Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators, and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies.
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the weekend ed tech. I'm your co host, Ben Cornell, along with Alex Sarlin. We're so excited to have you join us for the first week of February, Alex so much going on in the space, we've made it through the first month of the new year. Tell us about what's going on with the pod. So we just put out a special episode about European Ed Tech with bright eye ventures and the European ad tech Alliance. Super interesting what's going on in the European space. And next week, we are have a really interesting deep dive interview with CEO Raj Pearl hit who runs amazon marketplace for edtech companies. Don't miss that if you aren't at a company because that is a really interesting new distribution channel for b2b. And on this very episode, we have some incredible guests coming on at the end of the episode, we have Audrey witters, who is the head of online programs at Stanford Graduate School of Business along with Mike californicus, who is at Emeritus, which is now collaborating with Stanford. We also have Amy Jenkins, who's a friend of the pod and talking about the new round from the company meadow, which is tackling student debt. So hang on for those really interesting interviews. And before we go to those headlines, we also want to invite you to join us at one of our Ed Tech Insider events. We had 180 of our favorite ed tech entrepreneurs, investors, grad students, etc. In San Francisco, attending our Ed Tech Summit, co hosted with Ed Tech MBA and owl and Cooley. And then we have another one coming up February 15. In Boston, that is also hosted by the same crew and good harbor partners, shoot us a message if you want to come to that we will have events at South by Southwest and at ASU GSB. So lots coming up. So let's now get to the headlines. So first, we're going to start with our chat GPT beat covering every single week. And first, we have a slew of announcements of new companies, new use cases of chat GPT and generative language models. And one of the ones that caught our eye was math GPT. Alex, tell us a little bit about this. So this company photo study, it's been around since 2015. And it's a micro tutoring platform, they moved really fast on using judge JpT API's. And they've already created a math focused chatbot that basically can teach elementary algebra as a chatbot. And their idea is to do it as a b2b play and inject this chatbot into existing math products. It's able to offer personalized help assess progress, teach the textbook, all sorts of things generate quizzes automatically. So this is I think, you know, the first or one of the first shots across the bow of the kind of use case that we're about to see constantly, this entire year, where you can take this the power of this chat GPT, you know, engine, the API's and do incredibly specific and powerful things in an educational context. So I mean, I can't vouch for this particular chatbot yet, but the fact that it took just a few weeks to get an education use case out in the market, it's just gonna be a wild, you know, Cambrian explosion this entire year, I convinced? Yeah, two main thoughts on this one in particular one is, we've seen a lot around writing, and we've seen a fair amount around reading. But math seems to be a tougher nut to crack for generative AI, mainly because the math symbols have to be tracked to the language model to understand and interpret it. And so in some ways, these large language models aren't really best suited to deconstruct math. others who've been deconstructing math for a long time, like Photomath, one would think would be optimally suited to create AI generated math, tutoring solutions with textbooks, and I believe they have that product at Photomath. You know, they're generally speaking that, you know, in the top 10 have downloaded education apps. And so I think there is this arms race between the kind of incumbents who've been building their ml
We sat at our conference, we heard about Quizlet, they basically been working on machine learning for five, six years using all this assessment data to build their own model. And then these upstarts that are basically piggybacking on top of all, you know, open AI and other large language models. And so what I, what, you know, many people in this space are feeling is this exuberance and excitement. But I will say the investor vibe, right, that I'm getting right now here in the Silicon Valley, is really a lot of concern. So, you know, we'll share this in the show notes. But Andreessen Horowitz, published a pretty seminal article about the lack of defensibility for any of the value propositions in the AI ecosystem, other than cloud and infrastructure, because basically, for all these things to run, you need cloud and you need an infrastructure. But when you think about big companies that are developing models, like open AI, they're going to be pouring money into these models for years, continuing to help them improve and grow and also competing with with others. And you know, you basically have Microsoft and Google duking it out on this one behind the scenes. And then second, you've got all of these lightweight apps that sit on top of it. But the moment you release your app, everyone can see what you can do. And so then it's a race to replicate and copy. And, you know, I harken back to the early days of Chechi, btw, Princeton student launched a chat GPT cheating detector. And within 30 days, there were 20 other ones out there, including one made by a nonprofit. So the kind of access to check GPT, or any of the open AI models, has basically reduced the barrier to entry for anyone to have the AI capability to the degree that it's almost not defensible from anyone. And so I think investors are like, how do I invest in things and get my return? If the AI is just going to be this universal layer, kind of like the internet? Is this universal thing that everyone has access to? I don't know, what's your take Alice? I think that is a very investor centric way to look at this. Because they're basically looking for fast money and they're looking for fast money through an individual company. So they're saying, Oh, who's gonna win the math tutoring race who's gonna win the the plagiarism and integrity race? And and I think you're right, the answer, as of right now is, nobody's gonna win right now. Because everybody just got a jetpack, you know, everybody just got an incredible accelerant of the things they can do. And they're all just copying each other Jetpack, what I would say is just as the early days of the Internet, which was similarly a public infrastructure that was not owned by anybody. At first, every website feels about the same as any other website, who cares. In the first few years of the first couple of years, at least of the internet. You had your portals your your Hillels, and prodigies and whatnot. But the websites themselves were not very interesting. And they certainly weren't making any money. And it took a little bit of time to build that middle layer to build things like social networks, or even like Craigslist, you know, it took time to put together additional value that was separate from the underlying value of being connected. And I think the same thing is true here. I mean, this photo study app that came out is the first of Of course, many that are going to happen this year. But somebody's going to figure out I mean, if anybody can do it in a short time, what a companies have to do that and to say, what is our value add? What else are we going to put on this? What are we is it going to be? You know, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck teaching math is going to be math with crazy characters is going to be math in a way that makes you feel incredibly motivated isn't math, it's going to use the Quizlet you know, data set, which is the biggest data set in educational history. Like, yeah, you got to add value. So you can just make just make a product that's just chat. Chat, GBT. But I think this is hand wringing over absolutely nothing. This is good. There's gonna be so much innovation coming on the top of this technology. I agree. I mean, I would say it might be VC centric point of view. But it's also a startup point of view, which is that for startups, trying to raise capital, trying to differentiate on AI, could be really, really challenging. And I love your point. I actually think, you know, education is one of the most compelling use cases for AI, but really will have to have knowledge of the problems you're solving for your customer, and tools and features that are tailored to those problems. And so I actually think it's an advantage for
any of the EdTech folks who really know their niche or their target audience or, and I do think that big players can still, while they will definitely have access to the same kind of technology, the ability for a small team to disrupt a big player is going up. Last word on this one. Um, you know, we read Michael Moe's predictions. And in his predictions, he was saying that there might be a new era of four or five person companies that end up in 100 million in revenue. And that we might need to reimagine what a venture backed company looks like. It might be really, really small in terms of the team, and really, really big in terms of the impact and out but I think that that was pretty salient, given how we're just seeing the first month of the year playing out. Exactly. And just to put a fine point on it. Your example you gave earlier was so instructive, right? Okay, there is a problem that schools and colleges are feeling right now, which is integrity, they're afraid of cheating through AI. And it is happening at huge scale. So they're afraid of it and they want to get ahead of it. Think of the different players who are competing for that, turn it in, of course, created this instantly, open AI itself put out a plagiarism detector, this one Princeton student who's 22 put out a plagiarism detector. And then as you said, CommonLit and quill.org, which are two education, nonprofits put out that integrity, integrity solution, those are not usually people you see in direct competition with each other, the incumbent player in pleasure as a single person, it's crazy, just launch one where you can take 10 of them on top of each other and do synchronously. 10 filters. So basically ones like 95%, accurate ones, 90% ones 80%. But if you do all, you get like 99% accuracy. And that's what deep learning is like. That's exactly, it's about layers, so we can move on to the next thing. But this take is is real that because this is an open API, because open AI is open. And it's sort of one for now, I mean, we're still gonna wait on Deep Mind and some other stuff coming. But like, because it's head for now, it is a shock moment, because it wasn't developed by Microsoft or Google or by, you know, three guys in a garage that everybody's gonna throw money at. It's open, and now everybody's got it. And now people have to figure out what to really do with it, they still have to create value, if you can't just throw it at a problem and then make a company around it. Because you're right, there's no defensibility there, you have to throw to the problem, May Company write it, and then actually add value that other people can't replicate, it's gonna be wild. Well, speaking of open AI, landing the moonshot. There's also news about DARPA for education finally coming to fruition. Tell us about that. Alex, there has been this idea for many years, speaking of the original Internet, of creating a government funded, very well funded sort of research initiative to develop what they call, you know, the DARPA of the internet, sometimes they call this ARPA Ed, you know, which is really just about putting together as much brainpower and technology and research and development to get to sort of the next phase of what education could be just the same way that you know, Department of Defense put together, DARPA, which became the internet and sort of changed everything and interesting news this week is about you know, basically, there was a pitch in mid 2022, to create the DARPA, the internet, it's called the National they called it the National Center for Advanced development in education. The bill did not pass, but $40 million of it was of the 100 million they were shooting for, was given to the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the research and evaluation arm of the DOD. And there is at least some thought to pay, there's some you know, 40 million is not nothing. It's not it's not enough to do the new internet. But it's a start. And I think there's some, there's some thinking about what can the government do to create an infrastructure that improves education, you know, for everybody. And of course, AI is probably going to be part of that story at this point as well, too. So interesting idea. It's, it's not that the DARPA of Education has actually happened, but the amount of money going into this type of sort of foundational project is starting to rise. Yeah, so like you said, this initiative has been around for quite some time, I'd say probably like a decade. And it's really around r&d going into education, space, healthcare, you know, multi trillion dollar industry. The government funds, something like 10% of the total spend goes into r&d, and the government funds a big portion of that. Now, we also know that in healthcare you have pharmaceutical companies that have big homerun wins that pay off for
r&d in education, it's like point 1% goes into r&d. And so the idea is, you know, what are these Herculean tasks that take a government entity to kind of cross the finish line that private capital could not? A challenge that we face here is that many of the systems and structures that we're living with today, in education that are challenging students to kind of break out or our system to transform are actually policy initiatives. They're actually regulatory frameworks. And they're kind of cultural paradigms. They're almost not technical breakthrough challenges. They're adaptive, and around mindsets and leading change. But the one area that I feel like we could do way, way more on is assessment. And generally, to change what you measure, you change how organizations operate, and our mode of assessment in every single level of learning from younger children, you know, like preschool to elementary, the lag time is so long in terms of assessment and results, the ability to essentially standardize that assessment, you know, reduces everything to the lowest common denominator, which is multiple choice tests. So if the government could find out new technology or new ways of instituting assessment, calibration, and creating kind of vast feedback on that, then all we need are like entrepreneurs, and entrepreneur. And by the way, they don't have to be startups, they can just be entrepreneurial people in systems thinking now that we have this instantaneous assessment, how do we respond, and I will say, like, COVID is an instructional like until we had the testing, we couldn't transform the outcomes, you know, anything in business, if you don't have the dashboard, you can't move the business results. In education, this is what we're fundamentally missing, and $40 million, it's actually achievable on that. So that's my hope. I hope they don't spend time messing around with AI. I think they're gonna get lapped on that. A lot of other people. And I do think that there are real policy challenges around AI is AI using your your data it you know, and do you own it, data, privacy, bias, all of those types of things. But that should be done in a policy arena, it's really instant assessment, that only a government agency, if they published would have the authority credibility to make essentially offer that tool to everyone that could really be transformational. I'm not just talking about elementary, I'm talking higher ed, I'm talking about workforce, like I think assessment could could be the kind of mountain top, I love that take, I think that is such a great way to think about, you know, one of the core needs in the system that r&d could really serve and, you know, a couple of types of assessment that over the years have sort of come up in academic settings and never quite really broken through our authentic assessment. You know, basically, you're doing the thing you actually are trying to do not some proxy, multiple choice that sort of hints at it. And a type of assessment that I love called self assessment, where you're basically, there is no formal assessment, you can just use the existing work of any student to evaluate their skills, it basically happens quietly, secretly behind the scenes, not secretly, but happens behind the scenes. And you don't have to have these high anxiety, high stakes testing moments at all. Those are both avenues, I would love to see research, the technically this money is for, quote, quick turnaround, high reward scalable solutions, which leaves it very open. I love the fact that quick turnaround is in there. So it's not it's not saying hey, let's spend two decades on this. You know, it is the government. So maybe they mean quick turnaround is a decade. Yeah. And I will say, you know, there's layers of the cake on assessment, whether it's like, you know, self assessment, you get an AI based assessment, you got a peer assessment, you could have educator assessment, you could have a national assessment board. There's so many ways in which you can scaffold this thing to scale. But I think we'd all agree things like sa t, AC T broken, things like, you know, AP and other kinds of forms of testing are largely broken. So, on that note, let's actually talk about something in the news with AP. So AP African American Studies, launched to much fanfare, and then immediately crashed due to Governor Ron DeSantis. Presidential candidate for 2024. Basically declaring that the curriculum is to vote for his things. It's a tip of the iceberg kind of controversy. That's just going
To show how politics and education are firmly linked, and Republicans at least have a public education in their sights as a key election issue, as you read this news, and there's been subsequent moves. So just to not to oversimplify, but the launch got criticized, then have now relaunched with by pulling out some of the elements that are more controversial around critical race theory or, you know, the kind of African American perspective in African American Studies. For many people, it feels like they're watering it down. And it feels like a win for the ours and a loss for intellectual integrity. But I'm curious what your take is, and on this issue itself, but also on the larger implications in our edtech landscape. I think your comment about it being the tip of the iceberg is is exactly the key here, which is that, you know, this is a moment, and it has been for the last few years, especially in the US, I think starting with the mask mandates and all the debates there. And that just the the debates about keeping schools open during COVID, were basically it became clear to the political parties, and especially the Republican Party, that school and education is a winning issue, because they can just attack and point out things that are that that don't make, you know, quote, sense to parents, or, you know, this, this is the same thing that that was done during the Common Core era that people would pull out, you know, single questions from tests and say, look how ridiculous this question is, clearly, they're trying to mess with our kids. What scares me about this particular story is that it's so clearly at least being framed in all of the stories that you the BBC, NPR, as a clear win, because the AP did back down, because College Board did say, you know, there are elements of this test that may be considered too political, and we're going to take them out because of this. And, you know, for somebody like Ron DeSantis, he gets to put a head on his, on his wall, or whatever. And it means they're just going to do more and more and more of this, right, you know, you let a bully win, and they're going to keep keep bullying you. And I think that the fact that the curriculum creators and the test creators are bowing down, or you know, sort of backing off in the face of this political pressure, it just means that anybody in in education and ad tech is going to be facing that for at least the next couple of years. And that's just a loss for everybody. Because I think it's just going to make everybody nervous, and everything slowed down, and everything get caught up in, in internal debates and political, you know, red tape, so to speak. So I just think it's sort of sad that the blood is in the water in education. And that's where so much of the political debate is going to happen. It's just pathetic. And we've talked about it all year, but you know, the been happening at school boards, it's been happening and indoctrination at schools is now like, a very common talking point did it for in US politics, but it's just, it's working. It's working. And as long as it's working,
they're gonna keep doing it. I would say there's so much on this topic. And we've, we've covered the polls, and the data is that data is that most Republicans believe that higher ed is indoctrinating students into a liberal agenda, k 12. Is as well, and much of the CRT controversy occurs at schools that don't even teach critical race theory, or in a district like mine, you know, we only go to eighth grade, we it's not even, like curricularly available. But one thing that I think is important for our listeners to understand on this story is the business side. Education, let's just this is a fact, education is a business, it should have a moral authority. College Board is making a business decision, because Florida is one of the three largest markets in the country. And DeSantis knows that Florida has so much leverage as a business market, that he can transform curriculum companies, just as Texas or California hold the same kind of way. And in particular, it's interesting that they would back down on the test for everyone. Why would they not just have a version of the AP test for Florida, and a different version for other places? So normally, on the show or any look, this work is hard. We always support entrepreneurs are trying to tackle hard challenges. But the College Board should be put on blast for their poor planning and thinking about this. You know what they put in? They should have gotten feedback from a number of people on what are the political risks so that they didn't face this controversy in the first place. And number two,
But when they get this pushback, and they immediately cave, there should be a wave of resignations over there and protest, because they've lost all academic integrity in terms of, you know, what they what they stand for. And I, you know, I will say that some of the things that they moved on, I don't think that they're necessarily, you know, Game Changing issues for that particular module, or course, but it really is how whole thing played out. And the narrative of politics, shaping what kids should learn to be prepared for the world. So politics is not new, we've talked about this. I mean, look at the, you know, desegregation movement, politics in schools are tightly coupled in our country. But we are just on the cusp of school wars, and it was only going to come, you know, become more intense as we head into the election. And as companies think about, you know, any of our listeners, if you're running a company that's trying to serve blue states, red states, purple states, it's worth having the early conversation of like, where are we going to be flexible? Where are we holding the line? What do we do if this controversy hits us? And obviously, you probably for many of you, you wouldn't be on the front page of The New York Times for this. But it really is something that you need to think of in advance so that when it happens, you're ready to respond. And you can kind of speak to your thinking process and maintain your integrity. So I mean, Alex, this is just like, we've gone past the Trump era, and I feel like, and yet the damage has been done. And now the distrust is just, you know, pervasive. Now along with that distrust. I'm going to segue to our fourth story, which is around teacher shortage. So you know, previously one of the most venerated and trusted professions with being a teacher. Now, we have a new report from K 12 dive that 63% of educators are considering leaving the profession. 30% said they plan to leave within the next three years, while another 33% said maybe this is a survey from the Horace Mann educators group. And it's, this is not a new news item, it's that the crescendo has been growing. And we thought post COVID, this would kind of die back down, it's only getting worse. And there's also elements of mental health. There's elements of pay, there's elements of district leadership and community support. So this is not an easy fix, or a quick bandaid. Alex, as you've been thinking about this pretty strong drumbeat of teacher shortage, news growing, where does your head go? And what do you think we can do to turn around the ship? It's a big and kind of tough question. The reasons that the teachers, the things that they say, would keep them in education, are pretty clear. You know, 57% of the respondents here said, higher salaries. So that's, you know, more than half said, you're just not paying me enough to do this difficult work. And you can hear that from many teachers in many states. The second reason that, like you said, parent or community support, and I kind of read that as a little bit of code for some of the stuff we were just talking about in the last bit, which is, you know, teachers are under attack in a lot of places, they are really nervous about what they can, can and can't say, in the classroom what they can and can't teach, there are more and more constraints, more and more politicians, you know, local, all the way up to national looking for stories of a teacher doing something wrong, or a school, teaching something in a way that's sort of politically, you know, problematic. And then it boils all the way down to parents who are, you know, standing in school board meetings and yelling at people. So there's a lot of pressure on teachers right now. And they're not still not paid that? Well, I think that, you know, one of the things that really jumps out to me about why schools are sort of public schools, especially are under attack, is that there's not that many people who can sort of give a full throated defense of the American public education system. I mean, you have Secretary of Education is the first person to say there's all sorts of things that are that are broken, every teacher union, every, you know, every principle, like, everybody knows their problems in the system. So when politicians come and attack it and get parents to attack, it does sort of not as many people there as you might think, to stand up and say, leave us alone. We're doing an amazing job, like get out of here. And I think it just creates this sort of downward spiral and, you know, I think it can be reversed, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done like thinking pretty outside the box. I know you've been, you've been advocating for a minimum
wage for teachers they've been discussing, you know, 60,000, you always say been $100,000 should be the minimum wage for teachers, I think something pretty bold like that is actually really needed to stem the bleeding in the system because it is unpleasant, I think out there to be a teacher, a lot of these teachers say they're going to retire. So that might be a certain generation of teachers that are probably saying, I don't know if it's worth it anymore. I put in my time. But another 30% said, they're going to consider the private sector. And I know that everybody we talked to in edtech says they're getting flooded with applications from teachers. So I don't know if I were if I were, you know, in public education, I'd be looking at some pretty broad strokes. It's like, I don't think it's going to happen through a 1% increase discussion with the teachers union over the next two years. Like you need some bold moves to really change the narrative around. Yeah, I think the the headline news is, you know, teacher shortage, I think sub bullets, like you talked about, there's, it's not just like quantity problem. There's also a quality problem here, where if you are so desperate to hire somebody who can, you know, complete the minimum requirement of credential person in the school, are you really hiring the best teachers or training and supporting the best people, for kids. And given the data showing burnout, the data showing people are feeling underpaid, under supported, you're actually getting a selection effect that leads you to have even more degradation in terms of the quality. And I've never met a teacher that doesn't wake up every morning wanting to do the best for their kids. But like the degree to which schools have are also short on resources to train support, and upskill educators to be master educators, leads us to kind of have a double whammy of a crisis on the private sector side, you know, there is a moral question like, is it wrong to hire or recruit teachers away from the classroom? I know a lot of edtech companies prefer to have people working there that have been in the classroom. What's your thought on that? Like? Is it wrong? If you know, if you've got a job opening on customer success, and you pick somebody from the classroom? And that, you know, creates another opening? Is that actually against the overarching mission? Or how should companies think about that? It's a really interesting question. I definitely would not say that at all. I think teachers are an incredible, incredible source of talent for the EdTech industry. And I would not advise any tech company to feel a moral quandary in hiring a teacher into any role. And you know, I understand that the question is really interesting, because yes, if you believe in public education, strongly taking some, you know, the best and brightest teachers out of it can be a problem. But at the same time, leaving those best and brightest people to the, you know, the slings and arrows of the current system. I don't think that helps anybody, either. I don't think it's that those people are going to say, Oh, well, I didn't get that role with XYZ ed tech company. So now I'm going to do 10 more years of amazing teaching, I don't think that's what's going to happen, they're just going to go somewhere else, I tend to agree, I will also say that the era of, you know, the majority of teachers doing 30 years tense as a classroom teacher, it's probably over. And so we've got to get smarter. And that's just the way the world is working now, is that people have a job for four or five years. That's pretty good retention. So how do we make, you know, first year teachers much better, meaningfully better? And how do we support them to have five really great years or eight really great years, and then the upside career opportunities that open up create incentive, top of the funnel for more new teachers to come in and say, you know, if I do four to 10 years here, that's going to, you know, I'll have a career path, that one career path is lifelong teacher, which is great career path, but I've got all these other opportunities open to me. I love that. And I mean, one very concrete way to do that would be to accelerate the salary increases that come with additional training, because, you know, teachers can increase their salaries significantly over time with a lot of different professional development and, and various additional certificates. But it takes a long time. And it really only makes sense if you are, you know, a decade or more teacher. I won't say that entirely. But you know, it takes time. If there was a model where they assume that people are going to be in the classroom for four or five years and you can raise your salary within those four or five years in a significant way. You actually have a chance of retaining them in the system and your training.
them to be hireable anywhere and maybe even giving them titles that actually translate to anywhere else. I think the education system is just really chewed up and spit out teachers for so long. And now COVID is sort of created a forcing function. Something's got to change. And you know, one of the other things we looked at this week bet is about the the shortage of mental health professionals in schools. We have a school psychologist student ratio of 1100 students, for every school psychologist, more than 60% of public schools reported insufficient mental health staff is a great article in Axios. This week, basically saying, hey, these these extra funds, this 100 and $80 billion for eser has money for mental health support. And it's got to be used. And it's a huge problem. But there's a ticking clock, right. There's the SR Cliff we've talked about on the podcast for a while. This is a should be a clarion call for all the SCL companies out there for all the companies that are, you know, the tech companies that are connecting people to mentors. You know, there's a lot of amazing things we can do as a sector to help bridge this gap. But the clock is ticking. Well, the clock is ticking on our show today. We have two great guests coming up. So before we do that, let's do our funding and m&a Round Up. Alex, why don't you pick one or two funding rounds and m&a that caught your eye and then I'll do a couple as well. Yeah, okay, we'll do this as a lightning round $18 million for gamba executive training company out of London prisms be our that's going to be one of mine because we've just talking about how they launched a consumer that's really interesting education VR company focusing on math raised 12 point 5 million from Andreessen Horowitz exactly the, you know, mega VC firm we've been talking about today, the volpato. I have to call out because Chris, Dr. Christian Marty, one of the founders of a Bobo had a great session on our podcast discussing, you know, liberal arts versus vocational education. Very interesting take, they raised $8.3 million out of Switzerland to go around Europe. And then, you know, a few smaller rounds, mostly in India, we saw $3.7 million for sci fi pedagogy, about $200,000 small amount, but for an interesting company out of India called V versity. A British company called recourse AI. I know you didn't do what you said. But I went through all that. But the two interesting ones that I would point out, definitely prisms and a Volvo keep an eye on those. What about mercury on the m&a front. I mean, the biggest headline is University of Arkansas and University of Phoenix. Our listeners might know that Phoenix is in the state of Arizona, not in the state of Arkansas. But the idea is that University of Arkansas would kind of would enter the for profit university space and start competing with Arizona state. One thing that is important to note is that University of Phoenix had gone public. It's been, you know, a pioneer in online learning, but has had a decline over the last several years. And so the total number of students is under 100,000. But the acquisition basically signals that Arkansas, a state university is trying to make a play to be a national university. We also saw care Academy acquiring next step, a lot of activity in the training and placement space. That's mainly because in in spaces like healthcare, it is really, really hard to find talent, and the ROI on the training to get to your next job is really, really high. So to go from a patient care technician to a nurse has a big, big win both for the caregiving systems. And for the for the worker, Bill, one also acquires Anders pink, this is an Australian one. It's the Netflix of education. Anders pink brand is actually across a number of European markets. So this is a global rollout and kind of signals what we had talked about, right when Ed Tech winter started that we imagine a number of rollout strategies taking place. And then last, we have Ed you have support and go learn. They are two of the larger publishers and Finland and Denmark respectively. And this roll up is really creating 100 million in revenue publishing empire. We've seen that specific language publishers are teaming up to create international conglomerates. And this continues that trend. All right. That is it for our news roundup. Thank you for sticking with us through all these exciting things. Now, Alex, introduce us to our guests. For our deep dive today. We have some very special guests. We have Audrey winters, who is the managing director of online and entrepreneurship programs at Stanford Graduate School of Business. And Mike malefactors, who's the head of university partnerships at him
Meritus and they are starting a new collaboration. And they're here to tell us about it on Ed Tech insiders. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Alex. So happy to be here, Alex. First off, tell us a little bit about this collaboration and how it came about. Alex, we're so happy at emeritus to be working with Stanford Graduate School of Business, because this is really the fruit of, I think, almost six years of conversations to find the right way to collaborate with Stanford add value, and really bring their great, you know, faculty and content to the world. That's right, Mike. So we've been working on finding a way to work together for quite a while the Stanford Graduate School of Business went into the online market back in 2015. On our own, and we've come to this collaboration. Therefore, because we want to because we find there to be value here and and things that we we could do on our own if we if we chose to the course that we're launching with emeritus is a digital transformation playbook. And we think this is a really exciting topic. And so we're, we're really happy to be working with them. Yeah. So you're mentioning a tenure that Stanford GSB has been online. And it's really interesting. I want to read a quick quote from business chief magazine. It basically says in the wake of the pandemic, and with increasing acceptance of digital learning more business schools are launching online MBAs and other executive programs online. And you know, we've seen a lot of top business schools, INSEAD, and HEC Paris in Europe, and Wharton and the US start to embrace online and hybrid delivery after many years of being on in person only. Stanford has been an innovator in online delivery for a long time, as you just mentioned, so. And of course, you're right in the middle of Silicon Valley in the middle of the tech world. So, Audrey, how does Stanford GSB think about online education? Yeah, so we have always felt that many of the topics that we teach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business topics, such as leadership and innovation, are the kinds of things that you learn best by actually doing them. So we've had always a focus on experiential learning. And I feel that one of the major benefits of online courses is that because they are asynchronous in nature, the learners can practice implementing what they learn in the real world in the context of their situations and their organizations. So this first course that we've developed with Emeritus, the digital transformation playbook is a really great example of this, because the learners go through the course. And they hear about the frameworks, and they hear about the technologies. And then at the same time, they're able to apply what they're learning to their own digital transformation initiatives. And they end up at the end of the course, with a playbook with a practical roadmap that will help them implement their specific digital transformation initiatives within their organizations. That combination of online content and then applied practice in the context of each learners actual lives and their businesses is very powerful. This digital transformation playbook covers a really wide range of topics, you know, there's artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud services, automation, no code, low code, AR VR, really a lot of different new tech trends and tools in business all using Stanford GSB case studies. And you know, executive education is increasingly focused on topics like this, because digital transformation and technologies is changing the business world. Mike, I'd love to hear from you, you know, how does emeritus and Stanford make sure to stay out in front of all of these digital movements to ensure that the digital transformation playbook is is cutting edge and stays relevant as the technologies evolve, who that's where I think it really is combining. As Audrey said earlier, Stanford could do this on it so and would do an outstanding job, no doubt, and they were really one of the great leaders, when Adrienne team launched the LEED program. Back in 2015. I think where the collaboration really brings power is in two ways that helps us together stay ahead of things. We have great instructional design as the Stanford but we bring in a few different elements. And our global scope really makes a huge difference in terms of bringing the Stanford content across the globe, not just to, you know, nodes of excellence in say New York, Sao Paulo and London, Tokyo. It's really worldwide. And you know, prior to joining Emeritus, I used to run exec kid at Wharton and Columbia Business School and years earlier at Chicago Booth. And so they're all the same level of outstanding business school and I think the role that Americans hopes to play is an accelerator for the world's best business schools, as well as sort of distributor
To access to the world's best business schools, and that's why working with Stanford is such an honor. And, you know, we will work collaboratively to keep the design fresh and updated as the course goes on. Yeah, I think that one of the things that has made us happy to be working with emeritus is that while we do have an instructional design team in house, we're able to bring content to market at a scale and at a pace that we couldn't do on our own when we when we're working with, with someone like emeritus. And, for instance, in this course, there was a new case that the faculty developed about digital transformation at Volkswagen. So they were able to illustrate what they're teaching in the course, with a very recent and a very relevant example.
You know, also the different price points that we go out to market with, I mean, I think we, we really tried to find something that balances the commitment to deep learning in the sense that the learners in this six week course are going to be doing a significant amount of work to get this capstone project up and running. But it's also creating access for people who couldn't fly into Stanford. And I'm not just talking about the economics of it, but in terms of the time they have, you know, their commitments to work family life, that may keep them bound to wherever they live around the world. And they can't necessarily flying to Stanford, that that is a trend we have seen with, you know, with online and executive education for years. Because, you know, you mentioned the price point, I want to dive deep into this, because I think it's really important for the context for our listeners, you know, this digital transformation playbook six week course, is priced under $3,000 per learner, which is a fraction of the cost to take in person executive education courses at Stanford and other top quality programs, but relatively in line for how emeritus prices its offering. So I'd love to hear you both talk a little bit about you know, how to determine that price that marries accessibility to sustainability for the program and sort of who you're who you're reaching around the world. Sure. So to answer the question about the audience, first, the faculty designed the course, to help professionals think about how they can use cutting edge technologies to think about new business models to leverage business outcomes. So so the audience is fairly senior executives, managers, and even all the way up to the C suite. But to talk about the pricing, I think even within this audience, especially when you're, when you're thinking globally, access to funding varies quite a bit. And so we actually are really happy that we could draw on emeritus his expertise and their years and years of experience, bringing online courses to market to think about what is the right price point for this, this offering, and we feel that where we are now is a pretty competitive price for the content and and the format. Yeah, Audrey. And I think it's important to remember that the new view of lifelong learning and the need that all professionals have to constantly be updating their skill sets. And you know, in the old days, when people only flew to Stanford to take a week long course, that was a much higher price point. But you know, this sort of $3,000 price point allows people to think about, I can take a course, once a year from Stanford, and I don't have to think about going once every five years to campus, and the way the world is changing at an ever faster pace. That's the smart way to keep up skilled and relevant. And especially as economies are changing, it's going to be even more important going into the future to find that sweet spot of low enough price point that I can be a multiple, you know, course learner over many years, as well as giving access to you know, people who don't necessarily have the funding from their, their company, a lot of traditional executive education was funded by people's employers. At this price point, it's not inexpensive. But if I'm dedicated to just building up my own resume and my own skill sets, I can probably afford to do this on my own. Or if I'm, you know, coming from Mumbai, and I might not earn nearly as much as somebody in the Western world. It's also much more reasonable price than flying to Stanford. I think that that point is so important that executive education in the US and many developed countries, you have employers footing the bill, but as you're going around the world, which emeritus is truly global, you want to keep that balance of being accessible to individuals who might not have that support, but still be a serious program where you're actually digging deep and make sure that there's enough money coming in to have that
incredible experience, I want to double click on the global nature of this because this is something I think is really, really unique to America. So, you know, some of the plans for this program are that emeritus is planning to adapt Stanford's program starting with a playbook for audiences in Latin America and China, and providing globalization support with local on ground teams and translation and regionally relevant case studies. That's really an interesting model. So you can see that that's something emeritus really brings to the table it sounds like it's that's sort of one of America's is really special sauces in collaborations like this. They you have offices in Delhi, Shanghai, Palo Alto, New York, London, Mexico City, I can sort of go on. And obviously teams in each of these places, might tell us a little bit about how emeritus works and how this globalization process works. Sure, Emeritus is now working with over 60 universities across the globe, about 30 are based in the US and Europe. So you know, everybody from Stanford to London Business School, but we've got another 30 Plus that are in Latin America, in India, in Southeast Asia, as well as teams based there. And our teams know how to market in the local market, they know how to speak to learners in their native tongue, even if they're planning on taking the version that's in English. And then four major languages like Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, we do translation. And we'll have cohorts that are specific to Brazil, or China or pan Latin America for the Spanish speaking Latin America. And it's just another way to provide that access so that it's not just a price barrier that's removed, or a time barrier that's removed, it's a language barrier that's removed. And because of the design that Audrey mentioned, a lot of its social learning. So I might get more out of this course, if I happen to be a Brazilian executive working and living in Brazil, with a cohort of Brazilians, able to talk about it in Portuguese, rather than, you know, maybe I don't feel as confident in my English, and I might be a passive learner, if I took the global version, even if I have decent, you know, English. And so we definitely try to localize everything. And last year, we reached over 180,000 learners across the globe, of which only about a third were based in North America. And you know, big other. Obviously, it's the big global hotspots of India, Latin America, China, and they're growing at a faster rate. So this is also realizing where the weight of innovation, the weight of the economy, and the globe is going to be moving, south and east. And that's where we already are. Adria. I'm curious how you think about the globalization and sort of the ability to make a program and then have it be translated regionalised localized around the world. Yeah, we're really excited at Stanford, our faculty are really excited as well about how this will be able to increase the impact that we can have with executives around the globe, we, we already have significant levels of of global participation in our programs, both both on campus and online. already approaching 50% of the participants come from countries outside of the United States. What we've not done traditionally is, is the things that Mike spoke to about the translations and we don't have these local support teams around the world. And I think that this another are people who would have suffered from a language barrier that would have prevented them from participating in our programs. And this will open things up to them. I think it's also a couple of the other things that Mike said, are really excited to be here to about when we're thinking about applying learning in your context. And when we're thinking about making that learning social learning from learning from the other professionals within your cohort. I think that is something that because the cultures are different, the business environments are different, in addition to the language being different, that's really it's really good to have a cohort of folks that are local with you to have support staff that's local with you to help you think about the application of the learnings. Yeah, that sense of belonging is important in any kind of learning and especially an online learning because it's very easy to feel alienated if you feel different than the sort of the class so I think the idea of having local cohorts is really powerful Mike we're gonna add something there. I'm just going to just add one other thing you know, Audrey how part of our course design includes a Learning Facilitator also ensuring that that learning facilitator is speaking native language not not just you know, in translation from English, it makes a lot of sense that you're both sort of hinting at something that I think is really important.
And people have said for many years that you know, in business education and executive education, networking is one of the main reasons why people go back year after year. They want to meet other people they want to learn from each other, do that sort of peer to peer learning. I've been my co host on this podcast is a GSB, alum and went to tons of events and cocktail parties and trips when he was there. Tell us about how you make the social aspect of the emeritus online experience? How do you ensure that students can make connections with each other both regionally and globally? I'll start with that one, Audrey, just to say that, in the top, you mentioned, this is a collaboration and that is the right word for what we're doing with Stanford because we collaboratively designed this, I mean, we brought a lot of the knowledge we have from, you know, teaching courses to hundreds of 1000s of people over the year, and Stanford as their specialized design, were really deliberate to make sure this is not just what I think a lot of people think of online learning as this sort of passive type of learning that I can just log in, log out, unplug. And that's why many of the original mass open online courses, the MOOCs, 95% of the people don't complete the course less than a 5% completion rate. Whereas our courses, no Stanford's courses, you know, it's all well over 90% go through the entire course, because we make sure that the learning is social and networking is part of it. So Audrey mentioned some of this, but I'll just go a little more specifically, like in this course, in particular, on the digital playbook. You know, we have you mentioned the Capstone Audrey, where they have to formulate their own digital strategy, and it has to be applied. There Live Office Hours with learning facilitators to help the learners along with their capstone. So you're not just stuck out there sort of pondering to yourself or only speaking with peer students. But you can go to a, you know, learning facilitator, which I would think of as, remember, your TA, is sort of in between a coach and a TA. So that's a learning facilitator. There's live sessions with both faculty members that are present to answer questions. So it's not just pre recorded, and you know, the core content is all pre recorded. But if I have a particular question about how can I apply this to my situation in this industry, or if I'm just starting a new, you know, a new self funded startup, how can I do this, you'll, you'll get that opportunity to actually engage with the Stanford faculty. And then they're also really even informal networking sessions with pure learners and learning facilities where the purpose isn't to talk about the content, but the purpose is to get to know each other. So we're really trying to think and this is something we're thinking of beyond just your Stanford program. But when we see clusters of people in a given city, whether it's, you know, Sao Paulo or Chicago, let them know, Hey, you guys happen to be in Chicago. And do you want to do a meet up so So again, we're evolving this model to be not just digital connectivity, but hopefully when there is colocation, encourage the colocation networking as well. We mentioned both Mike and I, at the beginning of the podcast, that this took a long time for us to come together and start working together and feel comfortable with this collaboration. And one of the one of the things we worked on during that time, was ensuring that we were both gonna be really happy with the quality of learning that was offered through these courses. And the completion rates is is part of that the live interaction is part of that right? We are very, very interested in ensuring that people feel really good about what they've learned and how they can apply it. At the end of their time with this course, we had a strong reputation already at the Stanford Graduate School of Business with online programming. And we wanted to ensure that that emeritus was going to live up to that standard with all of the courses is that we developed in collaboration with them. And when I said six years, it wasn't six years designing this course, it was probably five years of getting to know each other. So we were comfortable enough to get to the point where we could collaborate and design this course. And just just last shout out to those who might be interested in this course or future Stanford courses is remember, it's not passive learning. It's learning with a purpose that's based on building social networks that can last beyond the program.
It is really been a pleasure to speak to both of you today. I'm really excited about this collaboration as well. We have Audrey witters, Managing Director of Online and entrepreneurship programs at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Mike malefactors, head of unit risky partnerships at emeritus in collaboration offering global executive Ed, thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much for Alex.
We're here talking to Amy Jenkins of meadow which just raised a $3.5 million round. And you know, Amy's a longtime friend of the podcast, she was one of the very first guests that we had when we started back in the end of 2021. Welcome, Amy, it's great to see you again. Thank you. Thanks for having me back on today. It's terrific. Well, so tell us a little bit about what meadow does. It's in the college tuition and debt space, tell us what it's all about? Absolutely. Meadow is really FinTech meets ed tech. So we're powering modern Student Financial Services for universities to really clarify and simplify the financial experience for students. What we've seen is it's incredibly complicated. And we think there are ways to fix that. And it really matters to all of us at the company, or small, there's seven of us and all of us are incredibly mission driven with a strong belief that we need to that we can improve economic mobility in the US through higher education. But to do that, there's a bunch of barriers we need to remove.
Yeah, I mean, the economics around college admissions and tuition are so complicated for everybody, let alone first generation college students or people who are trying to navigate it for the first time. One of the interesting things about Meadow is that both of the founders emigrated from different countries from Venezuela, and Thailand to the US. And do you feel like they bring a global perspective and our sort of don't take the US complexity for for granted? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they had personal experiences, which led them to found the company, and the composition of our team looks a lot like them. So our, our product designer, who recently came over to us from Amex is originally from Ecuador, head of product is from South Africa, our head of engineering is from Peru. So we have a team which is really brings a global perspective and really thinks a lot about the student experience. How do we simplify it? One of the first things we did when we developed our net price calculator was make sure that it was available in Spanish as well. That makes a lot of sense. So yeah, you're mentioning the Net Price Calculator. That's called meadow price. And it's already available. Tell us what that does. Yeah, so we met 14 universities using it right now. Some of them are pretty big institutions that you've probably heard of like UT Austin, or American University. Some of them are smaller universities like Wayland, Baptist, or Aquinas. And, you know, one of the really big challenges that universities have right now is is around enrollments. So fewer students have been enrolling and more students have been dropping out. And financial barriers are consistently one of the number one reasons that that happens. And that starts at the moment of application. So students go to a website, they typically pretty quickly when they're on a college website, or in a click on the tuition and fees page, and what they're gonna see there is a really big number, and students get sticker shock, and they walk away. So we've looked at the data over the last 10 to 20 years, and people talk a lot about the rising cost of college. And what's interesting is the prices on the website have gone up. But the net price, which is what students pay, after you take into account financial aid, scholarships and grants that has been absolutely, almost close to zero in terms of increases, so that is essentially plateaued. And yet those other numbers keep going up. So you have students who go to a page, they look at the number, they think there's no way that I can afford that, and they walk away. And that's especially true for first generation students. What it does is it gives students a really clear way to understand for them in a really personalized and accurate way, what they are going to pay for college, which means more students are going to feel comfortable understanding the debt burden they might take on understanding the cost that they're that the investment that they're going to make. But also being able to see this is affordable, even though at first glance, I didn't think I could do it. It's a really important thesis. And this might be just my weird way of looking at things but I think of you know, college and buying a house and buying a car. Those are sort of the three big expenses in life for anyone. And if you go to a car buying site right now, for one thing, they're gonna quote you the lowest price that the car will be not the highest and then you had on all sorts things. And then also for house sites like Zillow and Redfin, they'll they'll break down exactly the monthly cost right up front. And you know, feels like college has just been way behind in that ability to add to really create price transparency. Yeah, Alex it is always surprise me that they start by saying the worst case scenario of what you'll pay right everywhere else you see, you know, prices starting as low as they say, this is the most expensive and honestly most universities
The majority of students don't pay that when students get their net price. It's typically on average 30% less than the sticker price. And you know, over 90% of students receive some form of financial aid. So we're universities are putting a price out there, which almost nobody is going to pay, which I agree, it seems completely counterintuitive to what you would what we would expect that universities would want to do. And that's something a lot of them are working on addressing. Taking some time. Yeah, I've seen some articles about some schools trying to flip that around and change their sticker price. But I'm curious with the universities that you've been working with, with the sort of first adopters of meadow, how do they feel about making these prices so much more transparent, it feels like one of the things that universities have been able to do for many years because of this opacity is really make it totally unclear to anybody what you know, the person sitting next to you in class is paying. I'm curious how they feel about sort of making transparency part of the equation. Universities that Meadows working with really look at this as a lever. So it's an additional tool in their toolkit as they think about how can I boost enrollment? How can I make sure that more students are able to attend my college, and that I'm able to have access to them, because they don't go to my website and walk away, they go to my website, and they actually engage and they apply. So for the universities that we're working with, they see this as there's something missing that I didn't have before, that I now have access to, which is going to enable me to attract a lot of students who I really have wanted to attract. net price calculators aren't new, they were mandated by the Higher Education Act. So these have actually been around for a while. But largely, I would say that that say that the NPC initiative has failed in the US because it didn't bring more price transparency, because most universities, bury them on their website. So we've heard universities say things like I never promoted it before, I included the link because I have to, and the universities were working with creating email nurture campaigns, when they're sending, putting it on Instagram, they're writing press releases, they're saying, here's a way that we can demonstrate to students that come into our institution is within reach for you. And we want to let you see what you will actually pay. I love that transformation of the messaging where, you know, in the past schools bury the calculators because they're sort of nervous about or, you know, for variety of reasons, not that interested in having students being able to find their actual price. Now, I think they're starting to realize what actually maybe this is a good thing. It certainly matches the needs, especially of the younger generation that are incredibly good at price comparison and have been questioning the value of college for a while you would think that it would be a natural idea. Yeah. And Alex, I think some of it is they were hesitant about sharing the price. The other thing is that the calculators they had at their disposal just weren't that good. So they either were really hard to to use and created a not great student experience, or they weren't accurate. So there was a tool out there, but it wasn't actually doing what it needed to for universities or for students. And now there is both a shift in mindset around the importance of financial transparency and also a tool available, which makes it possible for them to do that. Yeah, and meadow has aspirations beyond price transparency, as well, I heard you're working on a payment system to streamline. Yeah, Alex. So we're really excited. We're gonna launch this summer with a few universities. One of the things that you and I, I mentioned before was this idea of financial barriers as being a reason that students don't come to or drop out of college. And you know, the financial experience is as complicated as as it is expensive. Students juggle up to 20 different sources of funding, which leads to a lot of confusion about what, when and how to pay for college, university Student Financial Services offices manage around 1000 students per staff member, so they're relying really heavily on manual processes and struggling to give students the financial support that they need to stay enrolled. Those problems that are faced by students create really big problems for universities, you know, they really rely on tuition and fees as their source of revenue. They're under a lot of financial stress. And so they are sometimes forced into punitive collection tactics just to recover all the late and unpaid balances. So we looked around, and we thought there has to be a better way. The systems don't have to work the way that they work. And we think that if we work with universities for application to graduation, we can help them more clearly communicate with students and deliver a really modern experience. So it starts with that Price Calculator knowing what you would be expected to pay. And then while you're there, we're able to really stress
In Line communications, and billing and make it easy for students to pay just from their phone, so that universities are able to also get those collections in faster. So when you know what we think about what meadow pay does, it really tackles the dual complexity of the tuition payment process for students, and tackles accounts receivable for universities, both important problems. And you know, I think this is a really good example of the kind of place where technology and education really can come together to make, as you say, a modern experience, you know, the idea of any individual school trying to, on their own build a whole system for streamlined payments and mobile first payments, that's a really big lift. But for a startup, it can do an incredible job with very modern design really use a great user experience that matches what what college students of all ages, you know, want to see. And then schools can get get, you know, reap the advantages. It's, I think there's a really nice model. Yeah, that's right. It happens in so many other places in the world right now. So all sorts of other businesses are really able to have data driven communications, they're able to really streamline billing and payments, and they have consumer friendly experiences. universities aren't really there yet as a whole. And so we're developing this to really change what that student financial experience is, and make it less frustrating for both parties involved. It makes a lot of sense. I noticed some of the employees from meadow came from startups like Klarna, which is, you know, another type of payment system that has sort of revolutionized online payments, especially during the pandemic. It's really, really interesting to see what Meadow is going to do for colleges. And I'm really excited to see where it goes. So my last question is about the round itself. So $3.5 million round. Tell us a little bit about some of the investors and sort of what you're looking forward to doing with the new influx of cash. Absolutely. So we raised around earlier this fall, and just announced recently, we're really excited about it was not the easiest time to fundraise as you might imagine it. But we saw an incredible amount of excitement around what we were building. So the round was led by Susa ventures, they have a great backgrounds in FinTech and are really able to bring a whole set of experiences and expertise to us that we're, you know, we'll get to grow alongside them and with them. Giant ventures was a prior backer they invested us at the pre seed round. And so having them stick with us and continue to help us when they really started when we were, I mean, there was just an idea at the time we first started working with them. And then we've got ally Corp and treble capital as well. We also some really great angel investors, we've got Coda Wang, we have Monzo founder Tom Blomfield. So Richie from Phenix be from Braintree and head of payments. We have this really amazing group who I feel really lucky that they're not just supporting us financially, but they give us really good advice, really good guidance. And together we build a new platform that really helps us to rethink and reimagine the Student Financial Services experience. I'm really looking forward to seeing the bright future of meadow. So Meadow is at Meadow feiyr.com Because it's finance Meadow phi.com. And we have Amy Jenkins, who's the Chief Operating Officer of Meadow $3.5 million round off to the races. Thanks so much for being here. Amy. Thanks, Alex. It's a lot of fun.
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