Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast, we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work at leading and tech companies.
Welcome to This Week in edtech, we have a lot to cover this week from employers lightening the debt load to the challenges faced by K 12 schools, we have our amazing guest host today, Matt tower from workshop ventures, Matt, say hello to the people. Hey, there,
thanks for having me again, say to to dig into this week's news.
Absolutely. So we have a great deep dive later in the show. But let's start with the headlines. So the first one that's really stuck out to me this week was that there were a handful of different headlines from different sources, that all sort of had the same kind of push, which was that people are starting to take the responsibility of taking the burden of debt off of students more seriously than I think they
have been quite a while. So there was a terrific Harvard Business Review article about why employers should fund and continue to fund education programs that actually really do not leave students in debt that follows them throughout their career, there's a great push coming to try to end unpaid internships so that students don't have to, you know, on top of their student debt work for
free. And there's an interesting article from the Hechinger Report about how low income students are starting to really notice the concept and the potential for free tuition. So this sort of from a lot of different directions, people are starting to take seriously the idea of shifting the balance off of students, and in many cases onto employers. Matt, what do you think about this trend?
Yeah, so there's kind of two tracks in how I think about this one being the more positive one of accessibility and making college possible for a broader swath of people and people that, you know, aren't necessarily 18 to 22 year olds and coming from the summer. Right, right, which, you know, I think the stat is, it's only about 40% of the US that has a college degree today. And you know, we know college graduates have outsized earnings. We don't need to
rehash that. But, you know, we know it's important to make college accessible. So like, on that front, I think, all of these initiatives that increase the number of pathways to getting a degree, you know, whether it's through federal grants, whether it's through employers or other avenues, I think the more the better, the more like businessy economic See, path that I also think about is what effect this has on
tuition. And, you know, I think most folks have seen that crazy chart of like Consumer Price Index rising relatively slowly until recently, against like college tuition and health care, which just went through the roof. And I think the interesting kind of thing that goes along with that is, we haven't really, the federal government, which has funded a lot of the kind of low end of the college tuition spectrum hasn't done anything to cap prices. And we've seen prices
just go up and up and up. And I'm curious if we see more employers getting involved if they have more leverage on universities to bring costs down. I know, that was something we talked about a lot at Sei was trying to make sure that we could offer a really comprehensive degree program within the budget of the employer, you know, whether that was the 50 to 50, that was tax deductible, or over and above that, for an unfortunately, small group of employers that
hopefully will increase. So that to me is a kind of potential consequence, positive consequence that is kind of under discussed, possibly, because we don't know whether it'll happen or not.
Yeah, and I think there's almost like a leverage situation reminds me a little bit of the sort of negotiating for Medicare prices, where if you have employers paying the tuition for large numbers of students, for a variety of reasons, then suddenly the bargaining power gets very centralized instead of every individual student and family trying to, you know, keep tuition low, or in the case of schools, like, you know, Cooper Union, picketing when they start, you know, charging
tuition or raising tuition, you have employers, which are very powerful, and maybe even groups of employers starting to put pressure on a university to lower the sticker price, or at least that discounted price could be a very different and interesting dynamic. One thing that stands out to me from the Ed Tech angle is that you have companies like guild, the big headline one and a number of others that offer education as a benefit and are trying to sort of work exactly in this space.
And one of the things that always jump So to me that I'm looking towards is, well, one of the reasons companies are really interested in this is that it is a retention play, right? If a company can offer University access or a degree or a certificate to a learner or to an employee and make them into a learner, then that employee is more likely to stay at the company, it sort of creates an additional meaningful and very purposeful reason for them to
stay. But it also kind of locks the employee into the company and doesn't make it as easy as maybe it should be to move to a new job, but stay at the university. That sort of portability, which would be very beneficial to the learner is not necessarily advantageous to the employer. Matt, how do you think about that? And do you see a future where learners can actually get that kind of employment that education is a benefit from an employer, but not then be sort of locked into the employment?
Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, there is a good article, Paul Fein wrote from workshift, just a couple of weeks ago about what he I don't know if he coined this, or somebody close to him, but it stuck out to me when I read it from his work was time poverty, where if you are a entry level employee at a retail conglomerate, taking part time classes covered by your tuition assistance benefits, it would take you like eight to 16 years to get a bachelor's degree,
which is like, just bonkers. So, you know, I think there's things we need to work on within the system to make that possible. from a time perspective, not just from a job perspective. I think for the employers, there's not really like a pro or a con to it, like, yeah, it's a thrilling benefit, I could imagine them saying and we want it all to be portable, so you can change universities whenever
you want. But I don't think there's like a strong economic argument for requiring credits earned while an employee of X company at y university to be transferable like to them, it's trying to keep an employee for an extra, you know, six to 12 months. And unfortunately, that only really gets you through your kind of entry level or introductory courses at school. So there's just this weird, kind of entry level introductory course cycle, that I'm not sure.
All right, it's possible to break in the current model, like something has to shift so that we have less of this time poverty problem. Yeah, sorry, I'm rambling a little bit.
No, it makes a lot of sense. And, you know, I would think that the group in this triad who is maybe potentially most advantaged by portability from employer to employer, is actually the
university. So because if a university is getting a whole large swath of students through an Amazon partnership, or Walmart partnership, but Disney partnership, like the ones guild does, but those learners are only able to complete one year of school, and they're not giving any credit for prior work, and there's no sort of accelerated model, then those
learners are dropping out. I mean, those learners are not able to finish if they're staying at Walmart for one year, then leaving Walmart and then unable to stay with the school. The school has a lot of, you know, both moral and monetary reasons to want to keep that student in their ecosystem. So I wonder if the portability may come from
monetary Yes, to put a fine point on it because you know, their highest margin products because schools are, you know, selling a product to a consumer, our introductory courses, the moral thing is stickier, because like, morally, they should want the student to graduate as soon as possible to economically it's kind of the inverse.
Yeah, well, one of the big conundrums of higher ed these days in general. So let's shift to talking about K 12. There's some really crazy stuff happening in the K 12. World.
Yeah, and I'm starting to feel like a little bit of a Cassandra here, where I talk about this and my silly newsletter all the time, but I just like keep getting hit over the head with these awful headlines about, you know, schools are falling apart, which you and I talked about, we saw this week, our staffing shortages galore. And even people are trying to get money to help acquire teachers and they just can't find them
anywhere. There was another headline that one in 420 5% of superintendents are likely to quit. So we're talking about a quarter of our superintendent, labor force, you know, ready to head for the doors, which is just insane. On the student front, there's this really informative but just terribly sad article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson, who I feel like he's everywhere writing about like all of the sad things in
the world really well. His writing is really good that one of the topics he writes about her talking about how you know, I think it was like 30% of American teenagers are sad and for are a lot of kind of disadvantaged populations, that rate is as high as 50 plus percent. It was 60%
for girls and 2% for LGBTQ plus, it was incredibly just workers.
Yeah. So it's like, I feel like K 12 is just taking it on all fronts. And yes, we've all had issues. But I feel like this specific demographic is so important to our future, both as country as a world, you know, not to get too mad on you. But if you're growing up sad, like, how is that going to affect your adulthood? That generation that came out of college after the global financial crisis? You know, we talk about, like, their specific buying patterns now.
And, you know, so it's just, it's a complicated thing to think about. Yeah,
what I'm hearing you say, Matt, is that you believe the children are our future, and, and let them lead the way. All jokes aside, you know, these headlines are quite scary. There was one about California enrollment plunging for the K 12 schools in the wake of COVID. And students just not coming back. And that is disproportionately for low income students. The Universal lunch program, you noted, you know, was expanded enormously
during COVID. But now it's being sort of reversed back to its original state, which is going to leave a lot of families sort of unserved. I think we're seeing maybe this is overstating it. But I think what almost amounts to an existential crisis for K 12 schools in the US, I think that they were already
facing some problems. But I think that in the wake of COVID, where so many different players in the ecosystem, you mentioned, superintendents, teachers, and students are all sort of heading for the door simultaneously, or feeling really unfulfilled or bad about what is happening. It's a scary time. And you know, we'll see if, you know, this is all a little bit of the sort of
post COVID. You know, one of the points that Derek Thompson makes in that Atlantic article is that there's so much bad news in the world right now between COVID and the Russian war and displacement and stock prices and inflation, that adults and children alike are sort of bombarded with consistent negative news out in the world. And maybe this is a passing
phase. But if you look at what's been happening in the schools, at least from the height of the pundits, and looking from the headlines, it really feels like they're adding up to something that may create a real rethinking of what schools are trying to do of who should be teaching of who should be running schools. Because with so many people leaving the workforce, I think there's a daresay maybe an opportunity to sort of really go back to the roots of what the K 12 system
can and should do. Do you think there's an opportunity in this crisis? Man?
Yeah, I mean, I again, like I have to, because it's like, you know, investors have to go where the opportunity is. And first of all, like, that's right. And the complexity of it to me is, you have a finite amount of resources, both in terms of money, but also in terms of time, like, you get a student in school for call it seven hours a day, obviously, that varies, and there's after school and for school, etc, but call it seven hours a day.
Students are behind in their academic, like knowledge acquisition, teachers are behind in their professional development. Yeah, it's sad. Students have mental health challenges, teachers have mental health challenges, administrators are trying to figure out how to run hybrid school environments. Yeah, like, what do you prioritize? We are fundamentally limited in the things we can do. And we can't do all of it. I don't think so.
I think it forces these just really complicated choices on school leadership effectively, and you're always going to be wrong in somebody's eyes. So you know, it's cool to see, you know, obviously, we saw tons and tons of tutoring happen throughout COVID. I think now we're seeing the mental health wave. You know, if I were to guess, out of 100 headlines in the next six months, 50% of them might be mental health apps, both for school and outside of
school. But we're still figuring out how to compose a day to make up for the last academic time, and the last social emotional time.
Yeah, it's scary and quite sad. My sort of TECHO optimist side says, I hope you know, I don't think we can
count on it. But I hope that some of the solutions that the ed tech world has been working on for a number of years to be able to, you know, bring learning home, improve access, improve communications, try to end now moving towards mental health and SEL could at least soften the burden and get us through this period, if not, you know, become a sort of essential piece of the future of what schooling is because if there are not enough teachers, you may want to, you know, work with out
school or you work with some of these providers that allow you to expand or With subject that allow you to hybridize a classroom and have really good subjects and teachers from elsewhere, and the same can be said for many elements of schooling, but I hope that it's utopian rather than dystopian are to know
well, and I think this is a good bridge to our third topic, which is learn platform just put out there, report on like the top 40 edtech products. And I'll let you talk a little bit about it. But just to kind of segue, I think one of the open questions for K 12 is something that higher ed kind of went through, call it 10 ish years ago, which is, what is the role of private players, and private in the sense of both commercial entities, philanthropic entities, but non
public institutions? How do they fit into this picture in what we hope can be an additive way, not a detractor play?
Yeah. So some of the headlines from this Learn platform top 40 report, I think speak to exactly what you're saying. So one of the big headlines is just the pure volume of number of tools being used in schools, that headline is 74, different edtech tools being used by K 12 students, and 86 different tools being used by k 12. Teachers, that is a huge number of edtech tools, they're being used in a huge amount of different capacities. Their LMS is an si s is in quizzing platforms, and storage and
everything you can imagine. But those are still big numbers. Two big headlines for me with this report. And you know, obviously, we'll put it in the show notes, along with all of the other headlines we're talking about is that of the top 10 platforms used in schools. Eight of them are Google products, eight of them, including, you know, not only Google Classroom, which is actually number eight. But Google Docs, Google Slides, YouTube are the top three Google Drive Google Sites, Google
Forms. So you're seeing this incredible, and Ben loves to talk about this on the podcast that Google is the biggest edtech company in the world. But it's really undeniable when you look at a list like this. And you see that, you know, eight of the top 10 tools are all Google Sites. I think it speaks to the free nature of Google Sites. I think it speaks to the convenience, the ubiquity, the fact that students can understand them at this point, as well as teachers, even pretty
young students. But that is pretty incredible to think that this one private company, to your point, is basically running the infrastructure for most of the schools in this country.
Yeah, it's insane. And, you know, I wrestle with this a lot. Because imagine if a school had to pay for all services, right, like, imagine if you just meant it's eight of the 10 Google Apps, I think maybe all those except maybe Google Classroom are free. You know, imagine even if you were paying 10 bucks a teacher a month for all eight of those, like your overhead just increased by 1000s of dollars, which schools just don't have.
So, you know, in some ways, we're, we're lucky that Google kind of stumbled into this position, that should be a little bit careful with my word choice. They're calling it stumbling. But, you know, what would we do without them? You know, is my counter argument to those who are who taught me that Google, with the
exception of Google Classroom, I think stumbling is a pretty fair term. And that, you know, Google Docs and YouTube especially, certainly were not designed for their core use case being education in classrooms, the fact that they've taken off and become unbelievably popular there. Maybe we wouldn't call it a complete stumble. But it's certainly not a hyper planned, you know, takeover, by any means. The other two, by the way, in case we're curious, you
know, number six is Kahoot. And number seven, most used product is clever, which is also just acquired by Kahoot. It covers the single sign and program. The other headline to me, it's really worth looking at this list. But the other headline to me besides the Google, just Uber dominance, is how many sites on this list are really about education and gamified quizzes, you sort of see it over and over
again. So besides Kahoot, which is obviously the sort of big juggernaut in that space, you have companies like EdPuzzle, which allows videos to be basically, you know, gamified, you can sort of add quizzes to videos, a company called blue bucket, which I had never heard of, but it also is sort of K 12, class reviews and quizzes, which rose up in the list this year, the Indian company quizzes, which is in many ways, a Kahoot, you know, competitor and
potential clone. And then you have these funny companies like coolmath, games, and ABC, which are these very low fi frankly, I mean, they're really old fashioned sites that basically are aggregators of educational games, very small educational games, but they both make the list as some of the most commonly used platforms in the country. So I mean, in some ways, I think this is a little bit of a COVID thing and that
people are so unhappy. It's cool that either there's a lot of stress happening right now the idea of playing games and making it as fun as possible. was great. But I also think it really speaks to how much that one use case of sort of making quizzing into something fun is really pretty dominant, you know, outside of the Google dominance, that use case is everywhere on this list. And it really jumped out to me, what do you think bad? Was that a surprise to you? I knew Kahoot
was huge. I didn't know there were five or six different companies doing something similar all in the top 40.
Yeah, I mean, it would have been interesting to try and like come up with a list of 40 apps and try to stack rank them, that might be a future game for the podcast. Next, you know, top apps and higher ed or K 12. But it's not shocking to me that gaming would be up there. I think, you know, there's the folks at those apps, maybe like, maybe with the exception of coolmath games.com.
I put a lot of time and effort into them, but they still feel pretty far away from you know, the games that I don't know if you're a gamer, but I play on nights and weekends. So I definitely wish that we had higher fidelity. I like the way you put it Lo Fi games that were available to students. I think, frankly, they'd be a lot more impactful to students, but then you'd have to charge more and I don't know. So I did enjoy as a millennial cool math games.com was kind of reminiscent of
addicting games.com. And those shockwave player games that millennials played growing up, but that was better for nostalgia than for learning math.
Yeah, I mean, I think if we flash forward to you know, 10 years from now, companies like, you know, Minecraft EDU Roblox class craft is a really interesting sort of modern gamified platform. There are a number of and then this whole Metaverse move that people are starting to think about, I think that next generation of games will make its way into the classroom in a big way. But I think you're right, that the cost is one piece of it, you know, Kahoot is free to very inexpensive.
So quick, fun fact, on Kahoot. They actually make most of their money off adults, they make I looked this up a couple of months ago, but it's more than 50% of their revenue from enterprise sales.
The millions, 9 million teachers that are using it in classrooms, you
know, it's not the teachers, it's like actual, like, people like Coursera
I mean, it subsidizes the teachers, the teachers are not the ones paying it's the enterprise class paying which teachers
evangelized it amongst their children, and somehow, while the children's parents ended up paying for it. Yeah. Yeah,
I frankly, I mean, cool math games is a lot of fun. But like, I was a little shocked to see sites that you know, really were like state of the art in literally, you know, 2003, as some of the biggest most commonly used people are very used to them. And they do have certainly have some value.
But I agree with you that if gamified quizzing is this big now then gamification, and gaming apps could really be a place to look in the future because as that next generation becomes affordable, approachable to both teachers and students, and you know, widespread, I think we are going to see more of that because there's such a gap between what you see in classrooms in terms of games and what you see in consumer products,
totally, then we are slowly seeing a bridge, you know, you and I talked about also VR two weeks ago, and our headlining acquisition this week, which I hope you don't mind if I just jump into the funding, or is labs there, which is interactive lab simulations. So they received backing from a16z. Last year, that was kind of a notable education play from Andreessen Horowitz, one of the bigger VCs in the whole world. And they added 47 million to their balance sheet probably
over the past few months. But they announced it this week. So the interesting thing about them, and I'll roll through all these, and then maybe we can zoom back on the ones that are interesting to you is that lobster wants to provide content for both universities and high schools, which traditionally has been pretty hard if you look at the stratification between the publishers, and they're probably call it five major publishers in higher ed and five major
publishers in K 12. Only a couple straddle both demographics, basically Pearson and McGraw Hill, the rest tend to be more specialized with smaller subsidiaries that run kind of the other side of their business. So I think as a result, like they need a lot of capital producing content for both markets is not cheap, but it's certainly kind of notable in the space. And also I just flagged that owl ventures
contributed to this round. And, you know, we talked with Michael from subject two weeks ago, that shows them being interestingly increasingly interested in this kind of Neo publisher content space, they would probably frame it differently, perhaps more eloquently than I but you know, these are both big bets on kind of the future of educational content, and at least with lobster, pretty interactive content and was subject you know, obviously high production quality and perhaps in the
future interactive. Next up, we have sales impact Academy, which is a again, they would probably put it more eloquently than I but they're a sales bootcamp. They train entry level sales folks for their first jobs. The big kind of a notable thing here is that HubSpot participated significantly in the round. So HubSpot, obviously one of the leading sales software platforms, giving their lending their name to SI, hey, sales compact Academy is a big win for
them. Then we have kaleidoscope, which is essentially a marketplace for college scholarships. So for graduating seniors and current college students, they go to kaleidoscopes website and look for scholarships that they qualify for. So Kaleidoscope builds them up a profile, and helps them filter through there. They're like, hundreds of 1000s of scholarships available ranging in size from, you know, a couple $100 to 1000s of
dollars. And traditionally, it's very challenging for high school students to navigate that and they tend to, you know, only find the scholarships available in their local market. So it's the, you know, the pizza shop down the street provides $100 to the valedictorian of high school, this kaleidoscope helps make that process more accessible to more of the high school population and in college population, and they take a cut for doing so. So it's a really big market, it's $60 billion.
And right now, pretty fragmented, couple more we have pursued, which is a job training platform and uses isas to make the training process more kind of affordable for their students. So it says you don't have to pay until you get a job. AUG schools, which is a platform for K 12 schools, healthcare
providers. So like the school nurse, which is kind of interesting in that it is, you know, another quote unquote, platform for K 12 schools, but it's one that is super sensitive, obviously, like, if you think adult electronic health information needs to be secured, children's electronic health information needs to be like, Tripoli secure, so and it was led by Tiger global, which is one of the biggest VC players in the world, not just at Tech, and this was one of their first
I think they've done others. But it was particularly notable that they jumped in pretty early to this company. So I'm gonna pause there any of those stick out to you, Alex,
they're all really interesting. I mean, I think that a through line I'm seeing with a few of these is this sort of attempt to reach students that would not have access to sort of job opportunities. So the sales impact Academy is an interesting play this, this sort of bootcamp specifically to create a job pipeline for salespeople. It's so specific, but sales is such a humongous world, there's a lot of turnover, there's a lot of
growth. And so it's so interesting to me that you can get that far and make such a huge company purely on the sales pipeline. And then you know, Kaleidoscope is obviously trying to get people into the scholarship world, but which is incredibly important. And I think, you know, there's this huge gap between students cultural literacy and their sort of knowledge of what options they have for funding and then the funding that's actually out
there. So those two both really excite me lobster, of course,
is I have a quick anecdote on the sales impact Academy. I once was very fortunate to be in the room for a lecture by the owner of an NBA team, I will hold back on saying which team but he was talking about when they took over the team. And frankly, actually, I think it was still their process. When when he talked to me at this point, their sales strategy was higher 200 entry level ticket sales people every February, which is when they sold the next season season
tickets. And their expectation was that by the next February, two of them would be leftover, and they promote them to more senior positions. So literally, every year like clockwork, they'd hired 200 people, you know, expect them to just quit over the course of 12 months, you know, promote those who lasted and bring in a new crop the next year, which just seems horribly inefficient to me, you know, maybe it was, but like you said, it's a massive market. There's 13 million sales jobs in
the US alone. Anybody who can, like if you told that owner like, hey, you'll end up with 10 instead of two, he probably would have treated you like gold,
which is amazing. I mean, that's going from what 99% turnover to 98 it's I mean, it's a crazy world, but when we're fast training has a huge payoff, and it makes sense that the company focusing on it would get some traction. Yeah, exactly. There's a few more m&a. Go for
it, Matt say Whoo, jumping into m&a, we have a couple from kind of all over the place. One is moment, acquired and roll hand. And roll land is a kind of marketing and enrollment service for for K 12. Schools, both public and private. And this really goes alongside school mints, drive to create, I'm kind of, you know, coining the term of K 12. OPM, I don't know that they would agree
with me on that. But it is really bringing that kind of professionalized enrollment management to the K 12 world, which traditionally, at least to my knowledge hasn't really focused on acquiring students in so commercial a term. So this kind of ad, they announced their kind of entrance into that market a few weeks ago and enroll here. And I think it's mostly just a addition for
channel. So schools that are already interested in this thing, now coming in under the school mint umbrella, and then to others baranda learning in India IPOs, which is they offer kind of coaching services for competitive exams. So I think we all know the competitive exam market in both the US and in India as one of the biggest in the world. And branta has leveraged that to great success.
And finally, we have go one acquiring corporate Academy go on is Australia's only a tech unicorn, very notable for that, hopefully, we'll see some more in the next few years. But they bought corporate Atomy to expand their client base into Europe Academy is based in France and Switzerland, and go on has kind of a library of professional training content that, you know, the biggest thing with any library is getting it into the hands of as many people as
possible. So that expanding from Australia to Europe is a fairly logical acquisition. And I would expect them to kind of continue along those lines in both Europe and elsewhere in the coming months and years.
Excellent. So a lot of stuff happening all over the world IPOs acquisitions of a couple of really big funding rounds, lobsters in Nordic country getting $47 million. That's a big one. A couple more funding rounds, hot off the presses, we care raised $12 million in a series a funding round we care is a childcare provider that is attempting to be something like an Airbnb for childcare and probably a matching marketplace. And neighbor schools raised $5 million. And that's a platform
for early child educators. So we're seeing some movement in the early child space for child care providers and educators. Let's move to our game of the week. And in this play future headlines, the way this game works is that one of us will put out a potential future headline and the other will determine whether this is likely or very unlikely to be a real headline in the next few months. Two years. Matt, do you want to start with your headline?
Yes, so I'm going to leave names out of this, I might be cheating a little bit. But I think pretty much any of the players are equally likely to do this. So I'm gonna say that a major OPM acquires or emerges with a major tuition benefits provider, you could say it the other way major tuition benefits provider acquires or merges with a major OPM does matter. But I think these spaces are intersecting in kind of interesting ways. You know, we think about them for very
different reasons. OPM is we think about as creating content for universities, tuition benefits providers, we think about as facilitating a back office transaction at a corporation. But they do have a extremely important commonality, which is they both provide leads to universities.
Yeah. So I'm with you that I think the chances of this are pretty decent. And especially at this moment where some of the biggest name OEMs are a little bit down in the mouth. Unfortunately, they're sort of working their way back from stock hits. And from some business challenges. I think the idea of being able to offer a university both access to humongous companies, as some of the education and tuition has
a benefit programs do. And the ability to actually make new programs, put them online, and then offer them to work for us is pretty powerful combination, because they can actually go from the market research and say, you know, these 10 companies all need a deep learning degree. We're gonna go work with you at this university to make a deep learning degree offer to those 10 companies and all the you know, workers within
them. That's sort of a full stack service that's could be pretty powerful for a university and exactly for the reasons you're saying you can create new programs and then create leads to fill them. So I think it makes sense as a future headline. Awesome. Let's hear it. Here's mine. Here's the headline, UNICEF launches eight $10 billion edtech initiative aimed at educating displaced and refugee Ukrainian children. What do you think, Matt?
I think the only question mark, for me is what the final number is, frankly, you know, I think as the this war continues to go on, and even if we get a resolution, there's just been so much destruction in Ukraine that, my hope is that a lot of the world's kind of major entities come together and figure out where they can make an impact. And I think education is a big one. You know, we know there's millions of children in Ukraine who haven't gotten a whole lot of education since the
war started. So yeah, it's just a question of, is it 1 billion? 10 billion 100 billion? I have no idea. But it'll happen.
Yeah, I really hope so. And I guess the question is, who's behind it? Right? Is it philanthropy? Is it government? Is it international organizations? But I agree, I mean, I can't remember the exact number. But I think it's something like half to two thirds of all Ukrainian children are now refugees from Ukraine. I mean, you see all those, because the women and children have been the frontlines of the refugee crisis, which is the biggest one
since World War Two. So you're having an entire, you know, not small countries worth of children suddenly totally displaced. We saw similar things with Syria, you know, we've seen some refugee crises in the past, you know, 10 to 20 years, but this is really, unbelievably large. And I think the global community is going to have to step up what that looks like, is unclear. But I'm hoping that Ed Tech can be a big part of that solution. So I hope to see this headline, you know, and that it
works. Matt's What's your next headline?
All right. So I've seen all the headlines that tutoring over the past two years has been basically the cure all for all education, you know, k 12, University and adult, you know, find a person and do small group or one to one remediation. And, you know, I think that was the right decision for a lot of reasons. But I think it is really just a matter of time until a shoe drops. And we start finding out about tutoring companies that were not putting all of their dollars to good
use. So I expect to see some sort of fraud uncovered by some tutoring company in the next, you know, call it 12 months as folks dig into how public dollars Gottesman.
Yeah, that's a very interesting prediction. And I could definitely imagine it happening, you know, I'm not particularly privy to the inner workings of these companies. But I do think that, you know, whenever there's a sort of gold rush in any way, which there certainly has been in the last, you know, two and a half years for tutoring companies as the entire school system basically collapsed in the US, then there is definitely opportunity for, you know, bad actors to be
involved. So I have no idea if this would be a large or a small tutoring company. I don't know if how major the fraud would be. But I wouldn't be totally surprised if just during this really chaotic moment, some of these giant government contracts, and these SR funding may be being you know, yeah, there may be some issues uncovered at one point, so I could see it happening. i It's
unfortunate. And I think it would be bad for the field, both the tutoring and the Ed Tech field at large if it does happen, but you know, people do unusual things when huge amounts of money are sloshing around.
Yeah, it's, you know, the history of ad tech is unfortunately kind of littered with these booms and busts. You know, we saw it a little bit with boot camps Wayside with in the kind of early 2010s With for profit universities. You know, I'm sure the further back you go, there's just more and more examples. So, you know, my hope is they get found out quickly and the good players can move on and, you know, help pick up the damage and we know twitterings important, but it just feels
inevitable to me. Maybe that's a little pessimistic point of view.
That's all right. That's it. We're here to make predictions. Here's my last headline Matt in the wake of COVID, Michigan, or you can fill in sort of name of state here, but I'm gonna go with Michigan moves to a permanent hybrid schooling model, say maybe three days a week of in school and two days a week of at home, or you can fill in your favorite sort of hybrid model there. Do you think that is a possible headline? Do you see schools permanently moving to hybrid?
Candidly, I don't. I think that while we send our children to school for academics, the implicit rationale is perhaps even more so that it's childcare. And we've seen the homeschooling movement takeoff. You know, it's now it's something like 8 million students of the 50,000,000k 12 eligible students in the US, but I get like parents see childcare. It's really hard to take care of a kid for eight hours a day and
work a full time job. So I have no idea whether that's good or bad, but it certainly feels like a fact to me until and unless we get better at managing our children closer to home while also working.
Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense. And I think that's a good analysis. i The only One thing I maybe would add to that is that I think in this very unprecedented time in schooling, and in the wake of superintendents leaving one out of every four I thinking about leaving and teachers leaving, I imagine that some elements of the school system may start to lean into this sort of principle hybrid, we may not have a
choice. In other choice, it might not be enough staffing, it potentially could be private schools looking to offer, you know, flexibility. It could be certain districts, but it may be not at the state level, like this fake headline, but I think something is going to happen. They're just if you add up all the problems that PK 12 schools are facing, I think one way out of some of them is this. But you're right. It has huge consequences on the families of
the students in the district. If it's a district or of the students, if it's a private school. It's an interesting thing to keep an eye on. I have no idea where this one might land for sure.
And for the deep dive this week, we are talking to Murad from curious, they were in the news this past week for their $3 million fundraising round for their, what TechCrunch classified as learned to earn platform, and we're going to talk to Moran about what exactly that means and what exactly they're doing. So thank you, Brad, for being with us. Thanks for having me, guys. Just just to kind of kick things off, because you're still relatively
early stage. You know, not everybody will have heard of you yet. Could you tell us what exactly you do? And then maybe we can go from there.
Yeah, I think as you surmise, it is learned to earn. But a lot of times that gets co opted by web three, even though there might be a web three component down the line. Currently, it's mostly Fiat, but it is this concept of going back to my co founder, Alex, his upbringing in Sweden, where they were actually paid to go to school and tuition. And we tried to look at that model and think, what does that look like in a
capitalistic society? So the idea was, could we incent individuals to want to learn and instill themselves with lifelong learning with the promise of that earning potential? So that's where our platform pulls in three stakeholders as we identify them. Apprentices, which are our learners, mentors, who are our instructors, and business partners. So the business partners are the hiring, slash gig related opportunities. And we, the model ties them all together by starting with the business
needs. And going back to what's happening in history. That's where the mentors insights come in. And the rest is the platform. So how do we kind of take these individuals who have years of experience, who aren't typically teachers, or do not have background in in pedagogy in any way, and instill them with the tools and the frameworks to pass on that knowledge. And I think the one takeaway is also, even though it might be cohort based, right, we'd like that idea of peer
driven peer interactions. It's very micro. So what we try to pioneer on our side is this micro cohort base where we know you go to a lot of people have gone to university, and it's just filling those skill gaps. So when we initially started off, our thesis was filling the skill gap between academia and the workplace, it slightly evolved from there, but some of those tenants are still within our platform.
So Miranda, what I'm hearing is you're bringing together students, you call them apprentices, mentors, who are the teachers and employers, and the students are actually paid to learn is the payment coming from the employers.
So the learning component is paid by students, although we try and make it as affordable as possible, because it is micro. And because of our market, we do, we're based out of MENA region. So it's an emerging market. So our cost point is affordable. But at the same time, we also do offer scholarships. And we're also exploring the potential of you know, income share, based on
employer side. So since we have these relationships with employers, we're looking at how can we even defer initial payments, get them in, get them start upskilling themselves learning and kind of take it from the end of the cycle, but currently, they do pay? It is very affordable. And the promise is, you know, if you're able to upskill yourself, we have
employers waiting for you. And that goes back to like I said the model, when when we launch new cohorts or we launch new categories, we tend to work with industry, so we understand what their needs are, what they're looking for, where the skill gap is, and talent, and we try to fulfill that. Gotcha. So
you have users, I'm seeing 25,000 users in 130 different countries. So you're very much focused on the entire world, which is great. The students are paying but you keep the prices very affordable. And there's this very deep integration with employers so the investment can really pay off from an employment standpoint.
Exactly like we hope people We'll see the payoff within maybe the first or second cohort right away. So we initially started with just gigs, we saw there was a need for even employment. So we've started to slowly expand on the larger employments. And I think that goes back to trends we saw with the pandemic, we saw with what's happened recently, just, you know, global talent is an opportunity for a lot of
businesses to tap into. And that's why when you say 130, we don't target those countries, they just tend to show up, you know, it's an opportunity, and we just don't block them, right. So we don't cater to them specific we're not localizing at this moment in all these different languages are anything, but they're showing up. It's all in English.
So just to build on that a little bit, one of the things that stuck out to me is, you are UAE based and you know, we've seen a couple of models like this in the States, but I personally haven't seen much along these lines abroad. What do you think about in terms of your market size, and where you have the ability to play the right to win? Like, how do you think about all those questions?
Yeah, my currently we're doubling down on our region on that emerging market focus, there's no reason we do have apprentices are joining from the UK and the US as well. Although that's not our focus segment. At the end, it is affordability. So there's no reason why individuals from the UK or US can't join either, even if they just want to do it for the learning components. Maybe, you know, that's where, because of our and that's why we did raise around was, you know,
scaling your operations. So the part that we're still, you know, trying to crack is that whole employer component. So right now, doubling down on that specific region helps. But I think as we grow, you know, expanding is an opportunity, but that's not our current focus,
I was going to ask kind of what is your pitch to an employer? And like, what are the tasks that if I were a student, if I signed up, like, what would I be doing for them,
so I can break down what our kind of cohorts look like. So it's pretty much three phases, we kind of go through, we have the initial workshop that's led by the mentor, and that setting up it's based on a case study. So all of our courts, when you go in, there's a case study, think, simplistic. It's like Harvard Business Review, like Harvard Business Case Study, where we pick a specific company that come in doesn't necessarily have to be one that the mentor works out, it's just the company is the
case study. But the mentor will walk through a problem set, and a framework or tools teach lines. And they'll go through what the methodologies and the expectation is, they're going to complete three to four tasks within that one week. So when I say my approach, one week cohort, so they complete those tasks in that time, there's two bolts, that one, they were able to work on it, they can, you know, engage with their peers,
happens mentors, while async. So that's their workshops live, but the rest is a sync platform race. And that interaction is where they kind of upskill learn more and actually do it themselves. So it's experiential learning. But that plays another role for the employer. So there's two components, employers can now see past past court case studies you've completed, but at the same time, when we do our hiring component, this is a newer thing that we've exploring now, is they can also
submit their case studies. So instead of just saying, you know, I just want to interview I want to filter based on certain, you know, academic credentials, we technically don't care about that we do have that as an option to fill in your profile. But we really hammer down on that case study, like, you know, do you really want to interview 50 people? Or do you just really want to see three of the top candidates that got the task you
want really done? Right? So you know, obviously, it won't be the full experience of the role, but you pick out let's say, what is it critical tasks you would expect this individual to be able to do? And that's where we've seen a lot of success on that side for that heart. And so
it's very interesting because it feels like you're zooming in and sort of honing in on this real need, especially in emerging markets, which is the need to have work experience relevant authentic work experience. Yeah, even before you have the job, which is one of the big catch 22 is of education and careers. So by having employers create these practical tasks and case studies, then when a applicant goes to that employer, they can say, I've already done authentic
similar work. And because it's a week long and affordable, the investment is quite low compared to something like a bootcamp or let alone a master's degree. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, no, definitely. I actually think we complement boot camps of universities and boot camps. So I wouldn't say we're disruptive in the sense that no more universities, no more boot camps, like, the depths you get at a boot camp is needed for those technical, let's say deep dives going deep. But what this is, is like, do you have the competence? I see the credential, you did that bootcamp. But are you good fit?
So a fit doesn't only just mean technical, it might even be cultural, like, the way you approach the problem is not how the rest of our team thinks about it. Maybe That's a good thing. Maybe that's a bad thing. We're not the ones to judge. That's the employer, but we leave it up to them. And I think what you just hammered in on, I think it's a joke we've always had was, we see Junior job openings or recent grads, and it says four years of experience, like that's a joke we're trying
to solve for. You see that on anywhere on LinkedIn. All platforms, right?
I love that phrase. That's the joke we're trying to sell for because it's true. It's a totally absurd. But do you want to ask about I know that you're interested in the sort of web three coverage? Let's zoom in on that. Because you know, that learn to earn coverage Murad, you mentioned that it wasn't yet part of the platform. But I'm not I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and sort of how you're thinking about web three.
Sure. Yeah. And you know, it's kind of funny reading the article. I hope you don't mind me kind of waxing on this a little bit. But you know, the headline was the attention grabbing learner earn in the UAE yada, yada. But then the article was like, very down to earth about like, we have students and mentors and employers kind of working in a three sided marketplace. Yeah, I was already for like a hype piece. And I was like, Oh, this is pretty real.
So could you talk about like, I could see a path to a web three enablement, where all three sides of the marketplace are participating in the growth of it. And that seems like a good thing for every stakeholder involved. But like, what does it look like to go from? You know, just trying to get your first I mean, 25,000 students, not 100 students to a web three enabled marketplace? What does that path look like? I mean, you have $3 million towards it. But I imagine it's going to take more
over time. How do you think about that?
Well, when we started exploring that route, it came down to we were looking at how do we gamify the experience? And what I mean by gamified is how do you kind of incent learners to continuously learn. So let's say you did get your job placement? If you had a great experience, exposing yourself to certain skills, certain tool, why not come back and keep doing
that? So we started exploring this idea of like, you know, this experience once right, like think think, typical games, but how do you kind of incent this comeback for more. And as we started exploring that, at the same time, our business team was looking at that whole income share component. So it's almost like, we know, we would probably get paid back down the line, because we're confident of the
upscaling that's occurring. So we would be able to kind of allow more people to come in at a more affordable rate, whether that's through our scholarship for whether even just slashing prices, and just kind of betting on the future. And you know, if you think of what we're kind of talking about the elephant in the room, is that like a token of some kind, there is a pathway to it, and even going back to the mentor. So if you think from mentors perspective, like we don't really talk about that.
But to be honest, that one of our core stakeholders in terms of they are what makes the experience what it is, and how do we kind of explore a deeper relationship with him. And for us, we initially when we were talking to our investors as well, we brought up the idea of like, what does the meta stock option pool look like for top performers? Like how do we really wanted to
build on exactly that actually, and apologies, this is a little bit of a right term, but I'm hoping it's, it's a good area to dive into, because, you know, you talked about, you've got 25,000 students, and then you've got 200 mentors and 300 employers, and one of the hardest parts of building again, I'm calling the marketplace, I'm putting words in your mouth, I apologize. But one of the hardest parts of building something with multiple stakeholders is you have to figure out what the right kind
of ratio is between them. And I kind of love that you are already thinking about what is the mentor stock option pool look like? That, to me helps answer the question I was about to ask. But how do you think about that ratio of students to mentors to companies? And maybe to put this in the form of a question, what do you think the biggest hurdle to jump over is going to be? Is it mentors? Is it employers? Is it students? I know you're so a hypotheses? Definitely. Yeah.
Yeah. If I want to hypothesize, I don't think it's the learning component just because of the organic growth we've seen. And I think we're just only beginning to scratch the surface of what we envisioned it fully experience to be with the current version platform where we're planning to be in six months from now. But it's, you know, that chicken or egg that you kind of think, too, I think it falls down to our
mentors to some degree. Because what we have seen if I want to give you some insights in terms of, we've seen the mentors when they start interacting with these apprentices. At the end date, most of these mentors are working at some type of company. Most of these companies are
hiring new individuals. What we're starting to see is it's like follow on effect of going then going back to the HR Hey, I just, you know, was in a session with like, three people that really caught my eye, you know, let's build on that, you know, can they almost become that connection to our employer funnel. But then on the other side is we see employers themselves saying, hey, this was great. How can we get our CO culture better like communicated
out there? Well, our employees could become mentors on your platform. So we've almost tried to make it as synergistic and you know, everything kind of comes together. I know it's like a cheesy word to say. But like, it really does play well together, because we think of it. Everyone has something to gain by contributing. And it's just, if we can teach that out better if we can incentivize that better. We're gonna get there. And you know, it's all driven by curiosity.
I love though the company is curious. It's spelled Qure O S. Curious. And menard is based in the UAE but his co founder is from Sweden, and they're serving 133 different countries and 25,000 students around the world. Congratulations on your funding round. It was great to have you as a guest on the tech insiders week in ed tech podcast. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Matt.
All right. That'll do it for us this week. It was a jam packed week, we covered what's going on with employers getting more involved with paying the tuition for their employees to go to college. We talked about some of the challenges in the K 12. World. We talked about how Google is dominating the scoreboard of K 12 learning apps, and what might happen to shake that up in the future. And we covered a whole
bunch of funding and m&a. And then we were really just privileged to be able to talk to hide from curious, an up and coming startup that just raised $3 million in the UAE that's focused on helping learners get practical experience on the job with mentorship. So that's all you need to know for this week, you will be the smartest person at last week's cocktail party. Make sure that you tune in next week so that you're ready for your next edtech event.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the EdTech insiders podcast. If you liked the episode, remember to subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple, please leave a rating and review so others can find the podcast. For more ed tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at edtech insiders.substack.com