Welcome to Season Seven of Edtech Insiders, the show where we cover the education technology industry in depth every week and speak to thought leaders, founders, investors, and operators in the Edtech field. I'm Alex Sarlin.
And I'm Ben Kornell. And we're both edtech leaders with experience ranging from startups all the way to big tech. We're passionate about connecting you with what's happening in edtech around the globe.
Thanks for listening. And if you like the podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review.
For our newsletter events and resources. Go to edtechinsiders.org Here's the show. Hello, everyone, it is December. Happy holidays. whatever holiday you are celebrating. It is celebration time. We are heading into the homestretch of 2023. And as always, you have this year with weak in ed tech. I'm Ben Kornell, along with Alex Sarlin from Edtech insiders. Welcome to the pod. Happy December Alex. Yeah, happy
December, we have so much going on. I'm just getting back into the post Thanksgiving groove. And it has been difficult. I won't lie. Oh my god, it's hard getting back into the groove. But it's been fun too. And we have some amazing interviews this week. So look forward to the end of this episode, because there are some interviews with amazing edtech founders. But for now, let's just go right into the current events. What's going on, Ben,
let's just start with big tech. And we talk a lot about open AI. We talk about Google, we talk about Microsoft, let's take a beat to really focus in on meta, who's making headlines for good reasons and all the wrong reasons. First, on the good side, meta launch seamless and LLM for speech to speech translation. We can talk a little bit about that. And meta also is making lots and lots of headlines around their Instagram addiction with kids
under 18. And then even now new findings showing that they had users under 13 that they knew were under 13. And they were using that data illegally. So let's start with the AI innovation front. Just to recap, meta has taken an open LLM stance, while many of the others have been closed. Ironically, open AI is closed. And also we've seen a theme of multimodal models coming to market. So here comes meta with seamless. Alex, tell us a little bit about what's going on and why it's important in
frequent listeners to the podcast will have heard me say maybe 10 times or the last six months, that translation is the sort of hidden secret sauce, it's one of the use cases of AI that does not get talked about nearly enough, and was looking at these similar tools, basically what they do, and then you know, I wouldn't have known about this if you hadn't sort of flagged it. But these tools basically do real time. incredibly high fidelity, expressive translation from one language into another.
And I went on you can try this on hugging face right now they have demos on it right now. I went in, we have a lot of 1000 audio files to upload, I threw in an audio file, and it just spat back in real time, my voice, same expression, same everything but German, same expression. But Spanish, same expression, same pace, sounds just like me, but French. Now it's not like Matt is the only one doing translation. But this is real time perfectly. It means
just indistinguishable. And I think that as educators at tech people, I think we are maybe sleeping on one of the big stories of AI, which is that everything can be any language. And we're really there are ready for anybody who already knows how to tap into these tools. It's already there and already open. And it's only going to get better very rapidly from here. So I was pretty excited to see metal just sort of throwing out this incredibly high fidelity, really beautiful free tooling.
And yeah, that's the good news. I think the bad news we get to do is that more and more keeps coming out about Instagram about metas pre knowledge about all the things that social media that it's particularly social media has been doing to people's brains to teens brains, and they sort of really have been sitting on it. That whistleblower really brought this to light. So I don't know what the story of Matt is going to be. But I feel like they're in this funny place where there's almost like, the
eyes are not on them. Microsoft is all over the place. Google is but all over the place. Open AI you know is all over the place and meta sort of under the radar for this for the first time in a long time. I think they're actually doing some pretty exciting things. I don't know what did you make of the seamless stuff? Yeah, how did you use it?
Let's take the two pieces and then let's step back on meta. So first on seamless. I think what's important to note is that seamless That word is actually a collection of LM is a collection of large models. And we're going from the world of singular agents and singular models to bundled ones where each model does something else different. So first, there's the translation layer. Second, there's the buffering and the kind of real time capability. And third, there is intonation,
and flexion. And they essentially trained three different models to do those tasks really well and then bundled them all into one model. And this is where multimodal is going to get mind blowing. Because the way I thought it was going to work, and this shows how naive I am, I thought it was going to be I do voice it translates it into words, text, text gets translated into other texts in the other language, and then it gets translated into a
voice of that language. This is pure speech to speech, it never goes to the text level, they've built a model here that goes, immediately translates over. So imagine vision, division, speech to vision, speech, to speech to vision. I mean, there's so many ways in which I mean, that's where we're headed. And when we say natural language processing, really, at the core, the new coding language, is human
language. And now that we are having these unique inputs and translation layers, it can be human language, in any form whatsoever. And eventually as it becomes visual, there's ways in which we might communicate things where we don't even have words for it. But the vision will communicate some sort of meaning. So I'm quite excited
about this. Now, if I weren't a shareholder, I'd be like, Why are you spending all this money over here on the metaverse when you've clearly got some really great things to add in the LLM space? And how the hell are you gonna monetize it if you keep putting it out for free? So I still don't understand the business plan. But this is why they basically had to take this strategy, because the other
people had such a big lead. And the hope, I think, is that eventually, all the developer ecosystem develops around the meta ecosystem because it's free and open in a way that gives them a b2b and developer advantage long term. But just alone on this seamless, it is a breakthrough.
And I mean, I would just jump in with one point there, which is the metaverse and real time translation of voice to any language that keeps the expression keeps the pauses, basically sounds like you just speaking another language. Those
are not separate ideas. I mean, if you follow Zuckerberg vision of what the metaverse would be back from when they first acquired Oculus backward, and they, you know, first thinking about this, this is the babelfish section, this is the thing that sticks in your ear, and you walk into a room and everybody is speaking your
language. But for them, you're speaking their language and for every single person there, they're hearing everything in their native language and whether or not the divisions within Mehta are actually talking to each other, right, whether these seamless folks are talking to the metaverse, folks, I sure hope so. But I agree with you that they are starting up from being behind. But I think that's actually freeing them up. I mean, you can imagine that Microsoft and Google are in a
sort of Death Race. I don't know what Apple's doing. By the way. They're probably doing interesting things behind the scenes too. But they're in this sort of death grip race of who's going to win this race. And it feels to me when I look at tools like this, like Facebook is, for lack of a better word, like kind of having fun with it, right? They're putting things out there really good research incredibly bright people behind this. And the tools I'm you don't even
hear about this. They don't even put our press releases about this. But this is one of the most amazing technologies I've seen in months, especially for education, which we, you know, we just can't sleep on that useful. I mean, the best teachers in the world who, frankly are probably in South Korea, because they they're the best recognized and paid can teach anybody right now in any language. How I found
about this is I attended an AI conference where somebody was speaking real time in Japanese. And it was be translated into a pure Casta Yano accent in Spain. And fortunately, I understand Spanish. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, this is amazing what is powering this? And so coming back to it. Meta has this question of can you trust them? Because basically, the Instagram story is a story about what happens with your data. And it is not good. It's not good for
adults, as well as for kids. And I would just say the fact that there is not a major outcry about this Instagram stuff is mind blowing. To me. There's 33 attorney generals that we've reported 41 And we've reported 33 and just want to also call out there's another lawsuit around school districts as well that are suing so there's a number of lawsuits Out of which have come three major aha was one, Instagram has users under 13. That's not news. We all knew
that. But Mehta knows who they are, knew that they had them, and then purposely use their information in ways that are illegal under COPPA and, and so when they knowingly violated the law, they're too, if you are a kid, if you are under 18, and you are using Instagram, it basically has algorithms that maximize your death spiral into eating disorders, body shaming, depression, suicide, all of
these things. And the leadership of those products, repeatedly brought warnings to the organizational leadership, and repeatedly were shut down because of the drive to drive more user engagement and so on. And then third, if you are an adult, who is trying to search for kid content, and you are not a well intentioned adult, you are looking for bad stuff about kids, it will also feed you into that spiral and connect you and
so on. It really blows my mind because I know many, many people that work at Instagram and at meta and they're good people who I think want to do good for the world. There's an element where the algorithm has taken control. And it does make me worry about AI, not sentient AI. But really good AI is hard to like for individual stakeholders in these larger organizations. It's hard for them to derail the algorithm
or the AI system. The fact that they knew it was doing that and then raise concerns and did nothing about it, I think is a huge, huge issue. And metal flying under the radar is part of why we wanted to do the spotlight. They need to be called in front of the American public, the world public, because this is a violation of trust.
Oh, yeah. I remember having a conversation. I won't name names here. But I remember having a conversation while I was working at Chan Zuckerberg, going out to lunch with some of my colleagues, who, as you say, amazing people care more about the world than than
almost anybody I've met. And I remember having this moment of feeling like there was this this sort of Silicon Valley hero worship going on this idea of like, the Zuckerberg and the Elon Musk's and the people were just like, beyond everything, they just like Masters of the Universe, like truly. And I remember being like, hey, that is not at all how I see this.
The way I see this is that we are in an era where the government, which is the natural regulator, and sort of, you know, brake on completely unfettered, crazy. Capitalism has just dropped the ball for decades, right? I mean, they have failed, go look at the Department of Justice, all the monopolies. They've tried to break up with these tech companies for the last 10 years. It just failed every time massively failed. And you're like, these companies,
rightfully feel immune. I mean, yes, Zuckerberg had to get pulled in front of Congress and talk about Cambridge analytical, nobody knew what to ask about. It was a joke. But for the most part, the companies have been winning for a really long time. And now as you say, this AI comes in, and there's this black box, even within the company, even people who mean really well, I mean, nobody is purposely serving child sexual content to sexual predators on
Instagram. There's nobody in Facebook or Instagram or meta who decided that that's a good idea. But there's also no legitimate fear that that's going to shut down meta. And there should be, because that's what governments or governments are for, hey, by the way, if this happens, if you create eating disorders, if you create suicides among teens, knowingly, we're going to put $1 figure on that, because that's the language that corporations
speak, right? And they haven't, they haven't been able to do it for decades. And nobody's afraid of it. And this fact of 33 states, you know, Attorney General, from 33 states, also in Atlanta at the same time for all of this, this is finally some kind of a wake up call for the government, the state governments, right, coming out and saying, Guys, we know you are playing fast and loose with our kids lives. We see the numbers here, and you better get
on top of it. Because it's not just about the show of bringing Zuckerberg in, it's going to be money, this time. It's going to be money. And if they're not afraid of losing money, and again, this isn't because they're replacing monopolists. It's because that's just how corporations work. They don't make decisions based on morals, they make decisions based on dollars. That's how corporations are designed. And there's been
no dollar figure. There's been no penalty for any of this that's been meaningful for decades. So time to change. I mean, yes, and AI is gonna make this even worse, because nobody understands it. But this is why I was I was kind of excited about the Biden AI push. It didn't have the answers in it. But it was basically a shot across the bow saying we're going to regulate all of this stuff. Like we are going to Yeah,
you know what actually is interesting here though, too. It's the state level Attorney General's bonding together. That Almost are functioning like a functional federal government here in the accountability zone. So I wonder also, if there's roles that states just like, you know, when California passes emission standards, it becomes the industry norm. Are there opportunities for large states to do meaningful things here for technology that could make the technology better, safer, and so
on? I think you and I, we straddle this because, of course, you know, I'm very skeptical of the executive order. And I do think that the ability of the government to regulate many of these things is suspect because of the rate of change because of the dysfunction in our politics, and so on. But stepping back, I think it just is important that we recognize that meta still remains one of the pillars of big tech. And what they're doing for good, can be incredibly great in terms of seamless, and
it can be incredibly harmful. In terms of what's going on with Instagram. They're the one player who has not seen to get the memo, that mitigating their risk by reducing harm is going to open up so much opportunity for them. This is where I do trust, Microsoft and Google more because they have a bigger picture business, that some of these things that Mehta was doing just wouldn't be allowed, because it is about money, it puts those other things at risk. Yeah, but let's see how it plays
out. We've got two more anchor stories before we dive into our interviews. So let's go to the next one. And you know, you know, I love talking about K 12. But man, higher ed is poppin this week, and some of it is really about people recognizing it's time to innovate. The one that caught my eye was StraighterLine, partnering with a KTM to offer college course
sharing. So this headline is really in the theme of headlines that we've had, which are really around networks of universities sharing content, and Akkadian has a network of 460 colleges and universities and straighter line has a library of courses that have reached 3000 accredited institutions. And they're teaming up essentially, to provide online universal access to these courses. I feel like this is the path for universities to become fully
blended. Were some of those like entry level courses, as our friend Matt tower often says like, why do we need an economics 101? Built by every single school in America, why not just have your like 10 best ones available to everyone? This seems like a step towards that. And we can talk a little bit more about the specifics here. But you know, the space super well. And you've articulated this vision, do you think it's finally happening? And also, how should universities think about
it? Because if you start being the aggregator how do we you think about your price and your variation of price and the business model? And so on. So what are your thoughts?
So I'm gonna throw some bombs here. So be ready for this right? People wait, Marin didn't expect this. But I mean, we talked to Heather combs from straighter line a few months ago on the podcast, I definitely recommend that
episode. And what people like a KTM and StraighterLine are doing and it's very important work is they're trying to create meaningful alternative pathways to the actual result that people are looking for, for higher ed, which is a meaningful degree and or a certificate or credential that gets them a better life that may be more money that may be access to certain opportunities at the lowest cost that they can actually afford.
That is what almost everybody in at least the United States really, really is actually looking for. For higher ed. And the actual colleges have just been so divorced from that core goal. They do some innovation they do. But in many ways they hold on to the last bastions of monopolistic control over that process. One of the ones that StraighterLine talks about a lot is transfer credits. transfer credits are a disgusting system,
it is literally repulsive. It is a system in which the accrediting bodies and the schools not out of malice but out of pure just not understanding what their real role is, what they buy what I think their role is in society. basically throw hurdles down in front of students who are trying to transfer coursework from one school to another or from online to a four year university or from community college four year transfer credits are incredibly
difficult to get. It's a really broken and complex and Byzantine system. StraighterLine has been trying to find it for a long time. And caveum as well as people like outlier, who have been talking about on the pod for a while, are basically this sort of shadow system that are saying this system that everybody thinks is normal This college accrediting body system that we have that we think is the way that this whole thing could work is actually not only
not normal, it's in reverse. It is creating student debt at a level, it's unimaginable, only second to mortgages now, as most of us know, and just not getting the outcomes that people want in a huge majority of cases. So we're in a crazy moment. And it's great news to hear that straighter line and a KTM are working together for this course sharing. The reason why it should work but won't yet work is that these groups don't have
the marketing budgets yet. They don't people don't know what straighter line is, you have to have a really good college counselor or a really smart parent or somebody in your life. If you're 18, or 20, or 24. You don't know straight or line, you can't find it. I was just talking to somebody last week who was in school and trying to figure out what they were going to do after school and she's trying to navigate this crazy
system. And it just didn't even occur to them that the school owed them career services that they're paying so much money, and the school hardly cares about them at all. So look, I am very, very, very skeptical of the higher the traditional
higher education system. And I'm very positive about things like the straighter line and a caveum working to say, why do we have not only do we have 1000s of different econ 101 courses, like you're saying, Ben, but each one costs three to four credits, and each credit is 1000s of dollars, or maybe it's like $700, whatever it is. So we're talking about everybody having to pay 1000s of dollars for something we know for a fact they can get online for 30 bucks. It's such a
fucked up system. And I'm hoping that these groups are dropping bombs. I dropped it, I dropped the F bomb. I mean, come on, guys. We're bringing Ron Craig on the podcast to talk about apprentice nation. But I am starting to feel very positive that this is now becoming a universally understood truth, especially within educators. That higher ed is not the solution anymore. They are the problem. Traditional higher ed is the problem. OPM, I mean, we saw two you fall apart right
now. And part of the reason they're falling apart is that people started to recognize that their main product was $100,000, social work masters, that is a scam. People, and everybody knows it, except the people in it. So we are in a hopefully, a moral turnaround when it comes to higher ed, where people are starting to, you know, the nibbling around the edges we've seen for the last few years, I starting to become core to the system. Sorry, forgive my rant. That
was great. We're gonna have to put parental advisory at the beginning of our our show this time. I love it. I mean, look, one, you've been talking about this for a long time, Alex. So I actually, when we first started the pod, this was a dream. Like, what if there was transferability? What if there was modularity? What if we could bring cost down? And I think for all these reasons, there's a lot of skepticism and concern about Ed Tech, and so
on. This is one of the clearest areas where the progress over the last two years is breakthrough progress, I think so. And by the way, it's paired with mindset shifts to and I think that's one thing we always see is like, mindset, plus the new tools is really the formula for transformation education.
And I actually am optimistic about a small set of higher ed institutions embracing this, by the way, I actually think there is a first mover advantage, there is a winner mentality here, where the universities that are adaptive and do embrace this blended model of you can do the online things that everyone needs to kind of get your prereqs up and get your basic courses done. And then there's deep work that you can do in
person at a real university. I think there's something there, that can be a winning formula. And by the way, yes, that is also going to really help with the capacity of the system to do all the job retraining we're going to have to do as jobs get replaced and dynamically changed with AI. One other thing that you brought up is to you and I would say Phil Hill has an amazing article on this, which is basically like, one, it's their business model, which you know, scam ish, with 100k Social
Work masters. Also it was their debt burden. And it's just the sheer amount of capital that they had to command to do the work that they were doing. What I love about this StraighterLine story is it's actually really content creation efficient. It actually means the cost to create high quality stuff is also going down, which is like that's the triple win for everybody. And then and the last thing I'll say is, you know, in February, we covered the
Department of Education. Putting out all these guidelines, it was a dear colleagues letter about, we're going to basically screw all the third party providers because they are taking advantage of universities. Well, turns out the market is doing the job for exactly, they are basically released a statement saying, you know, that dear colleagues letter, thanks for your feedback, we're gonna keep thinking about it. This is the third party stuff that actually could be game changing a KDM
straighter line. And by the way, I also know that outlier. And some of the other companies, they have not demonstrated yet that their business models are breakthrough business models, but something whether it's these companies or something like this, they are a part of the solution in some way, shape, or form.
They need better marketing, I tell you, that is the answer. I mean, I'm on the streamline site, right now, you know how much these courses costs $80 to three credit courses for $80. It's the best deal in higher ed. And you know why? Because they just like you say it's content creation efficiency, you make the course that people need, you get it accredited by the accreditors. And then you just go and you make sure that people get the
transfer. But people don't know about StraighterLine, they don't have that pamphlet with all the smiling people on why they don't have a huge football team on TV every week. Like I really think it's a marketing issue. And I think that's a scary word to you to, to use, at heart, a marketing company, a very successful marketing company who said, we can take Colleges Online, we can take you into the modern era. There were a couple of really important acquisitions this week. And I know we're
running low on time. But Ben, tell us about some of the ad tech acquisitions. I know it's a little bit of a right turn here. But these are important, I want to make sure we cover them.
And just on the last point, I'm ready to start the StraighterLine football team. So if we want to do that, let's let's do it. So our first headline was really spotlight and meta than we are talking a little bit about transformation in higher ed. Let's talk about some transformation. In K 12. We have two big acquisitions. First curriculum associates acquiring
soapbox labs. I remember hearing about soapbox labs on NPR, I don't know four or five years ago, where they had created the first speech recognition for kids. Curriculum associates, one of the largest players in K 12. Assessment and curriculum and instruction. This combination basically means curriculum associates now has voice capability, they will have it
across all of their products. So if you need to do an assessment, and someone has a reading disability, now they can do it via audio, also, soapbox licenses out there audio content to others. So look for curriculum associates, to explore third party licensing. I think this is really interesting for CAA, they started literally as a workbook publisher in like Worcester, Mass, I mean, they have gone from paper mill, like AES, to being a real dynamic ad
tech company. And the second one, and I'd love to hear your take on both of these remind, which was basically the bridge between school and parents, and, you know, is a parent communication tool, they really built out interoperability across all of the LMS systems. It was a darling of 2010 ad tech, they never they had incredible user traction, like 20 million 30 million users. And yet, they were never really able to break out as a standalone
business. They're essentially combining with the other big player in the space ParentSquare to create a parent
communications behemoth. If the SEC were at all paying attention to Ed Tech, this would be like the number one and number two companies combining and creating like a monopoly here, they will reach, you know, remind already had 80% of US public schools and 60% of teachers together, it's like 98% of public schools are going to be reached by parents square and remind, probably not a return outcome for remind where the investors are cashing in. But definitely big moving
pieces in K 12. Space. What's your take on these two?
I agree with everything you're saying it remind was really a very big VC backed at Tech darling for quite a while. And as you say, it was one of these companies that became a real household name for anybody paying attention to Ed Tech because of its traction. It was everywhere. You know, we've seen over the last few years, a few companies that are sort of everywhere, that are have incredible penetration into the school systems, still not actually being fully successful
as a business. And I think that begs a pretty important question for all of us in the space which is like what does it take to become a fairly sustainable business if you can have that level of penetration be a household name, and something that people loved. remind our love remind, as far as I know, I've seen nothing but good reactions to it. So people loved it, it was used everywhere. And yet still, the money didn't flow in enough to make it work. And I
think it's something I'd love. I mean, we should see if we can get some of these ParentSquare remind people on the podcast about this, because I think there's a really interesting object lesson there about Ed Tech as a space.
One takeaway on this is that the 2010 era was defined by Blitzscaling as a strategy, which was worry about your economic model later, get as many users as possible to own the market share, and then you can cash in. And of course, LinkedIn is the classic example of that reed Hoffman is the Blitzscaling king. And by the way, you know, Reed Hoffman checks into Edmodo, and I believe remind I'm not sure,
John Doerr was in remind. And this idea of like worry about the economic model later, that has been totally abandoned by all venture investors now in ad tech space. In fact, so many of the investors now are like, I'm not going to invest in you until I see revenue traction, like you could have a million users. And this is one thing holding back the AI products right now they're getting massive traction, but their ability to
convert revenue is low. And they don't want to create user adoption, friction, but nobody's going to invest in it until they see like a compelling sustainable revenue model. So I think that these stories are almost Well, actually, the other interesting thing is soapbox lab was doing an infrastructure play for AI. And the breakthroughs in AI speech that we just talked about with seamless and all these other things. Maybe that, you know, they had a ml, supervised learning AI, hard
tech build approach. And general AI comes in and actually, you know, maybe it's not the same quality, but it makes kids speech a lot easier for people to tackle. I think both of these stories just show how much our landscape has shifted in the last five years.
Great points. I really agree with that. I just want to build on your point from before about, you know, the curriculum associates this 1969 I think one of the things that we should acknowledge about the space is technology means lots of different things in edtech. But school budgets are not infinite, they are constrained
in lots of ways. And there is something very interesting, I think about the fact that curriculum, materials, assessments, screenings, curriculum, which are things that every school just needs period to operate. Some of the biggest companies in education and edtech are just I don't mean to be mean when I say this, but they're the old school delivers of curriculum and assessments. And you know, soapbox was from 2013, which makes it still a relatively older startup in
modern life. But at the same time, it's like the idea of a company like a remind, which is all about parent communications, or a soapbox, which is b2b, but still is about something very specific, which is about understanding accent, dialect, children's speech, and being able to do speech recognition for all sorts of things for reading. Seems so specialized compared to we deliver all your, all your books, and all your software and all your all the materials you need to teach.
It's like nobody can ever say no to iReady, because they're going to get so box labs instead. I
mean, look at our publicly traded companies, Sue Pearson continues to be to motor along. I mean, I think it just goes to show that a distribution advantage in education, whether it's higher ed or K 12, is really, really hard to disrupt because customer acquisition costs is the thing that makes or breaks basically, every business and once you've got that distribution, your ability to to pile things on to that distribution channel are
powerful. I do think that there is a question though, like, will the dinosaurs continue to evolve slowly but surely and own most of the spend in this space? Or is there room for disruption here, and that's why we have that Tech Insider Cipolla that
we predicted last year, there'd be a lot of acquisitions this year. And there were a bunch, but I don't think as many as we thought but ending the year on a couple of these types of things, I think is very validating. I actually think it will be really interesting to see if curriculum associates does continue to
license out. So box labs technology to third party, I kind of don't think that well, my guess is that they're going to buy it and say now everything curriculum associates does all of our products, like you said, Do speech recognition for children, they're incredibly well, you know, their AI ready, their speech recognition ready, they do NLP and I think they're going to use it as a way to raise the tides of their own products as a competitive advantage against Yeah,
and by the way, the other advantage if you keep it proprietary in house, too, is that you don't have all the data privacy concerns that if you're using third party MLMs So that's a great take. So we've gone through our headlines. Now we're going to head to our guests on the show, really excited to have
amazing folks joining us. And before we let you go to those, we are going to be doing our predictions episode coming up here at the end of the month, if you have predictions that you would like to share, if you've got reflections on 2023, that you'd like to share, please message us, the best way to do it is going to the EdTech,
insiders, LinkedIn. And just sharing your predictions there, we'll put out a Google Form stock, as well as some posts just to get everybody's predictions of what's coming, as well as reflections on the year. But we want to hear from you. All right, let's send it over to the interviews. All right, it's that time for us to do our deep dive with our guests of the
week. And we have Sarah, CEO of winning, thank you so much for joining us yet again, we call on you, because of your deep expertise in early childhood. But also your incredible hot takes on where the industry is and where we're going both in ed tech tech and startup land. So great to have you on the show today.
Great to be here.
So let's start with early childhood. And this is one of our deep dive topics for today. A Hechinger Report just came out, which was really talking about the end of federal funding, that was around COVID. And the impact that is having on early child care providers and companies. In particular, they talk about essentially below poverty wages for early
childhood workers. It talks about the lack of accessibility and the high prices for parents, it feels like the same challenges we had three or four years ago before COVID are staring us in the face, despite, you know, the bridge and all the efforts that we had for the federal government to provide access for early childhood funding. What is the state of early childhood? Where are some bright spots? And where are the persistent challenges?
Yeah, so it's a little bleak. It's definitely gotten really rough for parents, there was actually just a survey by this financial company and power that surveyed the different generations and the salary, they need to feel happy. And millennials said they need a salary of 525k to feel happy. And all the other generations were a fourth of that. And so there were all these articles and all these hot takes of like, oh millennials, or Millennials came of age in 2008. So they
just have high aspirations. But no, the real reason is because it is freakin expensive for millennials to live. They are the generation with young children that is paying for childcare. So if you actually look at what it costs to be a millennial say you have two kids, ages zero to five and childcare in or near a major city, even if you made 200k You're basically just affording your bills between childcare, you know, housing, health care, like you're just paying your bills, and you don't have
anything extra. So it actually isn't that ridiculous that millennials need to make such a high amount. Now they don't. So they're really doubly screwed. But they need that. So that's the kind of bleak situation right now, in affording childcare. I think the bright spot is, it's a little bit sad to say, but there's no longer the same hiring crisis that there was in childcare, because
people need to work. And so while it's still challenging, and certainly we need to pay teachers better and early educators better, it is no longer the case that centers cannot find teachers they can, it's so hard, and they still have to increase their wages. But there are people that want to do these jobs. Now.
I have a follow up question for that and forgive my naivete in this. But this feels like a space in which the invisible hand has just completely fallen apart. And I'm trying to figure out why we're in this world where as you say, childcare costs have gotten absurd. At the same time as tons of people need it, there's obviously should be some kind of solution that just sort of emerges, if you believe any of the traditional capitalist ethic, where people say, oh,
there's this huge demand. Why are we so behind every European country in this? Why is it so hard for America to figure out this essential problem for all families? Yeah, that's
too hard of a question to answer in the short time allotted. But I think there is a big kind of dichotomy right now between the childcare industry and what parents feel, and what childcare businesses feel and like everything else going on the tech world. And I'm sort of bridging these two worlds where tech is saying, you know, AI is going to change everything and the cost of labor is going To become so cheap, and then the childcare industry where that actually isn't
happening. So it's been really interesting to kind of bridge tech startup land and the childcare industry, which is really challenged and struggling, and everyone's feeling it and see that that universe really isn't touched yet by all these advances that we're claiming in AI.
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it's become even more essential that we have solid childcare infrastructure, because like you say, the millennial need to earn is quite, quite high. And so in order to support dual working families, or in order to create that worker capacity to do these new jobs in these new companies, we are missing a fundamental
layer. And just to add to the kind of expense burden, we also frequently cover the incredibly high cost of student loans and student debt that millennials have, which now, you know, Biden, the austerity, or kind of the pause on those repayments is off. So now people are paying for that incredibly high mortgage rates and high housing costs, high childcare. Can you give us a snapshot of 2024? And what you see coming? Do you predict that this is going to get any better? Or is it going
to get worse? Is it one of those it's going to get worse before it gets better? I just love to hear realistic take given how deep you are in this field?
Yeah, I think there are some bright spots, like there's government funding that's happening for childcare in different smaller formats. So the chips act that was recently passed, give subsidies to semiconductor manufacturers in the United States. And as part of getting those subsidies, you have to also provide child care for your employees. So now we have all these semiconductor companies that are suddenly interested in providing child care,
in video, child care, this is going to be great. And
then I think as a result, other companies that may need to compete for similar kinds of workers may now feel some interest in providing childcare for their lower wage employees that work in factories or retail or things like that. So I think companies are going to start to step up their game and are starting to slowly but
surely. And then also, you know, there are government subsidies for childcare at different local levels, different states are doing interesting things, different municipalities, San Francisco, for all the crap that San Francisco gets, the city of San Francisco is actually leading the way in providing really some amazing childcare subsidies, even for higher income families. So they're doing some pretty interesting
work there. So I think there are definitely bright spots between employers and the government stepping up to fill some of those gaps.
The other thing that you are running weenie, it's a really amazing company that basically helps people find solutions. So you're in the middle of many different overlapping complexities, or, you know, economic complexities. One is the complexity of childcare. The other is the complexity of running a Silicon Valley company at this exact moment that's in the early childhood that's in education.
Lots of funding changes, tell us what it's like on the ground right now, being the CEO of a early childhood company, and what would our listeners want to know about that world? As of you know, late 2023?
Yeah, so there was never a lot of investor funding for early childhood. It was never a particularly sexy area to raise money. So we kind of always were have this mindset that like, we have to make it on our own. No one is just gonna go give us millions of dollars. Now. I think it's gotten even worse recently, like, it's super hard to raise funding if you are
not an AI company right now. But for us, that's only made our business stronger because we focused on getting profitable building for what our customers want. Our customers are daycares and preschools. So we've really had to spend a lot of time with them asking, What will you pay for, and it's not much because they are trying to run profitable businesses, their margins are slim. And so it really has to be something that brings them more revenue or
saves them money. So in our case, our product brings more revenue, it gets you families to fill your spaces. And so we really have to focus on the ROI. Like every dollar you spend on weenie has to bring you $2 And if we can't show that immediately, people will not spend. So it's forced us to do a much better job building our product because that's our source of funding our customers are our funding. You've been
an incredible advocate for entrepreneurs and especially female entrepreneurs who often are dealing with complex layers of stereotyping bias. Divergent Preska coverage. And I was particularly interested in following your takes on the open AI saga and all of that, as well as just really we've had a month or two of some pretty outrageous headlines across all of tech. And I just love to hear, given where we are today. Where do you think Silicon Valley tech
coverage? Where do you think it's working well, for entrepreneurs of all different backgrounds? And where do you think that it's really falling short? I
think what's really interesting, and even in the last seven, eight years of building this company I've seen a shift is that there is more power, and press in the hands of individuals to kind of control and change the narrative than just these like publications. In fact, it's even like hard to read a lot of these publications because they're behind a paywall
now. And so it's really podcasts like this where people are getting their news and information, or just following people on X or LinkedIn, or whatever the latest social media app is or tick tock, unfortunately. So I think what that's meant is, you actually have to worry a little bit less about like the takedown article bringing you down, and more about building your reputation and making sure you are appearing on these podcasts and speaking in these different circles and opportunities where
it makes sense. And I think with the open AI drama, like we saw Sam Altman had a lot of support. And there were some like weird articles written. And actually the media did an excellent job during that saga of covering things and I think providing a lot of their articles for free, not behind a paywall, which was interesting thing that I noticed from a lot of these
publications. But a lot of it came from like the hearts that were appearing on Twitter and the things that they were putting out on their own blog and the GitHub thing from employees that got taken down. It was less kind of that traditional media and more of the story being told, just through these other channels. And I think that's really interesting. As a founder, like you can kind of now start to control the narrative and have your own ways of getting your message across where you're not
just like pitching the press. So I I like that. I think it's really an exciting time to be a founder.
Well, I continue to follow you, I think you're an incredible voice and just your clarity of thinking, not just of your company and what you're doing, but also how you level up to how other entrepreneurs should be thinking about driving their narrative and bringing their voice to the table. It's always really fun. So if people want to find out more about Winnie, where do they go, and if they want to follow you, where's the best place? Find
out about [email protected] like Winnie the Pooh, but just just Winnie and then you know, I'm on every social media platform, including now I have a tic tac, which is really lame. Don't look at that. embarrassing, but I'm at SM on Twitter, or x or whatever you call it. I'm on LinkedIn. I've been posting a lot on there in case Twitter goes away. I need some other platform. So find me anywhere you are on the internet.
Well, thank you so much for joining us. Sarah Mauskopf off from Winnie, an incredible founder incredible advocate in our space. And a friend of that tech insiders. Who What is this number three, number four time on the pod. It's just great to have you every time.
So exciting to be here. Thanks for having me.
Awesome. Thanks so much. For
our deep dive. Today we're talking to Candice Faktor CEO of disco. And disco made a really impressive and very exciting announcement this week were the alt MBA, one of the flagship programs for Cohort Based Business School, where the famous Seth Godin is now moving on to the disco platform. So we wanted to hear about this and everything that's going on in disco world, Kansas. Welcome to the pod.
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
It's great to see you again. So first off, tell us what's going on with the alt MBA. I know this announcement just came out this week, but I'm sure it's been in progress for a while.
We are delighted to say that the alt MBA has chosen disco as a partner and a platform to run their exceptional, you know what we call the OG cohort based courses. And, you know, it's actually really funny story this because I too, was curious how Alta MBA found us and lucky for me, I've had, you know, a few encounters with this Seth Godin, who I just think so incredibly, highly of and we were actually chatting and I said, Hey, Seth, do I owe you a thank you for the
alt MBA? He said, I don't even know what you're talking about. And so it's actually like even was better than I thought alt MBA really chose us because they thought our platform was the best platform for their business. And that was just like an incredibly great moment for us at disco, where, you know, cohort based courses are really transformative. And they're really hard to run and hard to
run well. And so it's just so wonderful that the team there looked at a bunch of platforms and said, disco is the platform that makes this the easiest and the most efficient and the most effective. And, you know, I love what Celeste has said, which is, you know, we are a human centered company. And we do share a lot of similar values. And that just kind of tipped it over the iceberg. But really, I think they said, We're saving them hundreds of hours by running their programs on Disco, disco
is really having an amazing year, what else is happening in the disco world?
Well, it's been a really fantastic year, you know, we were we're very, very honored to have been awarded two big awards. So one was one of Fast Company's most innovative ad tech companies. So that was really exciting. And we actually won the breakthrough startup of the Year award in 2023. So that was really exciting, too. And I think it's a testament to how we're bringing learning and
community together. And last, in that vein, we've really come up with a really powerful framework for learning community businesses. And so we actually launched this point of view as well. And it seems to be really helping a lot of our operators.
Yeah, it's really exciting. And, you know, for those who may not be deep in the history of this amazing space, can you give us a little bit of an overview of why the alt MBA is sort of the OG program for cohort based courses, it's sort of a four week, maybe it's changing now, but a four week program, but really, very in depth. It's almost like business school in a
box. But alternative from this perspective of this really, incredibly sort of maverick writer Seth Godin, who has been writing about business forever, give us a little bit of an overview of what the alt MBA is, and why it's such an exciting program. Absolutely.
So Seth Godin is a trailblazer. And I think what he recognized in 2015, was that the way most people learn, virtually is actually not delivering results, because the very essence of learning is practice and its peers and its projects. And most online learning is just a consumption oriented experience. And so my understanding is that, you know, was started in 2015, it's a 31 day, online workshop. That is hard, right? And you got to do the work, and you got to show up, and you got to be engaged.
And that's why it has such fantastic results. I think something like 6000 leaders in over 90 countries have taken the alt MBA. And you know, when we started Disco, disco, actually the root word for disco, I should say, I don't really know what it means. Do you know what it means? No, the root word for disco is learn in Latin. And the root of it is discourse and discussion and discovery. And so, you know, we were interested in really thinking about how do you make virtual learning more
engaging? And you know, how do you actually create the transformative outcomes that you want and cohort based courses do a really good job at that. I think the space has evolved tremendously since when we started. But there is no doubt that it definitely delivers results when people have to put the work in. Yeah. And
discos always struck me as a really fascinating platform. You know, this concept of cohort based courses, has been around for a couple of years. And it's continually been evolving and growing. Other entrants have come into the space. But one of the things that discos done for a while, and you can probably update me on this, but it's worked with some real trailblazers, you mentioned Seth
Godin. But you've worked with Roger Martin, who's sort of one of the original founders of the design thinking concept, you've worked with Margaret Atwood, you've really sort of continually expanded what cohort based courses are, and can do and work with some really fascinating partners to get this type of learning into new
environments. So I'd love to hear your perspective as one of the leaders in the space about how the space has sort of evolved over the last three or four years since we've probably first heard the term. And what brings us to this moment with you know, you're mentioning Julissa beavers is the director of student experience at Alta MBA, but you have a lot of programs at disco. And in some ways, it also works as sort of
an LMS. In some ways people can run programs on disco, whether they're cohort based or asynchronous. Give us a little overview. It's really it's an evolving and really interesting world and I think our listeners would really Love to hear an update? Absolutely.
So there is no doubt that cohort based courses are really transformative. And so you know, if you're trying to build like a program that can deliver on a transformation, it's a great way to do it. I think the challenge with them is they're really hard to do. They're heavy products, they're sort of at the top of your revenue pyramid. And so how we've evolved is, you know, in the early days, we did work with some phenomenal thought leaders and creators to run cohort based programs and really
transformative programs. And they worked incredibly well. The challenge for craters is that they're heavy, and they take a lot of time and effort to bring to life. And so what we actually did is we sort of said two things. One, there's a whole bunch of organizations who actually have the capacity and need and want to run cohort based programs, but they also want to run some lighter weight
programs. And actually, social learning is far more than just the cohorts social learning is community and social learning is having a place for discussions and having live events and having circles and being able to sub segment a community. And our platform is incredibly robust now in helping you run a heavy program, but also have a lot of social learning opportunities, in addition to cohort based
courses. And so actually, some organizations now don't even use our cohort based products, they actually just love how intuitive and social and flexible our platform is to do the very two things that we think matter which is learn and being community. And so we have a variety of different customers.
Now, a lot of virtual academies use us in all sorts of amazing spaces, like a ton in the sustainability world, a ton in the DI world of the leadership world, and the new skills like we are no code as a great customer to highlight or work
for climate. And then we have all of these amazing accelerators and incubators, right, which, obviously, there's a cohort based program, but what they love about disco is they can do that, but then also have incredible community and sort of lighter weight learning programs. So we've evolved a lot, but I think the space has to, and there's definitely a place for cohort based but it's for a lot of people like one of the products that they want to run to have a vibrant learning
business. And so that's how we've adapted our platform. Nuts.
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I'm seeing, you know, virtual academies, cohort based accelerators, membership communities, Slack based learning communities, which is really all about the social certification programs, there's sort of all of these different, I almost see this giant Venn diagram, you know, these somewhat overlapping use cases. But what it sounds like they all have in common is the use of community and sort of connection as a core aspect of the learning experience.
You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly right.
I have one more question for you, just because I know we're limited on time today. But it's something I'm really curious about. Because you know, we are in the land of AI. Right now we're in the year of AI. And you have launched a whole bunch of ai, ai features, you have an AI copilot, you have aI integrations, you have all sorts of stuff going on in the disco
platform. I think a lot of people have been curious about the future of AI learning and social learning and how they can sort of go together and not end up in conflict. Some people envision the future of AI based learning as everybody has an individual AI tutor. And that's what you're talking to your AI tutor, and you never need to talk to anybody else. And others say that's the exact wrong direction. It's all about community. It's all about social and the AI can facilitate that.
I'd love to hear your take on how AI and community and social play together.
It's definitely one of my favorite topics these days. So I fundamentally believe that there's a value to human beings. And so there's some people who believe AI is going to replace human beings. And the way I like to frame it is actually it's human to use AI are going to replace the humans who don't use AI. And I think that is very true, both for the businesses and operators, learning communities, as well as
for the learners themselves. And so the way we think about this at disco is, as you know, Alex, it's really hard to run a learning business and certainly a learning community business, right. And so we think about AI as your co pilot and all the tedious and time consuming tasks that you don't want to be doing because you want to be doing the higher order things of running a learning business and community which is likely connecting with
people and teaching. We want to give you the tools through AI to help you do that. And it's unbelievable just how much time saving and efficiency can exist as a result of it. So that's the first bucket. The second bucket is the promise of personalized learning at scale. And so you know, it's absolutely impossible today to give somebody a personalized program, if you have a cohort of 1000 people, right? That's a lot of work.
That's a lot of effort to like, first of all, understand, like who these people are, exactly. And then how do I personalize a program or curriculum. But we're very excited about what's possible with AI. And actually, one of the best things we built into our platform was learner or member onboarding. And so as a operator, you have this easy ability to understand exactly who your learners are, and what they're looking for, and sort of what pathway they want to go on.
And now with the promise of AI, you can create incredible personalized experiences. So we just think this is like really the beginning. And the AI is here to connect it to the learning but also to connect you to the network of who's part of these learning communities. Because I think so much of learning is learning as a means for connecting with others for getting that job for building relationships. So we get very excited about where this is all heading. I
love that answer. I'm really excited to I'm looking at this, you know, all women community that did run on disco, it's 30,000 Women who are the next generation of female tech leaders. And I'm thinking of all the features and ideas that you're saying, you know, if you have 30,000 people, 30 instructors, people all over the world, and tech is a wide
field. They're looking for different things on in that community, they some are looking for jobs, some are probably looking to hire people, some are looking for training, some are looking for connection or mentorship. And if you have AI tools that can help everybody get what they want out of a community like that. It's just so powerful. But it obviously it's not replacing people. It's all about facilitating and enhancing the community and the
connections. That's how I'm hearing you say it, and it is a really exciting future. Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here. I know this is a really big day to have the alt MBA, moving on to the disco platform, as well as all of these different use cases. Thanks so much, Candace, for being here with us on Ed Tech insiders for the weekend ed tech. I hope we can follow up soon. I'd love personally to move my ad tech in product
management class to disco. I will say that, let's do it because we have all this great content and it is now on the shelf. It's time for it to go out there and help the community succeed.
I would absolutely love that. So let's definitely do that and wishing you a great holiday season. This has been great. You
too. Thanks. Have a good one. Good to chat. Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more Edtech Insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.