12 years now.
And I basically,
and I asked them, what do you hire for today? Recruiting and obviously academic, no one cares about how well a candidate is, what they care about,
adaptability, and I know that these are not skills that are being taught intentionally, so that's why I I, right. I also feel that these are the skills that will help young people make their way in the world. What's the point of, you know, memorizing a chemistry?
Age, and you know, I'm not the first person to say that. How do we move forward from that? Right. And what is important right now is the question that people to ask. I feel very strongly that what is important right now is it.
We have eliminated millions of jobs, but also created millions of new, new, mm-hmm. Jobs, right? That we dunno what these jobs are. So the best way to protect this for these unknown jobs of the culture is to put them skills. And how have you seen the rise of AI and new technology impact?
Building Quest in a metaverse. So actually yesterday I gave a presentation at Asia, right. And I actually created two deck. Mm-hmm. So the first deck I used generated ai. I basically copied.
Magic, which is AI for, and it's the feature magic, basically created a deck less than five seconds. And my point is that generated ai. Create a deck and last time that it takes for open Microsoft PowerPoint while we still taking kids. So I think need fundamentally think what is important and it's really too early to say what AI is capable of, right?
We're all still trying to grapple with, uh, not just the technology, but the ethics around that. But what we know for sure is that AI is gonna fundamentally disrupt the nature of work. And if that's gonna be the case now, it's very hard how we're gonna for AI enabled future. Right? Yeah. In terms of like the markets that you operating in, like do you just target people in Singapore or where from?
Yeah, so right now we.
So we're also actively trying to work with schools outside of Singapore. So actually just yesterday we announced our first partnership in the US with a nonprofit called Change. So is nonprofit on racism and bullying against Asian Americans. And so with the partnership, we co-designed the to Quest schools that act to change, but to raise awareness about bullying and cyber bullying.
And also, like I said, provide opportunities for kids to practice life skills like critical thinking and to.
So we're very open to partnerships. We're very open to working with like-minded educators. I think one of the biggest challenges for us is really how do we get
without knowing us and our purpose and mission and what we stand for. We're just another, so, uh, any sort of partnership that can help tell our why we started and why we think that the work we do is important, obviously helps. In terms of like the way that you perceive, because you're also an investor yourself, how do you see like the different trends in Asia?
Sadly, I, Asia is two, so
the, uh, so.
Now English language. Yeah. But then we're not helping kids with, you know, zero to get from to one. Yeah. And yeah, I think there are competi of the market. What we're trying to do is to make English language learning more engaging, uh, increase the motivation level of students, and also to get them to practice using the language in a much more natural context.
Right? Mm-hmm. Because I think English language learning is that manufactured you.
But kids see through that, right? And they, they don't like to learn English like that. Whereas in Adobe class, because they're playing a game and they wanna be part of the game, they're motivated to speak up, right? They're motivated to attempt to use to participate. Yeah, that's important. The other is test prep, and I'm very against test prep simply because I'm prep,
do test. I think schools are testing kids on the wrong things and I recognize the challenge, which is that skills like critical thinking and collaboration are very hard to test and measure. But then I always tell people in what gets measured not is worth.
Yeah, I understand. But we have to do something about it. Right. Really in this day. And when can give you a answer to most example? What the point getting that? Yeah. Uh, some of the, because so I'm from Vietnam and I think yeah, like as you have mentioned, like the majority, like the main dominant segments are English learning and test prep.
But I do understand why that there, because there's so much demand for prepping for a test. And I think it's in the education system because it's so exam driven. And even if trying to culture around like learning for yourself and being skills. Like the default kind of structure that they in is doing tests and like learning these things.
Like it's not a root cause to like those things. It's like a vitamin that I'm trying to give to people, not pain to like what they have to do on a day to day. And so thus like the test prep market, so big demand
bring more representation of. Like critical thinking skills, creative skills, all these soft skills. Yeah. How do you see it being more encouraged in the market? Like what can founders do? What can investors do? I mean, it's really hard
that I'm selling a bite, not a painkiller, but then it's all about perspective, right? It's not a painkiller right now because parents immediate goals are for their child to do as well as possible, or whatever national exam to take. But if you reframe context and 15 years
and you.
Employers from now tell, you know, this young person, I care about your favorite qualifications, right? Show me what you have done in the past. Demonstrate that you have created problem solving skills. Then it becomes a pain, right? And so what I'm selling is a painkiller for the future. The future, but not for the present.
And interesting. I recognize that that's the iron of this whole situation, that what I think is important. Most people don't think important. At least not right now. Mm. But I can't bring myself to sell test prep because to me, you know, selling test prep, knowing that it does very little to prepare young people for the future and taking time away from actually practicing and developing life skills, it's just not something that I can do.
But it's a struggle, right? Yeah. If I wanna build a profitable at tech startup that can scale quickly. Obviously you wanna sell a English and you wanna sell a painer, that solves a pain point today, not a pain point. You know? And it's just unfortunate that not just parents but educators, a lot of them are so, and yeah.
I find that very interesting in terms of like, yeah, like of course you can be making money quickly by, you know, selling the pain killer of what people need today. But then is that like the point of doing entrepreneurship? And it goes back to like why you exist and what's.
So first of all, would love to hear who you're, what you're doing at Reed and if you can tell the listener a little bit about re that'd be great. So I have been with three years and I was leader machine learning research team at we and the second half. So the second year and a half I've been the product owner of our signature product called Santa and now I'm overseeing in general.
So I'm currently serving as a VP of product at we, so I'm overseeing our company's product portfolio and how we'll leverage our AI technology related edge in students learning experiences. I don't think this is a like traditional or standard career path, but I think the reason why I was able to take leadership in product development was my understanding in AI and how the AI can impact the user.
Collection of data as a pipeline that can further improve the, that we provide a lot of.
There was some GAP AI research team and as I moved to the product side through Glue the teams together and before joining Weed I was a quantitative using machine learning models to trade financial assets. I worked investment bank and Hong and if you can give like the listener a little bit like brief introduction on what is, that would be great.
Okay. So yeah. Founded to get of three
inequality in.
Have been focusing on AI technologies first on target. The inefficiency using our tracing technology and tracing technology is basically about predicting whether students will get another question correct or not based on the student's past, um, interaction record on our product platforms. And therefore, we wouldn't recommend those questions, that the students will not have any learning effects or reduce their learning motivation or engagement or based on a lot of key metrics, like, like the difficulty of the content or.
Can you tell me a little bit more about the learner type that you target? Oh, so our oldest product called is primarily targeting for the Korea, Taiwan, and we're trying to expand into Southeast Asian markets as well in multiple exams, including focusing on tech.
And at the same time, we're trying to expand subjects and are looking into find more content providers so that they can curate their own content based on our adaptive learning system, on digital interface. In terms of like learner, like what age, what is the learning background? Yeah, so most of our learners in.
From high schools as well, because the standard of English proficiency or other language proficiency is increasing in general. So I think the lower pound of the age spectrum or this product, Santa is expanding as well. And I think it'd be better if we highlight the products that we're focusing on, products that are focusing on the US and the Latin American.
Mm-hmm. So there's another product called R test, and that platform helps students prepare for a and.
And the core value proposition of that platform is to shorten the mock exam duration. So we believe that students wanna diagnose their proficiency or level faster and more accurate, and we have our own recomme system to diagnose students more accurately and faster than a fixed exam format using our fast ca technology.
Fast ca technology is so fast, is fast, and
so.
So if the students responded to earlier questions, well then the questions would probably get more difficult and vice versa. And we have our own internal technology that is much better than the other open source solutions. And we were able to reduce the test time more than within, like from 20 to 30% of the test time of the original tests.
We can predict the student's score level proficiency of strengths and weaknesses in a much shorter period of time. And in much more detail, our test is the product that primarily in the US and Latin US market. Right. And of course, since it's Target, it's primarily targeting A TAT and digital a t. The target customer segment would be the like high school students in the states.
Okay. Why did you guys choose the US market or like Latin American market specifically? Actually, the, our test product is only focusing on the US right now. Mm-hmm. But in Latin America, we're communicating with several regional governments to provide ai. To manage their students in multiple subjects across multiple classes.
How have you seen the rise of ai? Was the company like founded prior to the founded? Like before the prior, before the rise of chat GT, or like how did it evolved with the rise of.
As a whole, we were largely focusing on students' interaction dataset, which may not be the format of conversation. So it's not about history, it's more about how long the students can time on which question and what type of response that students submitted. So it could be a, A correct response could be an incorrect response, and if it's an incorrect response, there could be multiple choices, right?
There could be multiple incorrect responses. So based on those interaction record. Our platforms, user interface and user experiences. We try to extract the insights of the student knowledge, representation and make their learning process faster and more efficient. So previously this product, Santa did not have any chatting interface, but as the generative ai, their standard for their maturity improve, like especially last year, we are currently using generative AI technology to help answer students' questions and also, uh, improve the existing educational content quality and further personalize those contents to like tailor design the students' curriculum in our platform.
I'm curious to know like. Well, how do you measure the success of a product? I think it depends a lot on different industries. Mm. So different applications would have different KPIs, I guess. Yeah, of course the ultimate API would be like profit or revenue, but right beneath those top level APIs, I think choosing the metric or the core, uh, the key performance indicator would depend on the products strategy and road roadmap.
And in our case, we focus a lot on students retention and engagement and ultimately the.
Diverse needs of different users. And I think it's really important and somewhat difficult to weigh among those different values. So for example, if students, if our users are preparing for a test, then the core focus might be improving the score rather than improving the fundamental proficiency of the student.
So for example, like a lot of Korean users don't, uh, prepare for exam to improve their English, so it's just another test score. So they're focused on improving their scores, but in Japan,
their proficiency. They have different references. Yeah. So for Japanese users would focus on the ultimate learning game while Korean users wanna efficiently increase their score in a period of time. Okay. And I think as to wrap up our conversation, I would love to know, like from a product perspective as well as like your background in technology, how do you perceive like the trends of technology evolving with like and impacting the way that you are building product in the education space?
I think AI is definitely getting more interest from mass media, but in a lot of products or user experiences, they stay at the level of fun factors.
A trials. So they tried for once or twice and very few use cases have a meaningful degree of retention. So very few use cases from AI maintain meaningful amount of retention, I believe. And I think it's the homework or assignment for AI research engineers and the product developers to make actual impact outta it.
So like it cannot only focus on the fun part because if it's just fun without any learning.
Has to capture the fund factor to increase their engagement and retention. But at the same time, at some point the user must recognize himself or herself improving on another subject that matters to the user. So of course there must be some compromises, but it'd be critical to strike the right balance between transforming these ai, generative AI technologies into a fun factor.
Yes. And effective means, or learning at the same time. I'm curious to know why you say that the majority, or like the interest on AI is for fun? Only. The things that I've been seeing is like helping you like personalize the way that you learn. Correct. Your answer, correct your understanding. Like I do see it being used for the learning element.
Yeah. So I'm curious to know like, why did you think that it's, it's focusing more on. Example, there are multiple obstacles. Those generative AI need to pass. Mm-hmm. To become to meaningfully replace existing rules and responsibilities in education domain and from subject. Example, the issue of hallucination is much more severe Yeah.
Than the other subjects because as opposed to language learning, the knowledge representation in mathematics is more higher. Yeah. And if something goes awry in the middle, then the student cannot properly jump to the next one. Yeah. Jump to the next level. But that's a bit different in other subjects.
Yeah. But I would say like those subjects that have less hierarchical structure, such as like language learning. So one thing is the issue of hallucination. A lot of people are using chat to look up some information or get some fresh ideas. When I see people preparing for exams or like actually conduct research, I don't think they like rely on chat to a meaningful extent.
Mm-hmm. So like chat is definitely being used for some translation, summarization, brainstorming, and that it's definitely serving as a role of search engine as well. But it's definitely.
Real human beings for a while. Yeah. So for example, I think I shared this incident in my panel discussion here, is that when we use RAW to answer our product users questions, only 38%.
Relevant, both relevant and correct to the user's questions, both relevant and correct? Yes. Both relevant and correct. Only 30, 30% of the responses. Therefore, we wanted to raw, please don't like mention like G itself, but just try to, um, gt Yeah. As a No no, just try to wrap it as a large language model. Yeah, yeah.
Like open source large. So Yeah. So while the open source large language models like scored about like 38%, our content experts try to improve upon that openly available large language models. Yeah. And I definitely think that this is something that like how humans and tools can collaborate right. To like improve on the existing, because we can't, I think it's not a productive mindset to say like, how can we beat chat or how can we beat the open source lms?
Right. Right. Like how can we improve upon exactly the Exactly. And how can we learn faster to like get to the speed of it, right. Learn with it. I mean the more we experiments with like chat and, and all those like.
The weaknesses and strengths of these generative ais as compared to the traditional players in the education field. So like we have parents, we have friends, we have teachers, we have students, and AI is something just totally different from those four players in the, although AI can like partially satisfy some subset of those players roles, but they definitely have their weaknesses in terms of their physical presence.
And the physical presence is of utmost importance in education, I believe. Mm-hmm. So that part wouldn't be easily overcome in the following. Actually, this is a very bold prediction, so let's not mention it, but I think it's definitely, um, important obstacle for the. For example, the GPP doesn't provide synchronous communication.
It's still turn-taking audio-based communication. Mm. So for example, like it's not similar to how people call with each other because they like make sounds to take his or her own turn. Yeah. But like in this interface, like one has to finish their sentence or finish their message and for the next one to, yeah, yeah.
For the next player to play. And all those types of different physical limitations make human beings roles still important in the field of education and. I think plus more like there are things that human beings will still excel almost forever in ai and there's also a lot of parts that the AI will never excel in terms of like their memory.
They can memorize and they can, like their capacity to communicate with students would be much more scalable than a single human being. Like a single parent, single teacher or single friend. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's a machine. Yeah. It can be ubiquitous, it has like different type of privacy issues, but there are things that you don't want to a human being, right?
If you can have your own AI that doesn't tell your secret to anybody else, then I think there can be some new type of relationship that can be built between a user. And so it's something D but not better. All aspects of education and learning. Uh, thank you so much for sharing the insights about the, especially like, I think the technology part because I think you understand a bit more about like what the technology can do and how that applies in the learning and education context.
Yeah, and I think I look forward to.
Welcome to EdTech Insider podcast. We are very happy to have you here, and I'm very excited to have our chat today about what you do and your company and your thoughts on the EdTech industry within the region or global for the listeners to understand more, maybe you can share a little bit about yourself and a little bit of your journey, like starting Amy.
Fantastic. Thank you so much for inviting me and it's a pleasure to be here chatting with you. So my name is Rafael. No, one of the founders and CE of Amy. Amy is an AI private tutor for math. So what we've done is to take the most effective way of learning, which is private tutoring and made that scalable.
So we take all of the key kind of things that a good private tutor does. And, you know, make a logical way of basically providing that. So some of those are things like understanding why students make mistakes and automate filling the knowledge gaps. We give them really specific feedback to let them understand what they've done wrong and why.
Mm-hmm. And then of course, you know, we automate fill those knowledge gaps as they learn and, you know, give them the most effective path to reach whatever learning outcomes that to reach. Mm-hmm. And we've been working on this for many years now from before, AI being the cool thing in education or anything else.
And as a result of that, have developed a bit of a different and unique approach to this, which is allowing us to get better results because our system doesn't hallucinate like things like gt. Mm-hmm. And we have a much better kind of a human testing system built in, which allows us to make sure that, you know, students are getting the best learning and not ever being taught anything incorrect.
Mm-hmm. That's really cool. And I think later we'll get more in depth into like the AI part and especially I think thinking about like whether like the impact of ai, because it has. Talk about talk in a very like, explosive way. Mm-hmm. But at the same time, there are a lot of people who have worked on it like even before, you know, March, 2023, when like the rise of tragedy gt.
Right. Maybe if you can backtrack a little bit on like how did you get started on this journey? Like why were you curious about this problem? Sure. Absolutely. So I am actually a medical physicist by training. Wow. And I used to work in medical research, so I guess good ethics and everything was, uh, core of my education and, and early work.
I went back into the university after the financial crisis because the company I was working for shut down and there was no real jobs in the RD sector for a while. And so I went back to the university and I started working there, doing tutoring and ended up doing a lot of curriculum development work.
And that meant that I really had to think very hard about why is it that students Australian to learn this? And I redeveloped the whole sort of lab part of the physics curriculum for the university and then the math department. So what I did and asked me to redo one of their courses, which said, okay, sure.
And eventually this led to me lecturing. And during that whole process I spent a lot of time thinking about why is it that students find this so hard? You know, these are very smart students getting people and, but they're struggling. And I had a couple of key insights. You know, I did some private tutoring and from that I learned how quickly I help student.
Failing. Failing and how quickly I can help a student who was just passing, getting an A. And you know, I realized that this was something that really had a big impact. But most students couldn't have it either because they couldn't afford it, but more often that there just weren't enough good tutors available because there are good tutors and there are tutors and really makes a difference in terms of, you know, the, the outcomes.
When I was lecturing, I had another really important insight, which was that students would come to me and they might say to me, look, I don't understand what you're teaching. Mm-hmm. And my natural question was, well, were you in my class and did you pay attention? And that'd assure me they had, and you know, and I went home and I looked at the book and I tried to watch the videos.
Well then what? How can I help you? So I look at their work and normally within 10 seconds I could see exactly what was wrong. And I say, look, no, no. You completely understand what I'm teaching. Can't get right answer and it doesn't work is because something you shoulda learned three years high school.
And this is often the problem, this is, this is what makes math so hard for most students is that it's very hierarchical. Right. You cannot do calculus unless you know, algebra and trigon and addition in fraction scaffolding. Exactly. And so everything builds on itself and the way our education system works just adds more stuff on top all the time.
Yep. And students naturally develop gaps in their knowledge. They were sick or they were distracted, whatever. And forget things. And the only way to effectively address that is by, you know, diagnosing what each particular student needs and filling those gaps when it's relevant. Mm-hmm. Right? If you give a university student a primary school textbook and say, go through this again, they'll hate you.
It's a waste of their time. They need three things outta there. Right. They won't do it. So you need to actually say, look, right now, you need the skill to be able to do what you wanna do.
Why you what I that this knowledge gap. Students struggle and why private tutoring is effective. And so this is what we then used as the foundation of how A works. It's always about here's the problem you're trying to solve, and as you solve it, we understand exactly what the specific skills are you need.
We give you feedback and explain it, and then we'll go underneath and we'll fix that underlying problem and we'll go into the underlying problem. So you might be trying to do something in calculus and if need be Amy, we'll take a couple of steps to understand that you actually dunno how to add to numbers together.
We'll teach you that and then build it up until you can actually solve what you're trying to, so to what you're learn. Wow. In the technology itself with Amy mm-hmm. How, how could it identify that you are, this is like the missing part of your understanding? Yeah. Like just through interaction with the ai.
Yeah. So one of the things that we did was we did a lot of testing on every product in the market with students. We watched them use that, we asked and, and we basically tried to eliminate everything the students didn't like and said, how do we make that better? And so, you know, one of them is not understanding what's wrong and why they got made the mistakes.
So that's why we get very specific feedback. But to answer your question specifically, the reason why we know why our students made a mistake and what that means about their understanding is that we've built effectively a giant mathematical model which contains every bit of mathematics the student needs, and how it's all interrelated and what any step of any process and what common misconceptions are and what that means about misconceptions you have, et cetera.
And so we have a complete model of that and understand all those connections. And this is why we can be really specific and traverse it. And this is also why we are very confident in our model that we don't have the problem for hallucination because each one of those is actually traceable. We know exactly what that means.
Mm. It's not simply based on a lot of students made this mistake. And then also either this, no, no, we don't use that statistical model for our fundamentals. We actually use a very direct causal link based on mathematical truth. Mm. And what kind of audience that you are targeting? Like what age range are they in?
Or do they, do you target specific levels of learning? So we cater for K through 12. Mm-hmm. And actually a bit beyond that, we have some customers in the polytech space, but certainly the sort of from the senior end of primary school, right through school is, is our sort of key target. Yeah, we, so we, we target that generically.
We have products that are offered direct to schools, and we're just launching the direct to consumer products as well, so, mm. Okay. Got a few products out on the market. We're just starting to push those out now. Okay. Yeah. And I'm guessing that you, your customers and end users are based in New Zealand? We have users based in New Zealand, but we have them based across 15 or so different countries as well.
Oh, okay. Yeah. So in terms of like business development, how do you think about like, launching your market? Because I, I am assuming each market might require a different way of Yeah, absolutely. Interact. So we have, yeah, a team of people and they, they do research. We do a bunch of stuff to find possible customers, do research on the data around their country.
We do some testing to see how the market responds. And sometimes we've been very surprised that there are markets that we didn't think would give a lot, and they've had really, you know, enthusiastic responses. And so we've said, okay, let's go there. Mm. And so this has kind of driven our go to market and our international expansion has kind of been based on where there's the enough pull for the product.
Oh, okay. Yeah. And where have you seen like the most attraction from? So right now we've seen a lot of interest coming out of the Middle East and Africa. And you know, that may not be an obvious good market for us, certainly, but we found that there was a lot of interest and there's a lot of, you know, there are drivers for that.
There's the technological development, having their economic growth and also a lot of government pushed towards modernization in. That just results in there being an eagerness. And a lot of companies don't target that because it's not in the normal roadmap. And so we've found a lot of success going to to those markets.
What about markets within like the Asian region such as Southeast Asia, east Asia, or, so right now we are in Singapore only, and the reason is that we've targeted primarily English speaking countries, but now we've actually just hired our first business development person in the region. So I imagine that over the next few months we'll be expanding to a number of other countries.
And do you think that the language will be a huge factor in countries that don't speak English with when they use Amy? Yeah, so I think learning math, especially in early age, in your native language is important. Mm-hmm. Because it just takes out that barrier of translation. So we will offer Amy in other languages as soon as we can, but obviously there's a bit of an investment for that.
So we're just not quite ready for that. Mm. So right now, you know, we target English speaking schools as as a thing. Mm-hmm. But I hope that very soon we'll be able to also offer that in local languages in other countries. That's really awesome. And I would love to ask, because you were mentioning that previously Amy was using AI like.
Even before like AI become this hot topic. Yeah. In education that we see now, has there been a shift in the way that you do product development? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like any tech company, we need to keep up with the tech that's available. And so over time we have taken on new technology that's come out.
We're always looking at the latest things coming outta place, like Google, et cetera. And we use, you know, generative AI systems extensively now as a company for various tasks, but also including part of our product development. But we still always have human verification. So we take it, abstract it, and then build it in rather than just letting it run wild so that we have that, that absolute assurance about the quality of what's been taught.
Mm. But I think like, I would love to ask more specifically in the way that you develop the AI model to interact with the students. Has there been any changes or significant like improvement in the way that you built from a user interactive point of view? Nothing that's on the market uses that directly.
We do have an experimental system internally, which actually runs on a very carefully moderated and controlled system of GPT. We haven't publicly released that, but it's something we've played with. So we know that we can use that as a. Part of the sort of agent and experience within our system. We may release it at some point.
Right now, it's sort of there something just to play with. But yeah, we want to always figure out the best way of doing stuff. And so we'll decide if we wanna release that once we have enough confidence in it and if, if we see that adds a significant advantage to students in their learning. Mm, very cool.
And I think as we zoom out from our conversations as a founder working in like AI in ed tech, what kind of trends or insights you have about this industry that you find is interesting? Yeah, good question. Having been here for a while, I think it's been really interesting to see what's happened over the sort last decade or so.
Mm-hmm. You know, certainly the pandemic brought the industry into the spotlight. Yeah. The good, the bad, and the ugly, unfortunately. Mm-hmm. And I think, you know, the good thing about it is that it's made that shift and put it into everyone's mind. So EdTech is now a thing that's no longer will it happen, but when Mm, I think so many people had bad experiences with poor quality products that were on the market at the time that they were forced to use, that there's a bit of a pullback from it.
But I think the momentum that started in terms of the transition towards using technology. Is a good thing and we're gonna forget about those bad tools and start to use actually effective ones and then that's gonna become a key part of the future of education. So, mm. I think, you know, EdTech may be having a bit of a downturn right now.
It's gonna come back much stronger force very soon as the sort of mainstream adoption happens because of good products and better outcomes rather than by force. But that's gonna happen Absolutely now because in some people's minds they understand what's possible, you know? And that movement has started so, mm.
And I, I'm curious, like within, like in New Zealand, how do you find like the ed tech market has progressed or, mm-hmm. Like for example, I was reading Holland IQ for example, like Southeast Asia, top 50 startups, ed tech startups. And they were talking about like the different categories within EdTech that the region focus on.
For example, like within South Asia there's a lot of focus on test prep. Yeah. And tutoring. And there's less on like workforce and skills development in the like later stage. 'cause I go to a school in the US and mm-hmm. I find the EdTech market. In the US you almost never find like test prep the way that I think like Vietnamese market focus so much on like getting amazing score and like going so much in education and yeah.
I wonder like how is it in your country's market and how do you find it evolving? I think that's a really good question actually. That's a really interesting one. And I think the products and the way they develop reflect the way education is perceived, right? Yeah. And I think Vietnam, like a lot of Southeast Asian, or actually East Asian countries as well, are very Hess oriented.
Yes. You have that one exam that kind determines Yeah, exactly. Life and you know, for better or for worse, that's what it is. And therefore the products are gonna help people to achieve that because that's what they wanna buy and that's what they're best in. And that's like where the big market is, right?
That's where the big market is. That's where the market is, right? There's, yeah, because the demand is high. Yeah, exactly. And so in New Zealand we don't have that. And so therefore test prep isn't really a thing. You need to do reasonably well at school and then you'll go to university. Yeah. It's not a, if you get blah mark in this exam, then you can go into this university, otherwise you know your life.
And so I think that's really good. But it means that, you know, test prep isn't really a thing. And I think the other thing is that there's a lot of focus on K through 12, so school level education and it comes, you know, across the core subjects. But you know, there's also a very cool product that's focused on financial literacy.
Yeah, yeah. Because we understand that this is actually a really important skill that a lot of young people don't have, actually, a lot of people don't have. And so that's now, you know, become very successful. Very popular is the idea.
As a key topic that you need to learn. Mm-hmm. It's not part of the core curriculum, but this tool kind of nice integrates the classrooms, allows teachers to teach that and integrate it with what they do. And I think, you know, the New Zealand education market is quite open, so it's very unregulated and it's, the schools have a lot of autonomy.
Mm. So it's actually quite easy to go in there and work with teachers to do product development. So I think it, wow. The result is that there's been a quite a strong growth of ed tech because there aren't a lot of barriers to get started. It is, however, uh, because of its autonomy and its unregulated nature, you cannot push a product through the ministry that'll go to everyone.
You have to work on a school by school basis. So the growth side of things, like more decentralized? Yeah. It's completely decentralized. So every school kind of acts on its own. They decide what products they wanna use, and so you can sell well to whoever you have contact with, but you're not a nationwide contract because that's against the way the policy works.
Which is very different to places like Singapore where, you know, more centralized. You, you go through M OE and they approve it, and then all the schools use it. And so then it changes the way the dynamics work. Well, I guess it allows more room for like experimentation and Yeah. Customization depending on school.
Yeah. And so it allows, it's, it's fantastic as a test bed, it's great for, you know, early development and stuff. To also understand that it's a small market so you can develop stuff but also understand that you have to be an international company to succeed. So better internationalization and localization and adaptation to different markets because
Wow, that's very insightful. 'cause I also like, I just don't really know much about the New Zealand market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's really interesting. 'cause I find that a lot of the time, I think sometimes, like especially in the last bit of like the past, I don't know, 10 months when like the boom of chat GBT and I think in the US market there were a lot of products of AI coming out.
Mm-hmm. But I think in terms of like, it could be that we are living in a tech bubble. Yeah. That like really we have to look at, you know, the education system and how do we integrate all these tools and new technologies in the, almost like. Solving, solving the boring problems, you know? Yeah. Because sometimes text feels very exciting and we think of like different solutions, like creative solution about are we solving the problems right in front of us and mm-hmm.
Integrating into the education system. Yeah. And I think this is part of what I was talking about. You know, there were a lot of bad products that got pushed out during the pandemic, which sounded great, but weren't necessarily based on good pedagogy or good principles. And I think over time, hopefully that'll get pushed out by things that are actually doing good things in terms of student results that are actually helping students to become more engaged in the topic rather than just, you know, doing whatever the, the short term outcome is that they help teachers to become better teachers.
Mm-hmm. Because in the end, that's actually a really key thing, right? Mm-hmm. Teachers are an incredibly important part of education, and they hopefully will be for a long time, but we need to empower them, right? Mm-hmm. It's one of the few industries where data isn't really being used to drive better outcomes.
Yeah. And every other industry's really adopted that, but we're not really giving teachers good data because education doesn't have particularly good data. And yeah, again, one of those things that's really important for us is to actually say, look, how do we learn. And give teachers the data they need to do a better job of being teachers, you know, so that they can be empowered to teach better.
Yeah. And how do we take away a lot of the mundane work that no teacher wants to do? You know, marking, analyzing, report, writing. There's no need for human to do that. AI can do that way better. They get it done and then the teacher can think about, how do I make an inspiring class for my students rather than, I've just spent the entire week in marking assignments.
I'm exhausted. I'm just gonna do whatever I can come up with as I walk into the classroom. Right. So I think technology is a tool to empower better learning is really important. Mm-hmm. You know, and, and one of those things will come through empowering teachers with information so they know what to teach and who to teach.
Giving them the times so they can be human and do good classes. And of course, you know, actually giving students what they need, not Yeah. What's a fun toy but doesn't really teach you. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well thank you so much for sharing with me about the product, the company that you are building, and it's like, I'm very excited to see like with maybe the market going back up in the next few years and how your products gonna evolve with the market and mm-hmm.
Yeah. I think it's an exciting time to like think more about like how humans and tools can work together to empower education and especially Yeah, share your knowledge about what you share about like New Zealand market and more like localized knowledge. Mm-hmm. So thank you very much for your time. I think I learned a lot about from our conversation today.
Well, thank you so much. Very thorough. Enjoyed it and yeah.
Thank you for joining me in our conversation, EdTech Insiders today. Very happy to meet you at EdTech Asia. Mm-hmm. And just to start our conversation, I would love to ask if you can share a little bit about who you are and what made you venture into the EdTech world. So thank you for this opportunity.
I'm very much, uh, in love with EdTech for a long time. So this is, uh, where I'm, so, my name's Ruby, I'm the founder and CEO at Curious and at Curious, we building an app or we have people to write letter and get audience better so we can think of like a baby between Sub site and TikTok. Yeah, and there's a lot of content for professional learning and development on Curious.
We launched six months ago. Uh, we have a community of 10,000 people who love learning and writing about professional ideas and professional learning and development there. That's a brief background of what I do right now, but I've spent the last 10 years in the confluence of education, AI tech, so like Elsa and Media Tech as well.
And I just love the space of tech for a long time because I find it so meaningful to work on and solving problem, helping people to learn and become better in their life, in their work. So very meaningful. Also, opportunity education.
I'm curious to know, uh, because you have had a lot of experiences in ed tech, have your interest in the problems evolved? Yes, definitely. In earlier days I was interested in, you know, K12 first life. My, the first business I co-founded was a learning center secondary and primary kids to learn English and math.
And then later on I was also interested into, in the professional learning and development language learning. That's why I joined Alpha AI app for learning English. Mm-hmm. And then now the learning classes that we have a curious, is a lot less formal is about learning to an invisible skill, right? So mm-hmm.
The learning that called invisible learning. Learning is not very traditional learning. Like you go to school or you get courses. Invisible learning is that you do something and you learn in the process you don't even realize. And I believe writing is one of those things. So you're a writer, you know that you learn so much in the writing process.
Yeah, yeah. Right. And you don't really look at it, oh, this is my education, but, but if you do it long enough, you realize it's one of the best thing you do to learn. Mm. Uh so for me, I believe writing is one of the best thing you can do to learn in your life continuously. It's a lifelong learning skill.
There's a lot of research showing that people who write back. Have better income, better performance, better memory, more creative. So there's a lot of benefits to writing, and I want to be a part of bringing this love of writing to everyone and turning into like a, a habit. And our slogan is called Bringing Sexy Back Writing.
But the, the true mission is to bring that love of writing back that for everyone and help them develop that skill over their lifetime, become better professionals and think of life. So yeah, I I definitely resonate with the writing piece because, uh, I didn't engage in writing before. Yeah. But then once I start, you just become like, it just makes everything more sharp.
Exactly. And it's, it's such a, it's a very brutal exercise. Yes. Like when you have to so tough. It's really, really hard and challenging, but it's rewarding in the long term. Yes. Yeah. If you can push through like the times that it's really hard. Yeah, exactly. So that's what I do. I just make, try to help to make writing a more enjoyable process so that people don't have to go through a really challenging time.
Right. So they can get through the feeling of, oh, writing is such a great thing to do for living and for, for learning. I'm curious, uh, to learn more about curious. Thank you.
So I'm, I'm assuming that you are targeting more professionals. Professionals, yeah. And they are, are they located all over the world? The end goal is to become a global network, but in early days we are very focused in Vietnam. Okay. And, uh, and even earlier days now, we are focusing on the professionals in.
Entrepreneurship vertical. So there are certain specific verticals that you focus on? Yeah. And what made you pick an app as the solution to solve this problem? Yeah. At the moment, I'm sure. Yeah. There's many ways to, to do this, right? And the thing is, modern people, they only live our phone almost 16 hours per day.
Right? Except for the time. And so if you wanna build something that have habit, it should be something that they already have that habit. So. Writing. You can write on the notebook and write computer, but I wanna work with the form because of the habit. It's more accessible to a lot of people as well. Not everyone has a laptop, by the way.
Yeah. A lot of people have have a form. Right. And also our thesis in writing is that if you can write very concisely, it help you to become a better thinker, clearer thinker. And so to write on, on the phone course you to be very short and simple and concise. Mm. Write wrong. Right. If you wanna write wrong, you have to write computer.
And so the form of writing in concise writing and concise writing, you have to become concise thinking thinker, much clearer thinker, and much clearer communicator as well. Mm. That's very interesting because I, I don't love writing on my phone. Yeah. But it is like, it's a issue that you, you have to be like anything short that you just have to be very like, concise, snappy, or like punchy, yeah.
Capture. It's also very, very friendly to your audience. Excuse. Yeah. Yeah. To be honest with you, nowadays, no one wrong
content. As writer, sometimes we are very proud that we can write a long document or a long article. Right. But the problem is that the people can zoom it many wrong. Mm-hmm. So it's so, so these, wow. So I've done some research and typically nowadays mostly Zoom reading on, on the phone, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they give you about 15 seconds, 10 to 15 seconds to scan through your content and they decide whether they wanna read and then if, uh, they like to averagely they one to two minutes to read your content. So I'm very sorry to say that even your 1000 words long form article only get two minutes of attention.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's the brutal reality of the modern internet nowadays. So what I'm trying to build is to connect between writing and reading. So the concise form head writer to become better communicator, more clear, simple. And then the, on the consumer side, they can really good. I am curious to know in terms of how technology fit into like the product development and your like overall goal to help people write and think better.
Like is the technology, is this like for social learning or is the technology like embedded in the way that helping people, right, and think Yeah, that's a great question. So technology is definitely like a huge matter to enable this experience because our product is an app, right? It's basically a, there three elements of technology influence.
Number one is design of experience, right? So the product design is social learning is uh, if you go into the Curious app, you see a lot social elements. We're human, we learn in our group and we socialize. Just beauty in reading alone, but also a beauty of the great beauty in reading and kind of like having ideas mouse and machine people, right?
And so that's number one. Number two is element really powerful nowadays. So we a lot AI power tools.
So you can write without an AI tool, right? You can write a post or you can write a series. But if you wanna use the AI tool to help you, then there's a summarized function where you can put a long form article or long form content, and then it can turn into a very concise piece of content. You can speak to write, because a lot of people have great ideas, but they just don't have kind of sit down, write, how about speak it out?
And then the AI will turn the unstructured speech into concise content and then this ideation. So you have some idea, but you wanna kind of have more ideas to support what you're thinking about. And you can idea AI as well. And then after all of this, you can also use the AI to help you to write better headlines, the copies.
So there's a lot of AI tools that we build and enable people to write macro faster and more friendly to the audience. So that's the number two elements of the technology is AI empowerment. And number three is about design, right? So nowadays people are used to looking at Instagram and TikTok and all this very beautiful images, aesthetic videos, right?
So just asking people to read normal texts, to be honest, is very boring, very dry, unless that person is like super leader, right? Most people just don't have the tension. And also it's. To reach just long rock of click. And so that's why we trying to make our app a lot more beautiful. Like we see element of colors and design.
So there certain, you know, you can add images and stickle and to make it very, very easy to people to consume, adding emojis and that sort of thing. And then we're building a lot more features that help people to turn text into beautiful elements of design without having to do any design. Mm. So it's a right, you don't wanna do design, you just wanna share your ideas.
And so we build tools that can help you make your content beautiful without having to do design. So those are three things, right? The social experience, then the AI empowerment to help people to drive better, faster, easier to. Beautiful. Making ideas. Beautiful. Those are the three things that is so important for us as a technology product to develop and try to achieve our mission of getting more people to write and to read.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's super cool. I wonder if you are trying to target very specific types of writer. Yeah. Like the ones who write like maybe on the internet and like you, maybe you fo Is that that you focus a lot on like writing in this day and age? Yeah. We focus on the people who write to share the professional knowledge because there's so many people who write, there's 600 million blocks, right?
There's a lot. We cannot try to serve everyone in the beginning, so we try to focus on the group who right to share the professional knowledge because those are the content that has very high values. So many people who wanna learn from other professionals who their peers, and also people who are more experienced and that learning can come through.
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we focus on that. Mm-hmm. Because then we realize there's also a lot of people who write as a hobby. So there's, you know, act, there's some people who write poetry. Mm. Yeah. Not a lot, but we see that. And some people who write jobs just to entertain is fun. Yeah. So we see more people with different diversity, but we still wanna focus on the professional learning context.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Thank you for sharing about like, very, a lot of details about your product. Maybe we can zoom out a little bit in thinking about like, how do you see curious fitting into the bigger ed tech pie in Vietnam? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So curious is a part of lifelong learning, professional learning, what I share earlier, invisible learning, kind of.
Yeah. But we, we really wanna focus on professional learning
that a lot of values for society, for people, companies as well. From your like, research and experiences, do you find, how do you perceive the growth of like, investment and expenditures in professional learning? Like what? Professional development? I don't have specific number. Like this number is very hard to find.
There's no, no way we can really get a real on this. Let's start from global first, right? Yeah. Globally, we're spending on professional learning and uh, employee training. Upskilling is $4 billion. That's a lot. I think that's higher than the GD of Vietnam. I think so. I think is three something billion dollars.
Yeah. So it's a research saying that companies who invest in employees learning will. Business outcome, that profit and particular, so I'm sure business are very aware of having to spend money on employee upskilling and training In Vietnam, we see more of that, but there's also challenges of the people who are in charge of learning and development, being able to get resources and training.
Mm. Yeah. Yeah. And especially during the current economy. Right? Yeah. I see a lot of companies freeze their, yeah. Professional development. The problem with professional learning is it's very hard to measure outcome fast and directly, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So would you say that you target more you, your strategy would be more B2C?
Yes, exactly. People who inherently like love to learn. Yeah. Because you know that in Vietnam, people love learning, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's very funny in some of the conversation they have with global companies, right? And they say they have training for different countries, but in employees, and they say in Vietnam, they call us the aggressive learners.
And that is actually, I'm proud. I'm proud of that. Mm-hmm. Because Vietnam, Vietnamese are very eager to learn. And that's why I choose Vietnam, go the B2C route. Yeah. And they're willing to adopt new learning products and new experience, tech savvy. And the B2C route can always lead to the B two. If we build products.
Lot of people love it. They'll come by and tell their people in the company or the HR or the L&d person or the boss. Right. And so that's gonna be the little part that we gonna know. B2b. Yes. I just have a like a few questions left in terms of maybe you'll have experiences in your past. Tech journey and working in, uh, different markets or like other problems.
Mm-hmm. And how do you perceive, like when you expand curious to other region or countries, like what would be the things to consider? Like whether to expand or like what strategies to take? Yeah. For me, from day one when I feel curious, our vision is to be a global product. There's no reason why we just limit ourselves in Vietnam.
But to be global, we have to be very strong in one place, first Vietnam. Yeah. And the expansion plan is to go to where there's a lot of people who can adopt this product, there's a demand for it, and they're willing to pay for it. Mm. And so, yeah, I'm looking at US market. I'm looking at rising Asia markets like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, but there's no, there's no limit to us expanding.
We just need to build a very good product focus on one market, which is the whole market. But it's good. Yeah. And do you find that in terms of like. Any cultural differences or I guess this part of, you don't really need to think a lot about like government policies or, I do, but that's a small thing.
Small thing. I mean, not a small thing. It's, it's not a, it's one urgent thing right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you wanna focus on like building a really good product. Yeah. I just, I think that's basically like conclude my very al said conversations we have today. Yeah. I think I just wanna like focus on what you built and then the story of, and, but if you have any other things you wanna share about like, maybe the future perspectives, like how do.
Definitely. I know this sounds like AI is gonna be a huge influence. Gonna be in everything you do. It's gonna be in every education. I love ai, so I'm root for it. It's already happening. Yeah, it's happening. It's gonna be in everything. Do you see that the mindsets of people approaching AI in Vietnam, right way to think about ai right way.
Think about AI is
right. If we, if we just find a parallel, like before, before we have internet, and then after we have internet. Internet is an, nowadays, everything is on the internet, right? You cannot say, oh, this business doesn't need internet. Every business is on the internet. So same ai, every, every business is gonna be enabled by ai, but how is enable or how it affects the product or the customers is really case by case.
You really have to understand the problem you're trying to solve and see whether this technology can help you to solve the problem better for the company or for your customer. Yeah. Yeah. I really like make it fundamental of trying to solve problems, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like specifically in helping people learn, because in the course of like, I'm trying to build the learning how to learn course, right?
And like if we built it a year ago, we never have to think about GPT in or like the use of large language model in learning. But now, yeah, like how do you approach learning in the age of ai? Yeah. You can't run away from it. Yeah. You have to like build with ai Yeah. And do things with ai. Yeah. And I thinking about using tools to help us excel rather than like.
Theory. Yeah. Yeah. There's no need to fear, it's just the technology, the internet, it's no need. Yeah. Well, there's too many discussion about AI gonna take over the wall, kind of mental, but I'm very optimistic about that. Yes. There's nothing perfect, right? Certain risk. There's a lot of risk. There's a lot of things that we have to worry about, but there's also a lot of potential Opportunities.
Yeah. Opportunities. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited and I would to see how, yeah, you'll continue further exploring. And I spent, you know, about five years working in the US and in higher education and I still, part of our company is in the US so I feel like I've got a pretty good perspective on the global differences and nuances and yeah, there is a interested in what you have to say there.
There is a total bias towards the US is the default. Yeah. Everything at tech, whether that's through data or insights, publications or money or size, but their opportunity in Asia and tech is absolutely enormous and I don't think anyone really has. Okay, cool. I would love to dive into it. So to get started I would just love to hear kind of like a little bit about you, what you do right now with Key Path Education and what kind of like make you curious about the edX world.
Yeah, so I started Key Path in Australia almost 10 years ago and for the 10 plus years prior to that I was in education in various different ways, other startups, uh, huge publishing company, entrepreneurial ideas, right back to where I started my career, which was as a English language teacher. So I was a teacher when I left university and I thought I would be.
Robin Williams, dead poet of society type inspiration. But I was, everyone loves that movie. Yeah, yeah. I, I was the total opposite of that, whatever the opposite of him is that that was me in the classroom. So I, I got fortunate and on a network in, in higher education on the commercial side and fell into some entrepreneurs.
So I've always been fascinated by what I, what I couldn't do in the classroom, which was develop, develop, learning at scale. And I've spent the last sort of 20 ish years in the ed tech side of, of education trying to convince the, usually the higher education world that, that tech and digital is a means to improving access, improving quality and furthering market.
It's not the only means, but it isn't accessible. And KeyPass was formed, uh, almost 10 years ago. So we started the business at the same time in the US and in Australia. So we've got a really interesting global worldview of At the same time. At the same time. Yeah. We started the business almost 10 years ago with a view to helping universities.
So, so helping two audiences. One, universities understand that there is a market in online execution, typically through the non-traditional learner. That's 25 to.
And then on the second side, we wanted to help that audience students understand that they could access world class universities and world class degrees and programs and further their careers without ever having to go to our campus. And that it could be just as good and just as powerful and they could achieve the same outcomes.
So today.
We manage over 200 plus online degrees in everything, business, engineering, education, it, law, health, everything. And we manage. We manage about 40,000 students across 80 countries around the world. So we're like one big online university ourselves. Yeah. But we act as the group that sits behind the university.
So we've scaled and expanded significantly. But our ultimate mission is still the same, which is to provide access to world class education to students who might not previously have been able to access it through. Location or access or, or other means. Wow. That's very cool. I would love to dive into the part where you talk about improving access and quality.
Yeah. Because, um, when I first learn about the evolution of EdTech Yeah. People often refer to it as like there are phases. Mm-hmm. Like the phase where like the beginning of books where you put information on the internet. So like, yeah, ed tech brings access to education. And then now we are getting into a stage where information, most information you can kind of find online.
Mm-hmm. And then there are rare like solutions and like degrees and all these things. So just like the competition for access is like a bit more now. Like how have you evolved with Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. And there are a lot of preconceptions around online and quality and access, which we have to spend a lot of time rebuffing quite frankly.
So when I talk about postgraduate or online, people automatically think of me or course think an online. And that's quite true. They're visible and they're accessible and. Especially when a lot of the great universities are all around the world sort of attached themselves to it. It became a lot more prominent.
I mentioned before that we have tens of thousands of students in Australia where I'm studying online through our university partnerships. If we were to boil those tens of thousands of students down into our average student, it is 39 year, which is.
So the greater greatest access and attainment that we've been able to achieve in Australia, and absolutely what's happening in the US is in non-traditional students and in non-traditional areas. So as an example, right now, the biggest online degree that we manage in Australia by student number is a counseling program, an M mba or a cybersecurity program or a data science program.
It's counseling and it's majority females. Majority females likely have family and a working busy professional life. And without online, they're gonna almost no access to being able to study and further a career because they're geographically removed from a campus, they're working full time or they're a a mom.
So how would they become skilled, qualified and accredited to the counselor, a social worker, a psychologist, a mental health profession. So online provides that access. It also provides quality. So that's the second preconception that often exists, which is that it's, which I speak on behalf every online education person around the world.
When I say bullshit. So we have for years been able to demonstrate across every statistical measure that the outcomes, the quality, the satisfaction, the graduations, the completion rates, the attainment rates are as good, if not better. And that through a face to learning experience and.
Mm. You know, Uber versus a taxi. We created a better online experience attuned to what people expect in online. Mm. So the example I use a lot is that our online students, they're not comparing their online degree to their on-campus. One online students are comparing their online degree to every other digital experience in their life.
Mm. So your digital experience now is better than what it was five years ago in retail, better in banking, it's better In eCommerce, it's better in shopping, it's better in everything. It should be the same. And that's not just about recreating a face to face experience or a big lecture theater, or a one hour long YouTube video because that's not engaging.
Mm. It's about understanding that we all access our digital means differently than what we did five years ago. And the higher education needs to be aligned. So all you care about is access, but we also care about quality and we care about resource. I really resonate to the point about quality. Mm-hmm.
Because I think before I often think of quality as like really good content. Yeah. But who's to say what content is good. Exactly. Yeah. Right. And content. The, the example we used to get a lot, thankfully we don't get it that much, is from academics or faculty or lectures. We ask, will this be as good as my face course?
And we sarcastically ask, well, how do
get there? And low quality online degrees. Fortunately we have two, but they're also really, really bad on campus lectures. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So we try not to do, uh, apples to apples comparison between the two. We have to go back to the user, what their perspectives are and what their expectations are, and build an experience at tune to that as opposed to what we think it should be in a classroom.
Yeah. Well, and then I think the access point that you made, I think it was like, um, almost like a thing I didn't think about is like access for who. Mm-hmm. Because we often think of like, oh, we have past access of being on, like everything now is on the internet, but like as for who, right? Like people at what age and what stage of life.
Yeah. Yeah. First university we've worked with 10 years ago who took on a, took a chance on us when we were a startup and were nothing was at a regional university in, in Australia called Southern Cross University, and they showed us this map of where their students came from and they. Radius of their campus.
So part of their mission was to expand access Outside of that and through campus based learning, they never had that. Fast forward to now, and they have online students in every state and territory in Australia, which those are unfamiliar with Australia, pretty big country and remote this world. So that's expanding access to a university, to an audience of students and learners and cultures that they would never have had before.
And part what does a lot for the university and their mission and. And what they care about. But it also does a lot for the students as well, who now have a little bit like your example from Minerva. They have access to a network of like-minded students from all over the country and all around the world who can bring a different perspective to Yeah.
And who can, they can collaborate with and learn from and uh, engage with. So we like to think that online was the only means for a university like that to expand its access those students to get a more rounded educational experience. That's really cool. I think that will stick to me a lot in terms of like access for who and then like how do we define quality.
And it's a lot about like the digital learning experience. And I'm curious to know, maybe we get into like your experience building in different markets. Yeah. And I would love to just hear like your insights about like the tech landscape in different markets. Yeah. Because I find like, for example, from Vietnam for example, like one of the.
Like the market in the US when I study abroad is that in Vietnam there's so much focus on exams. Mm-hmm. And test prep. Yeah. Thus you see a lot of demand in like rope learning and taking scoring and there's not much on like different skills and not even far yet in terms of like redesigning online degrees and like certificates and all these things.
Yeah. How have you seen like the trends of IT tech in different markets? It's right, so, so for context, I've worked for education companies or started education businesses in the uk, Ireland, the us, Australia, Malaysia, and single payer. So I have a reasonable context of education across some markets around the world.
And the differences are vast. And you, you're right, there's some real nuances that exist in certain markets, which are materially different. One of the things that we've learned over time that has such an to.
Is there good access to digital education? Is the ministry of higher education or the regulatory or the government supportive of both non-traditional forms of learning and supporting scaling startup? And then you get into things like I talked about our example before of healthcare being a huge growth area.
The issue there is not students wishing to take an online degree or take on traditional forms of learning. It's sometimes the accrediting bodies. Yeah. Who are real barriers to diversity and to of approach. So our experience is just what works in one market. It'll not work absolutely the same in the next.
And that you need to spend time in the market and, um, build local capacity. Where we have failed, it's where we've tried to either jet us in an idea or people from one market into another. It almost never works. And that's part of why we've been so successful in the markets we're in because a lot of our competitors have tried to do exactly that and we've had local capability and expertise and been able to win over that.
But we're really guilty, especially in the, you know, we're sitting in a cafe in Indonesia right now, we're really guilty of saying things like, you know, expanding into Asia as if it's one, one universal market, which with all the same characteristics and all the same needs. And from a macro perspective, you can look at data and say, okay, there's enormous population growth and there's growth middle class and building infrastructure attainment targets.
The narratives that I've been, the macro things are. The nuances in each market are so unbelievably different. We have an office in Inala Lump Malaysia, and you know, we can just drive straight across border into Singapore. The two are ajo. But the two ways in which the two countries, governments, ministries, and universities look at our educational materially, materially different, what we do in Malaysia will not work in Singapore and vice versa.
Mm. And that's the same one across a lot of the emerging markets, Vietnam, Yanmar, et cetera. So for us, what's been successful has been not biting off more than we can choose. It's about embedding ourselves in one market, building it, scaling it, and growing. And sometimes that's counterintuitive to a lot of people think, we've been in Malaysia for two years and the number one question I get is the, which market?
Now, Malaysia, we haven't even scratched the surface on a even may sound really boring, but just basic things like setting yourselves up as a business, tax implications are doing the.
Get depth in one market, try when there before you coach your car. And I, I think as a Vietnamese, I look at neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, for example, and the cultural differences are insane, enormous. Like I, even though I'm in the same region as like Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, like I'm actually closer culturally to yeah, some country in East Asia, for example.
So yeah, I think maybe a good, like you really have to embed yourself in the market to really understand, as you would well know, the various different cultures within a country and behaviors are really different. Exactly. Yeah. Look, I speak to Malaysia because we're there a lot. The multitude of different cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities across Malaysia are enormous.
And so there are unique nuances within each, within there that we have to adapt to all the time, depending upon what we're successful. So you multiply that out across Vietnam, Asia, China, et cetera, becomes really, uh, really interesting. I would love to ask in the different markets that you are operating, in terms of, could you talk about.
Crediting bodies are real barriers in terms of like whether people would accept or like want to try out an online degree and like whether it's being validated by society. Yeah. Were there challenges in terms of like, yeah. Yeah, so I'll, I'll speak to health as one example. So example in Australia, like in the US and like a lot of markets, the great skills shortages that we have as valid nation is an insufficient amount of qualified healthcare professionals.
Not enough nurses, not psychologists, not enough social workers, not enough occupational therapists who goes on and on and on, and that has accelerated post.
The means through which we traditionally teach, educate, and graduate healthcare professionals is typically a traditional on campus in healthcare setting one, and it takes a long time. And the need we have for qualified healthcare professionals. The traditional means of, of educating them is not gonna keep pace with the volume of demand after the we need.
So we have been poking at the edges of that for a number of years through online digital, virtual reality simulations, et cetera. And there's some absolutely amazing ways in which you can demonstrate outcomes, drive competence, educate healthcare professionals without having them stand in a lab or, and by the way, there, there are absolute reasons for doing that.
Yeah. But it's not the only reason, and one of the barriers to that are, are sometimes the accrediting bodies who have a traditional mindset to how a social worker should become a social worker or.
If someone's gonna do surgery on my back, I want them to have, I want them to have been in a, in a hospital setting and to perform their robotic, but that's not the only way in which they can learn. And I think digital and technology has gone to a point where we can supplement that face-to-face with really high quality.
And that's a lot of what we're really trying to do, is demonstrate that you can achieve incredibly good outcomes to supplementing face-to-face with some interesting technology. Mm. I'm particularly interested in like what you do and the accreditation piece. 'cause coming from a school that when I started mineva, like we were not recognized in any ways.
And like when I go job search, for example, like people ask, I just have to make extra effort to Yes, yes. Do, to prove myself because I don't have something that is already proven correct by society, so I have to prove myself. Yeah. But I find it interesting after COVID mm-hmm. Where like, online learning becomes more legit.
Thus when I say that I'm from an online university, it becomes more like acceptable things. Interesting. And so I find that like, I am curious to see how like credited things or new things are gonna. Evolve as because who knows what's gonna happen and like how Yeah. People are gonna perceive like a piece of certification.
Right. For for sure. And if I had a really simple great answer to this, I would be, I would be doing something else with my, it's fascinating. Such a good point. You're right that we really love the line of keypad. The future doesn't care, especially in, you know, shortage areas that exist, whether it or cyber or healthcare or sustainability.
You can't be precious enough to think that they all have to become experts through the traditional university accredited approach. Yeah. That doesn't mean that the degree is invaluable. I just wanna be really clear on that. I, I hate this degree or non-degree battle. The two aren't exclusive. They can exist together and in, in many ways, they have to exist together because we're all gonna have more careers in our life.
We're gonna be in more roles. We have to have greater knowledge. The concept of lifelong learning is a really important one, and the degree is not the only means to which we're gonna be able to access all the knowledge and, and competence that we need in our lives. So I am, could not be any more supportive of things like an Argo or alternative credentials or unaccredited learning.
I'm an employer too. I employ hundreds and hundreds of people Yeah. Across Asia. And I really don't care how they gathered their expertise so long as they've, you know, aligned our values and they fit what we do and they're talented and they commit and work. And I have no idea how many of our staff have degrees care.
It's, it's almost inconsequential. But I think we have a real job to do to explain better to industry, to employers, to the world, to the average person on the street. Give value of non-traditional or non-accredited. Just to your example, it's not easy to explain something that isn't just a, you know, four year undergraduate.
Yes. And that it's valuable and learn something. Made this in panel before if I asked what.
Yes. You like, don't ask someone around this hotel what a microcredential is. Yeah. They probably think it's a toy that their child plays with. So I, we've a lot, we have a huge job to do, almost like a new culture around it, but it'll, and it'll happen time, people will more comfortable, I love this conversation about tradition and like the, kind of like the future that we wanna see.
Yeah. Yeah. So as to end the, our conversation, what are the, some of the things that you're looking forward to building with Key Path education in the short term or long term? Yeah. I'll just come back to the, to the start. So our, our mission 10 years ago was to help education institutions understand that there's a learner outside of the 18 to 23-year-old that comes to the campus and to those non-traditional learners all around the world.
They, they can access world class learning without having to go physically somewhere. And that it can be amazing. And in the time hand, I don't wanna tell you that we've achieved that because we haven't achieved all of that. But I think that's a never ending aspiration that we'll continue to improve that and continue.
What I'm incredibly proud of, the focus we have in healthcare, we're. Training, teaching and accessing gardens of students all around the world, improving their access to healthcare education, which in turn will benefit us all as a society and as an and advanced nation. That's amazing. That's something to we really, really proud of.
We're putting more speech pathologists in the world. We're putting more child and adolescent mental health experts in the world. We're putting more clinical psychologists. That's something just incredibly proud of and something I know all of our staff aligned here as well. And then here in in Asia, just being able to demonstrate to people that you can access world class education just as easily as you can access world class entertainment or travel or retail or anything else.
Yeah. And that's something that we'll just never perfect. So I'm excited about how we just like, in our own small way, just sort of poke at some of the edges of that. Well, and I'm excited for your never ending aspiration. I'm rooting for it as a nontraditional learner. Yes, yes. Thanks so much for taking your time.
I think I learned a lot about our conversation. I would.
In like investing in Asia and then at
how does into work
for investing in opportunities and Asia.
I website invest in education broadly. It doesn't
a way of unlocking the power of education broader learner set, bringing either a new type of learning opportunity to an existing set of students or accessing a new set of students who otherwise, very
also possible to bring a different kind of learning methodology given the fact that you're brain science, which can be more of a one-on-one methodology because every student
feel like they're the only student it can, like a class of one that enables lot deeper engagement and.
Deeper method learning. Also reduce the burden of learning, learning,
time consuming May or.
So we think that given, particularly now with the introduction of ai, and it's an overused word, but it's actually now gonna definitely become part of learning from various perspective AI as an enabler of learning, such as, and using an.
Lesson in life, your own classroom, sitting in business setting, personal setting,
learning. You don't ask smart question. It finally, there is an assistant available to you. And as in my opinion, is a great way of introducing generative AI and language. Language into that didn't exist until this this's, the very core. It opens up another opportunity set, which is to use data science and AI to enable personalized learning, right?
And teaching AI.
Fine. That's the first of an entrepreneur. Teach them coding perspective value of masses, masses,
AI technologies, teaching them when instruction from you change people. Right? So how do teach people the world of ai, as is a big part of teaching. I think EdTech can enable that as well. We think that EdTech presence and evolution to this point where it's gone from video based self-learning to teacher assisted learning, to a point which you described much more focused on.
Learning yourself. We're at that point. Now we're just entering domain, so therefore, the skill we see being taught by tech companies increasingly not just be about teach you physics better. That's yesterday. Teach you whether you are the right person. This aspect physics should teaching children from a young age, who are you?
What's your personality type? What could you serve society better as as a person when you grow up? I think those things are super valuable. Specialization at younger ages or people because they'll realize opportunities to learn.
In society will be enabled opposed to which fine,
better outcomes, better self outcomes, better jobs, learn change, and weather change,
change. They can be ready for change and that's a big part of success in life, I think. Therefore, EdTech is super powerful, is done right. Mm-hmm. I'm curious, like in terms of when you invest or when you think about like the future of EdTech, do you ever imagine like how current, like the existing system of certification can be looked at it differently?
Like degrees and because like for example, in Vietnam's market, I think like I am trying to introduce this way of like learning for yourself, but if that doesn't translate to something tangible that.
If you tell people, I'll tell you how to be a better human being. Pay for it if, tell people how. I'll teach you the confidence to be creator in the future. Teach them to a better human being
are of us who are for five.
Learning basic English math, them telling the concept of teach you how to be more person, teach you, but without giving you certific crazy need certificate. Go. So population, so.
There a big enough class about learning learn and now there is and they're generally more socially aware
learners, a big future success. I think that market never existed. Now it exists and parents will pay for that. Yeah, so it's really first time where you're a point where you can sell real skills of life to a lot of students, but you have to package different segments. Some will have to go through a subject like even creativity or drawing or art or philosophy.
Others, you have to teach that just subjects. So I think it's
now money from from it. Yeah. There'll be companies that will do really well from this topic. Think of what ate signify actually just quality QC certificate, sign.
With employers. Right? And now we have a time. Technology is give employers more accurate assessment, respective more, and think that's, you can demonstrate.
Starting at entry level and once it's proven it's metal, there'll slowly start going higher. Higher. Yeah. That's very interesting. I would love to ask, like shift the conversation a bit about like industry's trends and towards your point about like the different markets and segments with like the companies that you invest in, the markets that you invest in, how do you perceive the current state, like the ed tech industry?
I'm assuming you invest mostly in Asia compared to like other regions and I think within Asia it's huge as well.
Be b2, b2, those are predominantly Europe
growing into b2, Asia, develop Asia much more, especially Japan. Singapore
institutions go Asia versus develop Asia between the market. And can you explain a little bit more about like, because you were talking about the institutions emerging and developing Asia and how it doesn't not aligned with B2B. Yeah. So institutions in emerging Asia are much more around maximizing their tuition from the school, and a lot of them may or may not have government, but budgets decided at the beginning of the.
Anything above and beyond as an expenditure for a student is normally out budget. They're happy to offer student introductions to percentage of the, and they act in independently of each other. They act in competition because
show up as you go and enroll the many factors, including what courses in differentiate manner you offer to a lot of college schools is a differentiation from college. So, and they're willing to change every year, two years, three years. The decision.
Enterprise domain and tech companies in Asia also realize that they can home as
investment paying.
Physics at home afterwards for the same set of students. Yeah. So that's, given that culture, you can actually enable figure that another subject in the evening students
mindsets already there to a opposed the outside of the outside infrastructure. Like after school. Yeah. Kind of thing. But in the US let's say most of the schools that are buyers are public schools. Yeah. And they're part of the school district. They don't make independent decision to differentiate themselves independent based on the learning needs of that society of region that the school district decides in terms of they have a budget.
This, so buying behavior is private school. If in the middle of the doesn't see value cut you out.
The, A lot of us EdTech companies spend a lot time mastering the.
Even the buy parents
a.
You say, John, wake up and today is the day you make the world by gonna class and showing up because you're so made. That happens. That set works machine, it doesn't work in Asia so much. It can, but ultimately what will work in Asia is that is a part of broader learning product and a services opportunity where not only is system talking to you, click reach,
but a full on service where you've got equal action going on. Like people are somebody as a human being available to interact with. The ultimate receiver of Nudge Let is gonna make feature selling in US possible because the market is, or Europe, I.
So when we need companies that wish to go from, let's say, Asia, to we see that.
Always go towards tech, which is not always the complete solution. So a lot of Asian end up doing better in and that's what's needed in doesn't. So ultimately as an investor in Asia, we possibly know possibility of investing in us, of helping the companies into better than a investor would know, helping the company into Asia.
They don't need to learn Asia. Asia part, many is.
But companies from Asia that target us not failing their markets, taking brand new necessarily. So I think it's a very different way to think about Ed from a, from an investment versus
in Asia. To invest in Asia. Yeah. People from the US can't, shouldn't really invest. They should not, but they, but that's okay. We need capital. Anything from per we benefit. Yeah. And we welcome them to work with us, but at the same time we think it's our job to work with our S to help them be globally savvy.
Very interesting. Do you have any other points to add to this?
This is very, very interesting because everything so expensive.
Learners, they, even with the age of like AI and like amazing technology, like they still want a human for trust and connection and community, these things. Absolutely. And I think every human wants that sometimes are more. Yeah. Well, very interesting and I would love to ask, like to kind of wrap up our conversation in terms of like markets in Asia, I know it's quite diverse.
South Asia, Asia, east Asia or like Asia Pacific. Right. And do you find there are any like nuances to the market and is that people say.
Say like a Singaporean company wants go into another Asian market. Like do you have things that people should be considering when they look at the Asian? What comes to mind is two things when you're
very important to understand from local perspective what part business,
10, 20% choose, right? It's not gel well, right as organization, product as possible.
Be more business.
India
capital
into sales has gone into the, that now at least an acceptance that need to
pays. Why should pay for something. Yeah. So a matter of.
US is far ahead us. Nobody even questions why should I pay something? So we have to keep that in mind in terms of expand, allocating resources
of charming and very
fine. But if you're gonna
imagine I videos to which students learn.
And my first question,
and lesson Philipp, so that's the first lesson because that's the most strong lesson, but very, very valuable lessons.
Before we go and invest in the country, we need to know the culture and know the pitfall, the big one. So we can, we need to translate what did learn in this market and why does it Transl get that you're 80% there. 20% is what ation local, too much modification, local new you of, so I think is the
new
T, but you should think that that's a new startup. There is one common theme across
that I would look at often people looking at access.
Okay. One online class of the best in the, getting access to
that aspiration is what unites us all. Yeah. Right. And I believe that should be the North star of any tech businesses and not just like bringing something to the internet and giving access. That's like the, the fault of of technology already. I think that is the evolution, right. I think we were in phase, it's all about access.
Yes. Right. I think what we've from
is now for next phase. It's
wow.
Welcome to EdTech Insider podcast. Very excited here to talk to you today about the EdTech space in the region and especially your work with Elsa. So I will start first with a bit of question on like if you can introduce yourself and what are you working on right now? Yeah, yeah. So my name is Lu Van.
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Elsa. Elsa is an AI English tutor that can help you improve your English speaking and communication skill so that you can access and open up new opportunities in your lives. We started a company seven years ago and are now serving more than 50 million users around the world from countries.
Wow, that's amazing. 15 million, 55, 50 million million users. And how has it been growing? Like steady across seven years or? Was there a spark been growing very fast? We basically more than level of growth year over year. But I would say of course the years through COVID helped a lot more because online learning and become very popular to people.
Right? So then we picked up a lot of growth. We started out in Vietnam, but then we quickly see the success and.
Fastest growing country for us. But we also see a lot of trash in Thailand, Indonesia, Latin America, like consider Mexico as well. That's really interesting. Actually, I went to Portugal, Lisbon, and I met, what's her name? Me, I met Yes. Who was doing marketing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought, I think she no longer, she longer she, she started her own dancing company.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really cool. And yeah, and then she also told me about like the Latin American market, which was interesting 'cause I learned about Elsa just through, in the context of Vietnam market and like the people behind it are Vietnamese. So I thought that like it's a app that only focus on Vietnamese market.
No, we're very global. We have, again, 50 million users from American countries. Mm. Yeah. Can you just share a little bit about like your story around why did you start Elsa? Did you see that? Like when you started, did you see that, you know, this is a problem that really close to your heart? Or you see like the potential of a market?
Like what made you, I think it's both. So first of all, right, as a Vietnamese person growing up in Vietnam, you had been basically spending so much time learning English. But the big challenge as you started realizing, or I personally started realizing when I started going abroad, was that I could be really good at English reading and writing.
I probably ace every single test for, because Asian learners, especially Vietnamese learners, are learned for test, right? Mm-hmm. And so the classroom and teachers are all focusing on teaching you for the test, but the test never require speaking and then speaking require a lot of one-on-one attention.
And the way how teachers are teaching in Asia or Vietnam, they don't even speak good English themselves, right? So they can't really focus on. So it ended up happening is when you started going abroad in your workforce where English is required as a language, I realized that I didn't have the same confidence as other people when it comes to communication in English.
Mm. When I spoke, people had a harder time understanding you. I find very hard to find ideas for me to speak in English because I had to think in Vietnamese and translate into English. It means it's a lot slower and everything that comes with communication and speaking takes a lot of confidence. And you didn't, once you didn't have it, it's just very hard for you to continue speaking.
Right? And so that was a challenge I personally faced when I was moving abroad, especially when I did my MBS Stanford in the us. I engaged in a private speaking tutor or like expert. It was extremely powerful. They went through helping me figure out the mistakes that I made when I had my, uh, when I speak my pronunciation, how to construct your ideas, how to think much faster in English.
And so it was extremely powerful. But of course, uh, because it's a private tutor, it costs a lot, right? It's usually hundreds of dollars per hour. Yeah. And so the idea was how do I replicate this powerful experience that I had, but providing that solution to hundreds of million of people around the world who also struggled to learn and speak English better every day?
Because there are more than 1.5 billion people actively learning English right now on a daily basis. Yeah. So it's a huge market and a challenge I face. It's not my personal challenge only, it's a challenge that a lot of us are facing, right? So how do we bring that solution? How do we democratize that solutions that rely on the human?
So that everybody can get access to that at a fashionable cost. And that's why we built Tulsa seven years ago as an AI to provide that feedback to people as they learn to speak English and to become your conversational partner so that you can practice speaking English all the time without needing to have access to a private teacher.
Wow, that's really interesting. I would love to go further into the AI piece 'cause I think that's a central part of your product. And you, you said you started seven years ago and now like since the like rise of chat GPT, we have been seeing a lot of conversation around how AI can change education. Did you foresee what was gonna happen kind of like now seven years ago and how are you evolving, like your product evolving with the change of ai?
So nobody can predict where AI is, uh, seven years ago, right. I think when I started out, the company AI has been very problem research, right? Mm-hmm. And I, I, I know a lot of researchers, uh, like my friends at Stanford who have been doing it. Artificial intelligence is not a new topic outside of a research community, right?
So, and I'm passionate about it. I had always been curious, even though I'm not a tech person, but I have been. Reading up and looking a lot into AI and see what it can do for the humanity or like changes in society, leveraging technology. So I do know that there's a future for ai. Nobody can predict that this is the year's gonna happen, or actually nobody see the coming of open AI exploding this much, even though again, GPT is not new.
GPT has been discussed and been done for many years, right? Mm-hmm. Open AI is not the only company that thought through GPT. So GPT is not a new thing just because open G AI exploded GPT. That's why everybody thought that's a new thing, but it's not, right? So seven years ago when we started out, again, we were one of the very first few pioneering using AI for education.
But I strongly believe in the power of technology. And again, you can rely on human, but there's no way human can scale the way AI can scale. There's no way that every single person out of a 1.5 billion, uh, English learners can get access to a good English tutoring platform unless AI or technology do it right?
Because human's not enough of the solution at a cost that people can afford it. So yeah. So I think we started out being very early believer in AI and never giving up. Even though there's a lot of skepticism in the market, teachers don't believe in it. There's no way AI can do it. The users say, wait, what?
Technology didn't do it? I have always been relying on human and teachers, so we are very perseverance. We just don't give up because I still believe in the technology. Right? And it served us well because for a while we then become the only company that using AI to help people improve their English. Of course, the technology has evolved a lot, and now with GPT and General ai, we also launched as a AI tutor that can hold any role, play conversation with learners using general ai, right?
Mm-hmm. It used to be that that job cannot be done by AI because AI cannot hold a real conversation with you because it has limited power of like, uh, data. It has to be a human right, like if you wanna talk to a person, that's why there's a lot of need to find a conversation or partner, whether that's a friend living abroad.
Now AI can do it. Now you can sit in Vietnam or India. It doesn't really matter where you are. You can, you don't have to find a friends in America that's awake at the time that you are awake to talk to you anymore. Yeah, you can open us ai, we can role play any conversation. But the most powerful thing is that let's say you find a friend, he can talk about sport, but he might not know anything about music.
AI doesn't have any limitation in knowledge, right? Mm-hmm. So you can role play a conversation. You can create a scenario that you wanna talk about music or animals or travel or this country. That country, yeah, you can do it at a fingertip, right? So also, AI technology has also evolved quite a lot to study now with just giving you assessment and evaluation of your pronunciation.
Now we can play as a true AI tutorial, can guide you through whatever learning objective, generate lessons using AI on the.
And I think there's a lot more to come for general ai. Nice. And would you say that as I like, listen to what you share about the changes of ai, and you said that the conversation element is a new Yeah, like a new thing. Yeah. Would you say that with the advance of ai, like there can be more kinda like the human, human part to learning because it was created as a AI tool that people interact with.
Right. And would you say that with the advancement of ai, like there will be more elements of like AI being more human and like what would be the thing that you see developing into? I think there's a lot, right? So let's say at the beginning with the limited AI capability, AI might give you a response but won't be able to let you interact directly in real time.
Mm-hmm. A human teacher, you can tell the student that, and if you don't understand, you can ask the teacher, Hey, can you say a little bit more on that one? Mm. Now with the AI Journal of ai, you can actually hold that conversation with AI too. You don't need a teacher like simultaneously. Simultaneously, right?
They can talk about something. You can ask for clarification, you can ask for extra explanation. You can ask for, Hey, can you give me more examples of that? Right? So AI can do that very well. Now you don't rely on a human anymore. I think AI can also say, oh, based on the data that they get about you, they can immediately.
Generate new lessons that cater to your weakness that you just have. Yeah. Teachers might not be able to do it because they have to go back to the lesson plan. Yeah. They have to do it right. It takes time. AA can now do it within a second. Right. That, oh boo. You seem to be struggling a lot with this grammar sentence structure.
For the next five minutes, let's focus a little bit more on this one and then you can change it with ai. So I think it. Tutor or human that you can interact with that can be hyper-personalized for your learning path, right? Mm-hmm. And in the future you can add, actually we're building a lot more technologies that can create avatar for, for ai, right?
Like how do you want it to look like? How do you want it to sound? Like if I'm a person that want a lot of like humor, I can make my AI a little bit more humorous. Mm-hmm. If I wanna be tweet a little witty, I can make my AI a little bit more witty. So we are gonna add a lot more personality into AI so that you feel like you can connect, right?
And that can be done. You can replicate AI voice to be any voice that you want. And say, I love the voice of, I don't know this actor, and I feel connected. We can actually train the AI to have that voice for you as well, so you feel like you're talking to that person. So there's a lot more personalization that can make AI a little bit more relatable to the users, to the user, and that could enhance the learning experience of the learner.
Yeah. Oh, that's very exciting. Yeah. Personally, I just, I just so excited to see the potential of AI in personalization. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because I think usually like schools fit us into a box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, but inherently we learn quite differently. Yeah. And you never know. Yeah. So, yeah, like I really look forward to personalization as a potential of ai.
I think the next part, and probably the last part of our chat, yeah. I want to zoom out and ask you a little bit about like your view on the trends and insights into the bigger market. Because you do operate in different markets. Yeah. And like with the focus on like the Asian market, even though it's like really big.
Right? Yeah. But you said that you operate in Vietnam and Japan. Yeah. And maybe more like compared to other markets, how do you perceive like the growth or the nature of the market in Asia? So again, Asia is huge. Yeah. Like we can't compare Asia because within Asia, Japan is in Asia, right? India is in Asia and Vietnam and Thailand is in Asia.
So we have tackle Asia to market very differently. India might be a market where you can apply a lot of users, but they don't have the same willingness to pay. Mm. Japan is whether the market where you don't need a lot of free user, but every single user, they're very loyal, they're very sticky. Mm. And they have a much higher willingness to pay pricing.
We actually do a, we call a geo differentiated pricing. Meaning that each of the country will have to keep pricing because we have to compare to the GDP in the willingness to pay up that country in order for us to come up with pricing strategies. So, so yeah. So we see very different strategy for of the country as we go in growth wise, I mean, it depends, right?
Like for us, because we focus a lot on Southeast Asia and in Asia, so we see a lot of growth in Southeast Asia, but the moment we open up the market in, in Latin America, like Brazil, Mexico. This exploding the growth of us as well. Mm-hmm. And I'm very sure the story is gonna repeat once we expand the market into the Middle East or the market as well.
So I think for our space and our industry, there's enormous growth in pretty much just every market because English learning is big. Now, as a startup, you can't just do everything. 'cause it takes a lot of resources. And even though you win in one country, doesn't mean you're gonna win in the next country.
So that's gonna be an iterative process, which takes time and money, right? Mm. And so you cannot just go into every single market to pursue that, uh, that growth. But I would say for sure, there's a lot of, education is actually big in Asia because Asians, on average, I'm very willing into invest in education.
And so I think that's, you're gonna continue to see a lot of growth coming outta Asia for education. Yeah. When you say that, like the spending wise or investment in education, and that comes from both the government and like individuals and families, right? I think governments talk to know because, or, or like let's say Saudi government's spending a lot of money in education too.
So I think government's harder, but I think individual and family, I think like Asian just plays a lot of values in education. Yeah. Where they're willing to pay a lot, right? Yes. Other countries, they might say, Hey, education is important, but it has to be free. Asian education has always never been free.
The good one has never been free. So, yeah. Yeah. It just inherently in your concept of parents are willing to pay a lot for their kids. Yeah. In education. Right. And so, like you could say the parents could earn a thousand a month, but they're willing to put $200 a month for the kids to go to an English learning class.
Americans never do it. American put 20% of their income into just an English class because they weren't speaking English. Right? Yeah. And so they never see the, the willingness to do that as much as Asia. Mm. Yeah. And I think that's definitely like a big reason why. And in terms of like culture values or big reason why we've seen a lot like report and insights on like why there's a growth in this market.
Yeah. Because I think, yeah, it's interesting to, it might be rooted in like the way funding is and like how the education system is structure across different countries. Lastly, I would love to ask, in the market that you operate in, which is language learning and specifically English learning. Mm-hmm. What do you hope to see in terms of like the growth of this market or whether you, you have insight into like how this market's gonna grow?
So actually there's a lot of report in the language learning market, especially in English. And it's actually one of the fastest growing category, right? Like we gonna still gonna see about 15, 20% growth year over year for the entire industry on the learning market. We, right now, the market, I think spend about 65, 70 billion in English language.
Solution and that will continue to grow as 15, 20% for the next is based on the market research that we've seen. And it's very consistent in different sources. So I think the need for learning English is not gonna go away, especially with everything is opening up global workforce. Yeah. Uh, everything people can just like remote working.
I think the need for learning English is becoming more and more relevant. And so that's why I think the market itself is a lot of the data expecting that this market's gonna continue to grow quite well. Very cool. Yeah. And I think it will be like an exciting time for you as the market grows. Yeah. Yeah.
And the technology also grows. Yeah. And see how Elsa will evolve and like adapting to the market. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing your insights, and I'm sure that the listeners will get a lot of insights into, you know, Elsa and your insights about Asian market as before the dive into it.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. 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 EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the free EdTech Insider's Newsletter on Substack.