This Week in Edtech with Ben Kornell, 2/18/22

education. And of course, today we have Kelly Smith from Brenda and choleric Tanis from learn platform as guests for their really important news.

issues. But even outside of China, a lot of the ad tech stocks have sunk as we have talked about previously on this show. So that's a it's something to keep an eye on. I think it's an important trend, but hopefully when that will reverse in the near term, then what's our next headline?

And my initial reaction when I saw the article was actually to email you and be like, Is this okay? Like? Is this a good idea? And as I read in the article, the CEO, who who were both a big fan of was talking about she was talking about how kids relate to these characters and can translate that into their play. But I think it does raise pretty big questions for most edtech. Company of when do you cross the line when you're bringing in commercial enterprise entities

into the learning space. And particularly with presence learning, which has been a really awesome example of how technology can deliver value that is fundamentally different than in person, like they're doing great things, to see them jump into the space, I think is actually a really big deal. What's your take on on this particular case? Yeah, that's a great

for all sorts of things. And the advent of Sesame Street really came when Joan Ganz Cooney realized that, wow, if these puppets can sell, you know, coffee to adults, and they can sell weird oil products, then why couldn't they sell learning? And they actually created, you know, sesame based on that idea.

So when I hear about the idea of bringing commercial characters, you know, out of an entertainment context into an educational context, my first instinct is hey, that that's that may be is a is a good idea, but I can definitely understand concerns as well because there's there's something interesting crossed incentives if you're getting therapy from Mr. Potato Head, it feels a little bit odd. So I'm torn.

this context. But of course, we've seen like, you know, licenses for Disney characters or other like game based characters in all other aspects of edutainment, this one just feels like pure education, you know, crossing into that space. So aside from these particular headlines, we often do our standing funding and m&a round up, what did you have on your list today?

founders who met at BCG. And I think it's an interesting example of European tech in general, and how companies, you know, people who were formerly in in much more traditional fields are starting to enter ed tech, and, you know, with their background, be able to raise money and sort of move in a pretty quick way. So and that was really interesting to see.

education. But we're seeing the Uber, twitter and google mafia descending upon ed tech, and we'll be interesting to see which ones stick and in which ones don't.

in late 2021. As of this week, we see the launch of another company called modal and so far, it looks to be sort of a b2b company that is also mostly cohort based, it combines live and asynchronous learning. And this is Shimkus, one of the top Udemy executives as well as Dennis Yang, who was a former CEO of Udemy. And they just raised about almost $7 million from a number of ad tech VCs to credit create a whole new model there. It's also the former head of Udemy learning design is also

involved in that venture. So it's, you're seeing some of the people who are coming out of these big IPOs starting new models that are often quite different than the original idea, but they're getting they're getting a lot of funding and moving quickly.

And also, what is their fundraise per student. I mean, if they've got 2 million active learners, and they've raised 400 million, that's $200 in venture funding per student, they're getting to a place where their LTV would have to be quite quite high to justify venture 100x returns on those dollars, but also clearly a winner coming out of the kind of tutoring surge and the COVID pandemic

about Chromebooks. But where my head is, is YouTube and cloud, basically, more people are learning on YouTube than all the other platforms combined. And we're talking lifelong learners, baby. LinkedIn has nothing on us Have you seen their little videos are so cute, we have 100 million of those every day being created. It's is our our world to own in the lifelong learning space for you too. And meanwhile, we are going head to head against Amazon to be the number one edtech cloud

provider. And basically, if we can be the infrastructure behind every, you know, four, or five and six year olds learning experience, we're eventually going to take over the world and be the cloud provider. So sign up today. Thanks for having me on the show. All right, now we're gonna, we're gonna switch roles. So now Alex, you get to go. You are Phillip Cutler, CEO of Montreal based tutoring company paper that we just mentioned. This is your fourth

fundraise since 2020. What are your ambitions now that you've quote unquote, refueled the rocket, as you say.

dosage tutoring. So I'm really excited because I feel like I am taking something that is well known to improve learning and scaling it at school districts, I mean, over 350 school districts in 30 states in the

US. What I'm going to do next if I'm Philip Kotler is I'm going to say okay, having these incredibly good relationships with hundreds of school districts scaly, incredibly quickly being able to build a army of tutors, which is I can't even imagine how many tutors they must be training to be able to support this many students is giving me a channel into the

entire US school system. And ideally, overtime Canadian school system, maybe Mexican European school system, South American, and that goodwill and that ability to train an enormous number of people to be able to support students and build that trust is going to allow me to expand into some of the other things that schools need, especially as schools start to lose staffing with various types of teachers, something we talk about on the show a lot as they start to lose special education teachers

because there aren't enough of them as they start to lose mental health counselors because there aren't enough of them. I'm what I'm going to do if I'm Philip Cutler is follow the ball and continue to expand my set of services to fill the gaps that schools are going to continue to see as they try to wrestle their way back from the pandemic and try to battle teacher burnout.

And that may sound short term, but what that's going to do is put me in a few different verticals and being able to offer services to schools that will make be impossible to uninvested I will be paper will be some of the backbone of what schools do. That's my that would be my strategy. What do you think, Ben?

Headline four and headline five are around evidence as a service and we're excited to bring on Carl retinas from learn platform. And we're also going to be talking about homeschooling with Kelly Smith from prenda.

evaluations, and having evidence for their own decision making, we heard from solution providers, that, you know, everybody should be able to have

better evidence. And so over the last 18 months, we worked with a handful of providers, to understand what it would mean to create what is now evidence as a service, it's a subscription service that equips any size solution provider, to start to build their evidence base and grow it from logic model, where they demonstrate their rationale to meet every level of evidence outlined, and every student succeeds act in a cost effective, and more, most importantly, you know, effort

effective way to build and grow their evidence,

effective? And I think what is exciting about this evidence as a service is that you actually have the infrastructure where you're on the inside with districts, where you understand what their utilization patterns are, and so on and so forth. And now you're basically able to open up that kind of vast network of insider data to EdTech providers, I guess what I, you know, the first question

is like, how does it work? If you're an upstart at tech company, and you're trying to show that your writing math or reading solution is demonstrating results? Is it tied to some sort of assessment? Is it tied to longitudinal data? Like, how does the connection point really work? And I think from that answer, we can also understand, Okay, here's how Essers is really measured?

were different. The reality is that every student succeeds act values, the randomized control trial, that is actually an experimental considered strong

evidence. That's the first level of evidence but ESA highlights four levels of evidence that starts with demonstrates rationale, that level four, which doesn't actually even require testing or assessment, you don't have to be a curricular tool, you need to be able to have a research based logic model that supports that you believe your intervention and shows a pathway for your intervention to affect positively proximal and distal outcomes that is near term and ongoing outcomes of value to

students and teachers. You don't have to be driving test scores to be compliant with SN s or in a matter of weeks. From there and based on and our impact

ready. Tear leverages the things that you mentioned, it equips any startup or product provider, whether they're existing or you know, new to reach that first level, and to communicate that and they'll actually get a badge if they commit to also doing so with students we you know, with their data, privacy agreements, and commit and a commitment to do more evidence building over

time. They'll get a badge that is visible for them and on Learn platform which makes it easier for district Some states to know who's committed to evidence and how they're going to drive that. From there, they can move into doing correlative comparative or control based analyses on the outcomes that they think. And that they have agreed with their district providers matter to them doesn't have to be a test score. We are seeing some curricular tools. But we're also seeing, you know, neveress was

an early adopter of this. And they saw great growth and education around STEM careers for middle schoolers. And they were able to share that growth. And that helped them grow and help them communicate with districts what to expect. It wasn't necessarily designed to help math scores. It was designed to help wisdom, understanding, but folks like age of learning, and others are doing math and other areas too.

So works for everybody from the new startup to the existing growth companies and adopted companies that are driving curricular tools

making a difference. And that is such a terrible choice to have to make. So what I'd like to ask you is, as the evidence as a service subscription comes out, and companies can start building evidence basis for lower cost and more faster cycles, how might that actually impact the growth and business side side of small edtech? Companies? How might they use the evidence to accelerate their growth and sales and business?

throwing their evidence. And we're making it easily visible and shareable for the purposes of communicating with districts that helps drive their growth, or, you know, states or others who may be their purchasers. It can serve as a receipt, right? We did this evidence. And now we are an evidence based intervention as defined by Esser so or ESA, and that can be shared, could be a ticket,

right? Considered a ticket, if I'm going to investors, or maybe I'm going to complete an RFP or a grant application, I now can show here's my evidence basis, and we think this funding will equip us to go to the next level or what, you know, show it, we saw that in the first 12 months and sort of the beta period, you can, you know, talk to some of

the providers who did this. They won deals, we're not saying it's because of the evidence, but they did leverage the evidence as part of their response to statewide adoptions or RFP responses or what have you. So we believe by tying into how folks grow, that that's better for everybody. And we're excited about what that looks like moving forward.

framed from an equity lens. And this is just showing that parents in schools in traditional K 12 public schools are frustrated across demographic groups, and are looking for new ways to connect their kids to learning experiences in the article that that were while also posted the show notes. It talks a little bit about culturally relevant curriculum as well. And I think parents are repeatedly expressing an interest and having a say, of what students

curriculum would be. We're seeing that in the negative sense in terms of book bans and rallies at school board meetings. But also from a positive standpoint, parents are just way more engaged way more involved, kind of a positive output of the pandemic reality. And so with that, Kelly Smith here, you know, Kelly we first connected Long, long ago, four or five years ago when prenda was just an idea and you know, a

couple of home pods. And now here you are kind of on the front end as a leader in the homeschool pod space. Thanks for joining us on the show.

to bed. You hear the stories like this kid, you know, got really excited about reading the book Moneyball and then went on to sort of like, do a simulation of a front office of a baseball team and learned all this sophisticated statistics in the process and follow their passion. It's I think there's a sense with a lot of parents, that learning in that, at that level of engagement and flexibility is just incredible,

right? It's it's sacred, but at the same time, we never did it when it was pure homeschool, just our kids, right? We said, well, it's a lot of work for the parents. I don't know if I would even do it right. And I'm putting that in air quotes. Like, I think there's a lot of stress and pressure, you look at things like the state standards and tests and stuff that you hope that that kids will learn. And you look at, you know, the social factor, right, I want my

kids to be around other kids. So for all those reasons, I didn't take the jump to pure homeschool, I know a lot of families have done that. And they found ways to kind of get, you know, get over those those

potential hurdles. But what we found with micro schools and using the word pods, but this idea of a small group that meets together on a regular basis, and they have just enough structure that those three questions, the social question, the academic rigor question, and, and how hard is it for the parents to

pull it off? Those are satisfied, right, like we've solved, solve those three things and put put it together in a way that that just allows kids to get the benefits of homeschool without doing kind of a pure homeschool. So we we usually park it kind of in the middle of a traditional classroom and pure homeschool, as we talk about microscopes and pods. So I'm not saying that to be kind of pedantic, I just want to make sure your listeners understand to what the perspective I'm

coming from. And then given that, if you still want to know the answer, you know, yes, it's been a crazy couple of years, right? I think we're seeing people who never asked the question, right? It's, it was sort of this default assumption was I'll drive my kids to this building that's owned and operated by the government, I will drop them off when they're five, I will essentially pick them up when they're 18. And they'll have, you know, a piece of paper, and there'll be sort

of ready for life. And I think as you you see more and more parents kind of looking into that or asking questions about that. But you recognize that that was a kind of a preposterous starting assumption, right? I think that it needs to be more than that learning is so much more than that. It can be so much more

than that. And so you see parents all across the desert, like you said, demographic groups, all types of parents are saying, hey, I want my kid to be seen understood as a, as a human, I want them to have what they need in terms of skills and abilities and mindset, to go out and achieve success. And that's going to look different for each child, each human being is

different. So yeah, I think you're seeing very quickly over over three years, a complete rewrite of the social contract, what it means to quote, you know, educate a child.

through. And economists do all these studies, you know, you go into the supermarket, and you differentiate the pricing of yoga, people buy less yogurt, because they they actually are thinking about it. But when everything's the same cost, and it's default, it's all 50 cents, or a buck per yoga. They just buy the yogurt, and I think COVID has been the don't just buy the yogurt moment for educator or parents and families. What was that like for

you though? Like, early days, you had to convince people like, hey, try this out, take the risk, take the leap. And then basically, everyone's pushed off the ledge and said, You're doing this at home one way or the other. And so people are now inbound, bombarding using Kelli helped me do this. What was that moment like? And how, how has that reshaped your business?

have been thinking about it. So whether they've made the jump to homeschool, you know, one of the early sources of parents and families that we found were actually the lurkers on homeschool groups. So in every like homeschool network, there's a really loud group that seems to have it all together, they tend to be very like type a very organized, and they're out there saying everybody should homeschool, here's why. Here's all the stuff I'm doing. They're sharing the resources in a very

generous way. But part of what happens is, if you're maybe not that way, as a mom or dad, you're looking at that saying, I could never be like that, you know, like, that seems completely alienating. So you're reading it, you're reading the posts, you're sort of talking about it, but you're not acting, you're not commenting even on any posts or even asking questions, you're just sort of

vaguely thinking about it. And what happens with those people is, there's a moment that comes I mean, we saw this over and over again, where, you know, one of those kids like, so I'm thinking of one of our early students that was really, really advanced, academically, picked it up really quickly, socially, was hard, right? And it was little things of just practice, like, when you when you talk to someone this way, it comes

across poorly. And so you know, I think there's so much that the family can do, but the environment that that these parents chose was to say, hey, let's let this kid run. And he did, he continued to go through math at an astonishing rate, I think he was well into high school math by the end of the seventh grade year that that we

had him. And meanwhile, the stories that were most powerful were about his connections, right learning, learning how to give and take with other kids his age, sharing what he's got, but learning from others, instead of maybe feeling a need to be the one that knows everything and, and to see that transformation. That's just one particular kid, we hear story after story of, you know, reasons why, maybe it's more

acute for that one family. So you had those those people have always existed, they will always exist, like you're talking about though, COVID comes along, and pretty soon, school is happening by zoom and living room, or it's a worksheet or something. And the family is kind of looking at it and saying, Hey, I don't know if the learning here is really what like my child needs, it doesn't feel tailored, it doesn't feel I can definitely see like a lack of engagement in

my daughter, my son. And so yeah, so then this is a moment that I think for all the hardship of it. And it was a challenging moment for everybody. The benefit is like, for the first time ever, people said, Hey, we could be part of a solution here. Like there's, it's maybe a combination of educators, curriculum, state standards, and parents and kids and families and put it all together in a way that hasn't

been done before. And we were grateful to be part of that, we very quickly saw just an explosion in growth, we saw lots and lots of families come in, some of those families have seen the way we're doing it and stuck with it. And some of them haven't, right, some of them have said, we're gonna go back

So we're trying to really focus the world on on this concept of learning and how much power is available in living life that way, right living life as a learner,

school in means. And I'm curious, as you see this sort of pandemic beginning to ebb now and people and kids starting to go back to traditional school. Do you think that this spectrum, this idea of different pieces of learning coming from different places is going to far outlast the pandemic? And if so, how will that happen? Will it come from parents? Will it come from schools and hybrid hybrid models? Will how will that continue to be part of the conversation? Yeah,

public schools. So we work closely with forward thinking educators, in you know, states all over the US, we get to talk to these folks see their one just undying passion for serving their kids in their community. It's inspiring truly is inspiring and And you could see their willingness to kind of question some of the structures and maybe blockages that have held things up in the past. So there are people from that side that are going to work hard.

There's a lot of energy on the parent side parents who just, you know, whether it's I disagree with particular policy, or I want to tailor this to my own kid, it could be curriculum choices, and there's lots of reasons right that the parents might say, Let's take matters into our own hands, you know, and, and let's do that and Prentice vote is, let's do that in partnership with the institution of education, it doesn't have to be throw the whole thing out and invent something completely separate.

But working together, giving people that flexibility, and getting kids to a point where, you know, I guess the the parallel this all happening in the backdrop is the parents of these kids are seeing a shift in the way work goes, right. So there used to be this giant bundling, you go get this job, and they tell you everything to do and they might train you in how to do it and you sort of performing these tasks. Well, that's that unbundling has happened. I mean, it's that's

over. Right. So now everybody knows, like, it's about that. Yeah, there's this reed Hoffman book called The Startup of You. It's really just saying, like, you're gonna think about your career as an agent of change. And you can you can go out and sort of create, build the skills and abilities that you want, do the work you want. Find the other people and yeah, so you'd imagine that kind of unbundling

re bundling? And I think it's going to be the answer is gonna be yes to all of it, right, there's going to be people who want the bundle, because it's much easier to just make one decision, and not think about it. And that's totally fine. There's gonna be other people who will go as far as you're talking about where it's literally is all a cart like I will do this sport over here,

and we'll drive there. And then there will be science, we're going to do exactly this way, we're going to sign up for this theater camp that includes writing. And so they're going to do get in and all of that there's families doing that today, I think it'll get easier, there will be more options, the

ecosystem will flesh out. And so you'll see more and more choice, all of this approximating what I think is the core right as an individual learner, for a child to decide, like I want to learn, it can't feel to them, like they're being pushed through some sort of factory, right? It really needs to feel like theirs. It needs to feel like a choice that they're making. And that's only going to happen to the extent that options exists. And there's decisions along the

way. And agency is part of the the equation.

now. And from a business standpoint, there's the impact standpoint, which I think we all understand, from an equity standpoint, finding a way to reach all learners is really important, and is best served when finding opportunities to partner. But outside, I constantly hear from education entrepreneurs around customer acquisition costs and lifetime value challenges with b2b sales, b2b partnerships with

governmental pay. And so we see more and more momentum around the direct to consumer angle that said, you know, places like outschool, and others are trying to find ways to, you know, create a school district product offering, how have you navigated that? And what advice do you have to a tech entrepreneurs that are thinking about this?

This is not, it's not something that just sort of was written from scratch. So it's, you're inheriting hundreds of years of, you know, evolution in the way America thinks about education. And most of that written for a model where information was the kind of the constraint right, so the, the bottleneck was we need people who know, subjects, so they can stand there and tell the kids about the subjects. And that was true for a long time.

That's no longer true. And so it's, you know, as things evolve, fortunately, this is I guess, if you're listening to this thinking, you know, I would like to try to do it that way. I would say it's, it's definitely going to be a lot more work. So don't don't walk away from this thinking that Kelly's telling you to do it and not worry. But if you want to do it, it's

possible. And the reason it's possible is we've met folks from departments of education, from regulatory bodies from State House legislatures from I'm all different groups in this whole ecosystem that get it, they really do. And they understand why like, what changes need to be made and what how these pieces can come together to not only serve parents and kids, but but to really move public education forward. So there's, there are allies out there that

will support you in this. And and yeah, you're right, then I mean, it's not, it's not the best quote, you know, pure business perspective to do it this way. But every time I meet, kids, and I would overwhelming majority of the 1000s of kids we've served, wouldn't be with us, they wouldn't be paying for

school, they just can't. So when I spend time with those kids, and I see the changes that are happening with them, I see them coming alive as empowered learners, it's like, well, I'm gonna go back and solve hard regulatory problems, because it's worth it right, we've got it got to make this available.

And so this binary thinking of you're on the conveyor belt in the factory, and you've got to go to each station to be output. I think that longitudinally, this ability to go in and out of those systems based on the learners needs can be much more successful now. Absolutely. I

know, we've got to wrap up. But I do think a lot of our listeners are also would hear what you just said about sometimes it's not the best business optimization, but for the long term, you believe that it's aligned to your impact and the long term health of your enterprise. You know, we're seeing headlines from soar raising, you know, something like 100 million Kai pod from Y Combinator, I follow Prisma. I think they're doing great

things. So an explosion of venture activity in this space, but also like, a Retrade right now on venture valuations due to the market conditions. So, you know, I've always been impressed with how you've maintained, you know, your core values and that impact as a guiding star, and then figured out how to bring the right investors on. How did you how did you navigate that?

And how do you manage investor expectations today, knowing that they're, you know, some of these elements are in your control out of your control? And, you know, homeschool is such a, like evolving space.

people homeschool? And so he asked his friends, that question his friends brought him to me, we were able to kind of quickly connect on this vision of what the world should be. And he's been incredible support with you know, he's famous for having a very long term perspective and one after another. We meet people like that. I think that the answer is, this isn't about building something up and

selling it. It's, it's about making a difference in the lives of people and there are so many people out there even in the capital markets, right that I think scare people away, that really see the world that way. And we've been lucky enough to find those folks. That's our, our squad we, you know, it's

definitely not easy. So we celebrate the wins and we definitely regroup on the the hard moments publicly shout out that we've been very lucky learn capital has been an incredible partner, John Dan are one of our early investors. It's just been incredible. We, for our series be outside of the education world, Alexis Ohanian, and Canelo Kailyn. Holloway from 776 have just been incredibly

helpful for us. And they see the same future they want to get get to this world where these kids are really empowered as learners, right? And they see this, this need and that's it's growing. And it's not going away that more and more parents are going to want to participate in education in these ways. So we're grateful to do the work. It's grateful to deal with people that are great. And it's it's good to know you guys, too. I know you're out. You know, Ben, you and I've crossed paths

for a long time. So tons of respect for everybody that's that's out there. Every company you just named I'm in awe of AI and many more, right? There's, there's lots of good stuff happening so