Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators, and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top edtech company.
Hello, everyone, it is March 5. And we are so excited to bring in the month of March bring in spring with another episode of week in edtech. I'm Ben Cornell here with my co hosts, Alex Sarlin. We're so excited to catch you up crazy amount of things going on in the EdTech world. But before we do that, what's going on with the pod? Alex?
Yeah, so we are right on the verge of South by Southwest. Edu. It starts tomorrow. And our next episode is actually an interview with four of the seven launch competitors at the South by Southwest pitch launch competition, they happen to be amazing companies. So you'll hear their take pre pitch tomorrow, that is going to be great when it comes out really soon. We also have talked to a number of amazing folks. So we also talked to John Eagleson, who's in the midst of stepping down from time for learning and handing over the reins after many years of accelerating the homeschooling market. So really, really interesting stuff happening there as well.
And then on the events calendar, we've got a happy hour at South by Southwest over 200 folks have RSVP it promises to be a gathering of 200 of our most favorite people. And then we have on the 13th we have a happy hour in Los Angeles on March 30. We have a happy hour in San Francisco at driftwood pub. And on April 17, at ASU GSV. We're going to be doing a round table near the convention center. That's on that that Monday, April 17. Stay tuned. Obviously, if you have events going on your neck of the woods, let us know we'd love to cross promote, and just keep our community connected. With that said, let's jump into the news. What's our first headline, Alex?
So the first headline is something that we've been talking about for awhile, but this week, it really crossed the Rubicon, I think this might be a week in tech that we look back on in a year, two years and say okay, that's when things really started to change. So the topic, of course, is chat GPT. But what happened this week is that Chachi Beatty launched an API for businesses, which basically allows businesses to install and use chat GPT inside their dedicated services. And they did it with a few companies to start sort of as a kickoff event, one of which was Snapchat, kind of interesting that which is Quizlet. And anybody who knows Quizlet, it's one of the most popular websites actually in the world of anytime. But it's also a mega edtech company with a humongous amount of data built in both about learners and about actual content. And they are building they just launched a what they're calling cute chat. It's an AI tutor built with the open AI API's. And I think this is a moment where we are I mean, we're just gonna look back and say, Yeah, that was the first shot across the bow, and now floodgates are open, what, what do you think of the Quizlet movement?
Well, in general, I don't think we can underscore how big of a deal it is to have this API. And I liken this to electricity, it is something that is now going to be available to basically everyone. It's a utility, and it's something that will be ubiquitous. And so coming back to like, what does this mean for that tech space, it will be hard for people to differentiate themselves based on having electricity, because everyone will have electricity. And let's remember when electricity was invented, you know, there was the hyper investments in electric companies. But there were also a whole ecosystem of new innovations that required electricity. And so then came the light bulb, but also came refrigeration, and then everybody invested in refrigerator companies, which turned out to be like heavy duty manufacturing, relatively low margin high competition. So who won at the end of the day because of electricity? Well, it turns out, it was Coca Cola, because a bottle of water was sugar that's warm, is worth zero. And a bottle of water with sugar in it that has cold and refreshing is worth billions and billions of dollars. In fact, the most valuable company in the history of the world up into that point. And so the question for Quizlet and for all these others is now that you're electrified, what's the coke and I think There's a way in which there's this battle to be first mover with the chat GPT enabled features. But what really is going to have the staying power is the unique use case where the kind of old way of doing it was just moderately good. But the new way of doing it with chat DPT is like an ice cold coke versus a warm coke. And so, you know, the API means that's going to be available. It also means chat, GBT and open AI are in the lead compared to Google and some of the other large language models, I expect this to be a really interesting race. And I expect it to be really fast. So very rare in education, that we have something that launched in November. And here we are in March, and it's already changing the game. So this kind of speed and acceleration, I think, will be one of the hardest things for the education systems to adapt to and navigate. What about you, Alex? What do you think is most exciting, but also, you know, most worrisome, as you see this playing out in our space,
I think it's easy to talk about what's exciting about it, because I love that metaphor of the electricity, it's going to create just layers and layers of different kinds of uses. Some on top of the other, it's just crazy. And you know, quizlets use case makes a lot of sense. Because it's a place that has an enormous amount of its own data to pull from as well as the data that's trained the original, you know, open AI API's, they have proprietary data inside their millions of flashcards. So that makes a lot of sense.
So Alex, can you explain to our listeners why that's important, because I'm not sure that everyone understands how important it is to have your own data as well,
open API's chat, GBT is trained basically on things that are on the internet and open on the web, that is a huge amount of information. And that's what makes it so good at doing that predictive language. It's called a large, large language model, predictive language matching, you can ask it virtually anything. And because it's been trained on the internet, basically, it can put sentences together, put paragraphs together, put information together in a way that for the most part, will make a lot of sense and be very coherent. That said, that's only the public information in the intranet. So if you're a company like Quizlet, or Snapchat for that matter, and you have a lot of data inside your own servers from millions of users, and in quizlets case, a huge amount of actual content people have uploaded, you know, anatomy, you know, 500, anatomy textbooks worth of vocabulary about anatomy, huge amounts of information there, then you have additional information that you can feed into these API's, both from the content side, and from the user side, to be able to actually begin to personalize the experience. So cute chat is, you know, they call it an adaptive tutor, because it can actually change the way it tutors based on the user's information. But also, it's trained on quizlets proprietary educational content library, which includes both questions and answers, which is also really interesting aspect of their particular data set. So it's a lot now to be clear, if a company like a Pearson came in, they also have a massive educational content library there. It's not unique to Quizlet. But it does matter because you can then combine the API's that open AI uses, you can combine datasets, you can combine the open data set that GPT already uses, and an internal private one. And that's a big deal. And that's also part of why this is a big deal for having the API's at all is a big deal. Because now every business that has its own data inside, which is many, many businesses, all sorts of different kinds of data, can start using it and combining it in that way as well.
Right? And so this is really the big, big question too. Because if you've got chat, GP T's dataset, you can tune it on your own data set. And this is where, you know, in normal internet use, you get the hallucinations, but just a little bit of tuning of your own data gets the accuracy up to like 99.7 99, when you start getting questions with actual factual answers, like Quizlet would have the, you know, the question and the answer. Question is how much data do you need? And I was, you know, I mentioned this on a podcast before at Duolingo. They were saying, you really only need like 20 people answering a question to get statistical validity on that question. So the real, you know, the mathematical question here is, what is a sufficient data set size? At Quizlet? They had a big enough data set that they were already using AI. What about the smaller, you know, entrance? Could they get a hyper focused set of data? That's way way smaller, maybe only 1000s of users or 100,000 users? Can they then create the 99.7 or eight point 8.9% accuracy that's really needed for the learning space. So it's going basically this summer, everyone's got to figure it out. And they've got to have it by fall launch, or they're toast. And that is, that's also insane amount of pressure on entrepreneurs to like, win or die in like a six month window.
Yes, yes, I definitely agree. It's a really nutty moment, because as you're saying, both sets of AI are accelerating at the same time, right, you know, AI that does require and then can launch using humongous datasets is already quite sophisticated. But you're right, the type of AI that can, you know, do really good predictive algorithms based on smaller and smaller datasets is also accelerating. So if you're a company that has a very particular niche in terms of either content or users, you can still use and as you say, tune the open AI API as to what you're doing. And if you don't, it's not just totally out there and not not going to work because you don't have, you know, the 16 million students that Quizlet has. But that said, it's still an advantage of 60 million students. You know, we talked to John Cotton fruit a few weeks ago on the podcast, and he, before these API's came out, he gave a little sense. He's like, I think this is what's next for chat, GBT, they're gonna put out these API's. And his take was really interesting, because he said, the main thing that's gonna allow is actually constraints. It's not just that it's about adding data, it's that you can tell the algorithm what it can't do. And I'm sure that's a big part of this as well. So if you're Quizlet, and you have, you know, k 12, and college students and adult learners, you know, it's not going to answer, you know, risque questions, it's not going to give, you know, horrible political disinformation, it's not going to be racist, it's not going to do a lot of the things
that you say. You know, of course, if you're a high school student, that's the first thing you're going to try to make it do. So I think it's gonna definitely put some pressure, I do think there is this world of supervised AI, where it's all about training the algorithm in a really specific way around really high quality data. And then there's generative AI, which is basically training the model on all the words world's data and then setting up to learn and infer statistically. And there's a way in which these don't have to be totally separate. You could on top of generative aI have supervised AI, that then is tuning the generative, and you get the best of both worlds, which is just crazy volume of ambidexterity of the model, like you can really do anything. And then you can narrow it through your supervised AI. And then on top of it all, I think we're also just seeing a lot of people aren't recognizing the value of human in the loop. So if your stack is large language model, plus specific data that you've got, where you're training the model, and then you have a human in the loop, you are basically superpower and you're human in the loop, to really meet the needs of every learner. That's the promise. That's also probably the scariest thing too, because we really don't know how that's all gonna play out before we move off of the chat GBT. By the way. It's probably worth noting a couple other highlights. We had a article from Sebastian Thrun and Sal Khan saying that chat GBT will fuel the future of higher education, meaning that higher ed will have to adapt because of how much chat GBT is transforming the space. And also an article around chat GPT and cheating. Is it going to be used for Homework Help? Or is it used for, you know, cheat sheets? Do you have any thoughts or takeaways from those articles? Alex?
Yes, I mean, just really quickly. On the homework side, the new take on the integrity question is an interesting nuanced one, which is, hey, there are a whole bunch of edtech companies that business model are all about homework help if chat GPT creates a million AI tutors to those threatened those surfaces. What? What does it mean for cigs tutoring? What does it mean for paper? What does it mean for all of these these types of surfaces? And that's obviously very relevant to our listeners here. And I don't think anybody has an answer, but and search has a really interesting article starting to predict, hey, what might happen if suddenly the special sauce of some of these companies gets just becomes the electricity that powers everyone, as you say, and then on the throne and con interview, the thing that they had they both shared, and I think is really aligned with what we've been saying on this podcast is that Chad GPT already has the power to basically do homework for any high school subject for any student at this point already. And you know, that's a thrown quote and Khan is basically saying that old homework is getting dated extremely fast and students are going to have access to an AI tutor. Very soon, it's basically here, you know, yesterday. So it's really a forcing function. It's a moment where we have to rethink what assessment is, we can't just do the same thing we've always done because the tools are now unbelievably good on the learner side. So we have to get better on the educator side really raising the bar. And I you know, we've talked about that a lot, but it's really cool to hear it from, too, you know, big tech luminaries like those.
Well, it is a fascinating story. I have a hunch that the AIB is going to show up again next week. But thanks for that around the world with Chad GBT. And for those of you users that are using the API, we'd love to hear how it's going. I was sitting down with Vlad Gourevitch for lunch the other day. And he was like, the API for GPT made his you know, he and a friend created an app that creates like worksheets and vocab lists, and study guides for any book in the history of the world. And he's like, it's now like, 100 times faster because I have API. It's just it's mind blowing what people what small teams of people can really do. We've talked a little bit about transformational change. Let's talk about someone putting the brakes on transformational change, the Department of Education reversed course, and announced that they were delaying guidance on their TPS expansion. If you were listening last episode, the Department of Education had announced that third party providers for colleges and universities would be subject to the same oversight, regulatory requirements, etc, in order to receive federal funding. And one of the kickers of that was no foreign ownership. But Phil Hill had an incredible article that really breaks it down of the delay. And it gives hope for a lot of these third party providers, not just to give their comments and input but also to maybe avert the biggest potential downsides, which is a huge regulatory burden for anybody doing outsource work for higher ed. Alex, this is your space. What do you think people are feeling now that they've seen this kind of pause?
I would imagine that the higher ed community is still a little bit on tenterhooks trying to figure out where this is going to land. But the good news here is that the guidance that first came out came so suddenly and with a very, very small and almost non existent window for sort of public commentary and discussion and, and some of the processes that people sort of tended to expect, especially for a change that could have huge ramifications like this. So the update is basically, I think they've gotten an earful from many people in the EdTech community, and many people in the higher ed community who are saying, well, we don't even know if we can sign contracts anymore. And I think we've said, Okay, we're going to hold on this for a second, open it back up for more public discussion, try to understand, you know, everybody's concerns before making a decision. So it's not that this is, you know, kill vetoed or something, but it is on delay, because I think they were surprised at how enormous the backlash was to it throughout the whole industry. And I think that's a good thing. Government regulation is not necessarily bad, but something that comes down and, and just throws a whole industry, or more than one into confusion is usually not the best for anybody. So I'm glad it's being delayed. But, you know, I don't think it's over. I don't think this story is over, I think we're going to see where it does end up landing. And, you know, Phil Hill had a great take. We mentioned this last week about how he felt that, you know, they were doing these sort of two policies at the same time. One was about OPM directly, and one is sort of about all third party services. And his take was, hey, maybe they're playing politics here. And they they're putting two things out expecting that at least that one will get knocked down, and then they can still use the other one. And I thought that was an interesting sort of inside take on it. We'll see if that's the result of this. It could be that they come back and say, You know what, let's not worry about the third party stuff so much, but we do care about OPM, and we are still going to regulate them in a totally different way. And that would not be a super surprising outcome for me. What do you think when you've been talking to people about this, for since it first dropped?
I think the overall you know, concern in the industry is shared universally. But the question that a lot of people have been asking is who stands to gain out of all this? And it's basically the large universities like Arizona State University, Western Governors, the folks that have been really innovative, but who also have borne all of the regulatory headache, and you have to wonder, are some of those schools behind this, where they're essentially eliminating OPM competition, because they are directly competing with the OEMs. If you look at Asus deal with YouTube, and you look at a lot of the ways in which through you know, operating partnerships, these large now non geographic universities have have moved. You can see that this might be is the kind of saving grace for large universities, if they can, you know, claim that territory, I believe it was University of Arkansas or Alabama, that was buying the University of Phoenix, Arkansas. Yeah, University of Arkansas. So there is this world where I think we all have been talking about are expecting the demise of the four year university, partly because of modularization. Partly because the ROI is not there, partly because their cost structures are upside down. Is this actually a protection move from the universities trying to protect their space from being eaten in up by rpms. And now that they've demonstrated that a few of them can actually compete head to head in that space? So you have to wonder, you know, Department of Ed doesn't put out something as aggressive as this without having some allies in a corner saying, This is great policy, you got to wonder Who are those people? And it's probably like, anti privatization people, maybe it could be labor. But also you have to think the universities, for the most part are on the side of the Biden administration.
Interesting take I love that analysis. It's really I have no idea what sort of coalition might be behind something like this, I tend to assume it's incompetence, rather than malice. And that it's, it's really, you know, the apotheosis of all of these senators and all of this, basically, the federal government saying we've we've spent so much money on higher ed, and it's getting sort of siphoned off into for profits, we got to do something, and then they do something and realize that the something they did is like throwing a glue into the gears, more than
maybe a combination thereof. And I have no insider info here. But tell me if this goes through, and all OEMs are subject to the same regulatory hurdles as a university, who wins. It's the universities that have figured out how to compete though PMS despite those regulations. So it will be interesting to see what's next. All right, well, we're on to topic three, you know, as predicted at the beginning, actually, in our predictions episode, we talked about more m&a, you know, Ed Tech winter, creating some interesting bedfellows. And there's ones that would be defensive, where it's you know, somebody who's running out of cash. And you know, there's the opportunistic acquirer coming in, and then some that are more on offense, like, okay, now's our moment to drive our share while others are weak. So we've got to, I'm curious, do you think these were aggressive on the offense moves? Or are these the case of one company failing and the other company taking an advantage? The first one is I excel learning acquiring Teachers Pay Teachers. TPT is the world's largest platform for Educator created content, huge database, I excel has a number of properties, including a bunch of math programs. And then paper acquires major clarity to create a comprehensive career and college readiness platform. So this is basically combining papers, tutoring service, with career and college guidance, support, break it down for me, what do you think about these two?
Great question. I would say that the paper one, I think, is a offensive move. But also one that, you know, paper is very aware that there's been a little bit of a backlash against, you know, some of these enormous tutoring contracts. And they're saying, well, we need to expand what we're doing. And we need to expand it in a direction that people really, really want to be be in. So we're gonna expand into college and career readiness, because that's an area that we can offer for students that is beyond tutoring, and something that sort of maybe as a buffer against, you know, not enough use it. So I think that the paper move is sort of offensive to expand their market expand sort of what they do expand their offerings, but also in the face of let's make sure that we're safe against some negative press. The other one, it's hard to know, I don't know much about what's going on inside. Teachers Pay Teachers. I don't know what do you think I was pretty surprised to see this I excel Teachers Pay Teachers, they seem like wildly different types of companies to me, but I'm probably missing something big there.
Well, you know, it's hard to know. And aside from the press release, there's not a lot out there to tell us why this happened. But with the advent of AI generated content, you have to wonder what teachers pay teacher's was thinking about all this. Number one, they might be thinking, Well, we are the largest platform for teacher created content. That data could be incredibly valuable to someone who's trying to create generative content, but they could also feel like holy crap. That's our entire business. And now AI can create things with similar quality to anything that we have. And the truth is, you know, the reputation of Teachers Pay Teachers has been quantity, not quality, it really has incredible database. And kudos to them for figuring out the double sided marketplace of this. But it's mostly like worksheets on what to do for St. Patrick's Day for fourth graders. Like it's not mind changing deep lessons, I will confess, during COVID, in my pod, we got a couple of units on explorers and presidents of the US, you know, American Revolution from Teachers Pay Teachers, and you can find good stuff there. So I guess the question is for AI Excel, which when you boil it down, it's a content company that has academic content, they have now this ability to take all of this data, take all of that teacher community, and power, everything that they've got. And so there is a way in which you could imagine a generative AI layer, a teacher curated or created layer, and then the kind of top down created like core constructed. And you know, I also know that teachers pay teacher's was looking at going into video, and short form video as another mode of learning. And that might also be an eye Excel strategy, because many of AI excels products, do short little video clips on a math concept, for example. So I think there's a degree to which both of these companies had kind of flattened out their potential, the combination, you know, something like half of all m&a does not work out to be successful. I think this is a roll of the dice. And it could have huge upside if they figure out the right way to layer the cake. But it could also be like a breakeven a moot point or a downside. Also, in the agreement, there was no clarity on what the purchase price was for. The paper one is interesting, because it does feel like Papers trying to diversify. And maybe the one asset that paper has is a lot of cash on the balance sheet. And, you know, if I were in paper shoes, I'd be diversifying really quick, especially given that the kind of expiration day on Esser means that even if they were doing, you know, great job on the tutoring front, they were looking at a haircut. So I think this is probably the first of many moves you're going to see from paper, their CEO was on our show, and he's really sharp, and he understands all the different needs of learners. And you could see them actually playing more like a private equity roll up roll in the space, given that they already have contracts with something like 100 of the top 150 districts in the country.
Yeah, that's what I was gonna say the other thing they have is incredible relationships. They're already, you know, embedded in so many districts that if they have something new and really relevant to offer these districts as a very clear, you know, renewal upsell opportunity there for sure. And you know, it's interesting with the ISL, they, you're right, their contract company, they're also very much of a language company, if you look at, you know, they have immersion, which is an AI language app, they have Spanish dictionary.com and glaze.com. Rosetta Stone is owned by Excel. So I think your analysis makes a lot of sense. I think they're trying to think about, Okay, we have all of this different types of content, we're trying to put it together and sell it through our different channels, Teachers Pay Teachers has, you know, more than 7 million resources all from teachers and these amazing relationships. And I excels in, you know, 85% of schools. So both of these companies are sort of universally known in K 12 schools. So I guess I started to see it. It still didn't totally add up to me, but you know, we'll see what happens.
Great. Well, we will be following up with this. And this is certainly not the last m&a to shake things up. We go from edtech big players to big tech big players with tick tock, tick tock has long courted the EdTech market, in fact, believe it was 2019 or 2020, they launched an edtech division, I think called dolly in China, but pulled back when the government regulations, crackdown on private providers. Tell us a little bit about their new foray.
Yeah, interesting moment. So the fact that tick tock launching an ed tech platform dedicated at tech platform is like our fourth headline today, maybe gives you a little bit of a sense of how crazy this world is. That would be a number one in many weeks. But tiktoks parent company bytedance is launching a new ad tech platform called genius joy. It is AI based we know that by dance is a Chinese company. We also know that Tik Tok is in the midst of being banned in many different countries right now. There's a lot of backlash against standard Tik Tok that said By dance has played with ad tech for a while because there's a huge ecosystem of educational content on tick tock tick tock education is enormous. And so I dance is now hiring in both Singapore and LA for this genius Joy program. And it's about, you know, global primary school students, they said, they're going to focus on 10 to 12, build math and STEM skills and using the Singapore Math pedagogy, which is a very famous well known math curriculum. So it's a very specific move. But I think, you know, anything a company of that size, and that is so ubiquitous in, in kids lives, starts to make moves directly into edtech. We all gotta take notice of that. And I'm surprised a little bit just to see that this is like about stem with a very specific age. And it's AI based makes sense. But I would think that they would be using the AI similarly to the way Quizlet does to take the infinite number of tick tock videos and start to, you know, curate or think about them for education, maybe that's something down the road, but the fact that they're coming back in to Ed Tech and to math is definitely newsworthy. What do you think about this tick tock Mubende? Do you think it's just a little spark in the pan flash in the pan? Or is this like, we're gonna look back at a year and say, oh, yeah, tic TOCs, the biggest education company in the world now?
Well, if we look from the education sector perspective, anytime one of the big tech players gets involved, it creates market distortions that are hard to predict, and can be really, really challenging. But I too, am really shocked at how small the ambition is, of this stated company. And so it makes me go back to the larger story around tick tock, which is it's under fire from the US government, because of its ownership by Chinese parent company, bytedance. And all of the kinds of connections to Chinese government. And you know, this week, they also announced that kids under 18, would get a notification when they hit one hour of scrolling on tick tock. There was also another story that showed that actually half of college students get homework help on tick tock already. So there's a way in which this could also be a PR, like, good for America thing, where launching a, like a tutoring or math service that is valuable to students, leverages Tiktok data that could become, you know, effective, and beloved, could be part of their broader social impact, CSR investment portfolio to try to avoid, you know, regulation or banning from the US. I don't see that being effective. It could also be that they just recognize that math tutoring is such a huge marketplace worldwide. And if you look at that age group, and the ability and willingness to pay of families outside of the US across the world, it's ginormous. And so maybe they're just saying, we're already seeing these kids profiles, using it, maybe even at a later age, why not? Let's codify it and maybe they can make it a little bit safer for kids than just being on open tick tock. It is telling that it's the number four topic and you know, if this starts becoming a bigger deal, we're going to move it up the list. But I think for now, it's and we keep our eyes open.
So just one more tiny point about that. You mentioned in passing that article about people using Tiktok. More than half of college students. So this is an intelligent.com survey surveyed 1000 college students, not only do they say they use it for homework, but more than half of them say they learn more on tick tock than in their classes. And the top subject for that is math. So maybe there's something inside the data of tick tock that we are not seeing where people are using it for unbelievable amounts of math help, and homework help and tutoring and they're just going where the interest is. But I mean, the fact that more than half of the college students surveyed said they learn more on tick tock than in their classes should be a little bit of a headline in our heads. I
mean, do you know as educators, this is where we've gotten to in higher ed, the vast majority of students do not feel like they're learning very much in their college courses. This is a crisis. And the fact that a company as big as Tik Tok continues to see this as a place to play in suggests that it's a gigantic market. All right, from the gigantic to the local South by Southwest in Austin coming up this next week. We have an edtech insiders happy hour at 5pm. I'm not sure that we're going to get this one out by that publishing date. But as I mentioned in the top, we have 250 of our best friends coming. And there's a number of great panels. There's a number of great topics, any insights that you have Alex to share with our listeners.
Yeah, so Greg Toppo, a very long term education journalist who has been on the pod for his books, wrote a really interesting rundown of some of the panels that are gonna be on there some things that really jumped out. One, one panel jumped out to me a lot, developing and assessing creative skills with AI featuring Lego BrainPOP. And the Gates Foundation that feels like something to keep an eye on. As you all know, Legos parent company bought BrainPOP earlier this year. So Lego and BrainPOP are now under the same umbrella. They are clearly thinking about creativity and AI in some really interesting ways. We're also seeing panels about you know, what is Gen Z really wants speaking of tick tock smartphone addiction, social media issues, mental health, teacher shortages, recruiting teachers of color, and one article that stood out to us as well from Ed Week is that the science of reading is, you know, a really hot topic this year, because 18 states have passed science of reading laws, basically focusing on evidence based reading, teaching, instead of, you know, whole language and balanced literacy approaches, which are sort of dominated for a long time. 18 states have passed it since 2021. Nine states have legislation right now. And you know, more than half of the states in the US are now truly moving towards this, Hey, we gotta get phonics, right. And so a lot of ad tech is thinking about that, you're gonna see a lot of panels and interesting talks about science reading, we also see Frank Gehry, there, which is always a fun site. But sounds like it's gonna be amazing conference, I'm not going to be there myself. This is one of the first South by Southwest missed. And I'm so sad because it sounds like there's like such incredible things happening everywhere, including this happy hour that I'm gonna miss our 200 best friends. Ben, what are you looking forward to? You're gonna be in the weeds? I mean, you're gonna be deep in it up to your neck in South by Southwest this week. What are you looking forward to?
Yeah, I mean, you know, most of the conferences for me, it's about the people and the connections, and really catching up on what's really happening in the space. One thing that I will note is that it seems like fewer district leaders are coming to South by Southwest this time. And so that's really changed some of the dynamic those who often went to the event to meet and potentially pitch district leaders are not coming. And so it feels a little bit more like a similar type of field to ASU. GSV, a little bit less investor heavy, a little bit less techie, a little bit more programming, but not as much of a presence of practitioners, and administrators and leaders. And I think that is a potential loss for the conference and for the space. But lots of new companies kind of emerging lots of new players. And let's remember that last year was the first time since the pandemic that it happened. So I think there's, you know, this will be the first time that it will be fully back. If you happen to be at South by if you happen to be at ASU GSB please drop us a line say hello, at ASU GSB. We're hoping to have a booth there just to do postcards from ASU GSB. We'd love to hear from you. All right, as we wrap it up, Alex, any funding m&a That we should talk about?
Yeah, I mean, we saw in new markets, venture partners get $160 million fund to spend on edtech and workforce companies. That is a pretty serious fund. We're actually talking to one of the partners at new markets shortly on the podcast. I look forward to that soon. We also saw $50 million for a Chinese campus recruitment platform called now coder 41 million for a student finance platform that's really focuses on isas income share agreements in Europe, some really interesting kind of wacky funding rounds this week. And then of course, those amazing mergers we already talked about, as well as one where her Dosia, which is a big education services company that runs a lot of big colleges acquired the coding boot camp, coding dojo, which is a real one of the really old school and really, really effective coding boot camps. So that's another one of these roll ups from coding boot camps into the higher ed environment. We saw physics, Walla and UHD. Karsh combine, it's called UHD cars classes combine to do some new test prep, and that those are two big Indian test prep companies that work in science and other topics. So when we saw Morocco on the map, so you know, we saw some interesting movement last last week with the EdTech accelerator in Africa. And now we see Morocco based ad tech cool schools get a bet a million dollar investment to solve educational problems with an interactive courses exercises, management of school life live courses is sort of all in one ad tech platform for schools that's not as organized as we usually say. But some pretty interesting stuff happening. Yeah,
you know, and I'd say a lot still going on in workforce, higher ed and upskill. Seeing and you know, continue to see trends in K 12, where it's really around testing and assessment. And I think it's really exciting to see some of the new entrants in ad tech in Africa, what we know is it's just, there's a number of very large markets, in Sub Saharan Africa, in Northern Africa, quite a lot of government investment that has gone into ad tech, just to create the infrastructure. So an area we'll continue to watch,
just on a last note, you know, Fast Company put out their 10 most innovative companies in education this year, it's always an interesting list to look at. And it was a kind of surprising list this year, we don't have to go into great detail. But you know, you had companies like learning platform, which we know just acquired by Instructure, you had companies like Teachers Pay Teachers, as we know, just acquired by Excel multiverse was on there, which is amazing, you know, apprenticeship company out of Europe, which makes sense, disco was on there. That's Canadian CBC platform, one league, which is basically a platform that does digital MBAs. One thing that really edX is on there, one of the things that really struck me is how few of these are K 12. I don't know if any of them or K 12, specific, maybe teachers, and how many of them are really about that bridge between university and work. There's a lot of these are really about career readiness. I don't think this has been true in other years. I mean, you see babble on there for language learning. But it's an interesting list. And you know, not quite as strange as they have school links on there. It's a sort of competitive NaVi. And it's all about counseling. It's worth looking at just to sort of get a little bit of a pulse of where the EdTech you know, spotlight is going these days, because it feels pretty different than previous years. Is there anything on this list sort of stand out to you, Ben, just as a closing call,
once you are on the list of 100 most influential edtech people? So congratulations, Alex, bravo. No, all of these lists just tell us that we are in an era of increasing not just innovation, but acceleration. And so just the speed at which things are changing, is mind boggling. So that's part of why we do the weekend. Ed Tech is just so you and I can keep tabs on what's going on. And hopefully it helps you the listener as well. Well, thank you all for joining so much. Because if it happens in ed tech, you'll hear it here on the weekend ed tech. Take care and see you all out at the conferences. Bye.
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