[00:00:00] Ben Kornell: I think if you were to have stepped off into a spaceship in January, taken off and you're just returning from orbit, Alex, the other headline that you would wake up to today is like backlash. We are full on backlash mode and I'm, when I say backlash is backlash against everything.
[00:00:19] Alex Sarlin: Everything comes in waves, and I think we are at a moment where sort of at a, not the low I think, but at a down ramp in terms of the public perception of ai, the data definitely bears backs this up.
People are now more worried about it, more concerned than they are positive about it in many different contexts. But I think that's gonna turn around. If not when, if you know, if anybody who cares about AI can actually prove, can actually show that this is working. That includes the kind of studies that scale is looking at in the research, but it also includes anecdotal and it also includes a world in which people say, my children, it's not just they love Roblox, it's not just they love Duolingo doing it on the weekends.
It's like, they have leveled up their learning because of something that has AI baked into it. And until we can make that happen, and by we, I mean open ai, I mean Google, I mean every EdTech company you can think of, right? Until we can do that collectively, the backlash is, is gonna keep growing.
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Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. Guess who's back, back again. Alex Sarlin. Tell your friends. He's back. Hi Alex. Another Week in EdTech and I get to see your smiling face here. How are things going? Tell us everything and anything about GSV Life.
[00:02:23] Alex Sarlin: Oh, it has been exciting. GSV life is intense and exciting.
You talk to so many people, you work on so many different projects at the same time. It's a thrill. It's a roller coaster. We are one month out from the A-S-U-G-S-V summit now, and we are now putting together all the pieces for all the different events, entrepreneurs, receptions. School superintendents, college presidents, there's gonna be podcasting happening from the summit.
There's going to be so many speakers, including some real stars from the, obviously from the EdTech world. I mean, just every CEO you can imagine is speaking there, but also lots of stars from the AI world, which is. Very exciting. We have the, the CEO of Lovable presenting this year that is about as hot as it gets right now.
We have people from OpenAI, we have Google, we have Anthropic, we have so many different people. It's just gonna be this sort of next level conference this year, and I'm, I'm really excited about it. The GSB Cup is of particular excitement for me right now because the GSV Cup is, you know, 50 startups across K 12.
Higher ed and workforce, they're all gonna be pitching and presenting to a big audience. And I'm gonna be co MCing that this year. And then the audience choice, the fan favorites, get this spectacular sort of, uh, explosive celebration at the shell at the end of the event. So it's, it's gonna be wild.
Anybody who's listening, who already is gonna be there, right to me, say, hi. I'm so excited. I'm gonna be busy, but I'm gonna be there and anybody else give it a look. It's gonna be quite a event this year. And boy, a lot of work goes into it.
[00:03:55] Ben Kornell: Yeah, we are so excited. And of course, our EdTech Insiders Happy Hour is on Monday night from 6:30 to 8:30 rooftop party.
We are going to be watching the sun go down with all of your favorite friends, and we're gonna have a bunch of really great organizations co-sponsoring with US headliners. We've got the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, now known as Learning Commons. We've got Anthropic as headliners, and then we've got a host of others.
You'll see all the announcements coming out really, really soon. And then on the pod, we've been super busy. Alex, like, you're busy. We've been busy. Over here we've got Oliver Page from CyberNut. Aaron Cuny from AI for Equity. Joshua Broggi from Woolf. We've got Aaron Feuer, Yoon Yang, Larisa Hovannisian. We've got Dr.
Kathy Weston, Karl Rectanus, that's already come out, and we've got Brandon Smith from Integrity Advocate that just came out last week. We've got Greg Hart, Ariella Racco, Dean Celaj that just came out today. Josh Jones from QuantHub. I mean, the list goes on and on. Lots of great stuff going on overall in the space.
So with that in mind, we've got a lot to cover and we've got like 20 ish minutes here. So let's dive in. Alex, from the world of ai, the big news right now is open AI's new learning suite, interactive lessons in science and math. Did you get a chance to check it out and what are your thoughts?
[00:05:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean, I, I'm really excited about this James Donovan, who is the head of cognitive outcomes, I believe learning and cognitive outcomes.
I'm probably butchering that, but has a really, really interesting position within OpenAI and is thinking very deeply. I know that you just got a chance to interview him in a, a tech insiders event very recently, but he is doing. Incredibly interesting work and I think what's happening right now is OpenAI is really thinking how can we make sure that we are a source of good when it comes to cognitive outcomes and learning in the world?
We know they know just as well as anybody. Exactly how many people are coming. To open AI every day trying to figure out core concepts of science and math, trying to figure out how to do their homework, trying to figure out how to write an essay, trying to figure out how to improve their own skill sets in every conceivable way.
And what they just launched this week is this sort of interactives that are built in. More than 70 of them in core science and math topics. So they basically said, look, we see how many people are asking us about how, you know, volume works or the Pythagorean Theorem, or how circles work or all these things.
These sort of core concept in math and science. And when people ask, we're gonna use the underlying learning science. And rather than trying to explain the area of a circle in words in text, the way we normally would for other things, we're gonna actually give them an interactive visual. Simulation so they can actually see the area of a circle.
They can change the radius, they can change the diameter, they can change the area, they can see how it all works together. It's a page out of the core learning science playbooks that we all use, thinking about how to make things more interactive, more hands-on and more visual, and give multiple modes of access.
And multiple modes of understanding, and it really gets me in the learning science heart, because this is something that Exactly, it's exactly what you should do if you're a company that cares a lot about learning, and OpenAI, as always has a million irons in the fire. They're huge, but they still care about learning.
They really do, and they keep proving it with these projects. So I was really excited to see it. What did you make of it?
[00:07:30] Ben Kornell: So first off, how is open AI strategy different than other people's strategy? One of the foundational things that has really kind of shown itself, and this is from some of James's work over the last three or four months, is some of the providers out there are really thinking about how does learning work in our current system?
What does a human tutor do? Which pieces can be replaced by AI to make a human tutor more effective? What Open AI is doing is they're starting with cognitive science. How does the brain learn in abstract of knowing anything about tutoring? How would we construct intellectual processes that lead to learning?
And I think that's a fascinating way, and the danger zone is that you. Invent things that we know don't work because tutoring has shown it doesn't work. But coming at it from a first principle standpoint, Assos opens the aperture of re-imagining modes of learning that are more AI native. And so I think this is.
One big salvo in that regard, and you can see that part of it is the lessons and the concepts, but the kind of part that stands out is making it visual and interactive. It reminds me very much of Desmos and what Desmos objects do and what we know is for self-driven learners. Having the ability to take something that's abstract and conceptualize it with physical shapes is really interesting.
The irony, I think, is that now people are. Jumping at the opportunity to take screenshots of it being wrong. And that is the bar. In education. You and I both have been involved in personalized learning and in personalized learning. You get it right. 95% of the time that 5% will kill you. Whereas if it was like serving up ads, you're right, 95% of the time serving up ads.
You're a millionaire or billionaire. So, you know, I think we've gotta see these tools as big steps forward, but probably not all the way there ready yet for primetime. But those of you watching, basically, if Google strategy is AI on every surface where you are with learners, they're going to be thinking about how this plays within the existing system on the opposite end of the extreme.
You now have open AI showing that they're reimagining and basically putting the hands of learning in the learners grips and saying, go to it. Go learn. And by the way, anthropic, in terms of using Claude directly, is not listed for under eighteens. So that gives you a great sense of like, wow, they're taking such distinct.
Paths.
[00:10:17] Alex Sarlin: And don't forget about Google in this context too, because I think you mentioned Google's surface area idea, but they're also super contextual, right? I mean, I think Google has also been for quite a while saying, look, if you go into the search bar and you search for the score of a basketball game.
We are not just gonna give you things about the scores of basketball games. We're gonna take you right to this module that says, here's the game, here's the live game. Here's what's happening right now. Here's the score right this second. Because they know what you're really looking for from lots of context.
You go do a calculation in Google, put it in the regular search bar, it's gonna bring up a calculator for you, right? And it's the same thinking here, right? If you're in open AI and you're saying, I need to understand these science concepts, how does this work? It says, okay, you're trying to understand core concepts in science, and as you said.
They're gonna leverage the cognitive science, they're gonna leverage what we know about learning and jump you right into a learning experience. And I think that's gonna be true for both Google and OpenAI for the foreseeable future. And I, it's fun to think, you know, there's always naysayers, right?
Especially with new products and especially for giant companies like OpenAI. Right now, there's a lot of. Skepticism about their motives. There's a lot of skepticism, especially coming off all of this crazy stuff with the defense department in the last month. It's a crazy moment for ai. It's taking over everything and people don't know what to make of it.
So of course you're gonna have people saying, I'm gonna make it wrong. I'm gonna figure out how to break this thing, and then take a screenshot and try to humiliate, you know, one of the biggest companies in the world. I think that really misses the point, which is that a company of this size for all the things they could be doing, the fact that they're not only experimenting with cognitive science, they're launching it, they're putting it out there, they're saying, let's just go with this.
Let's try to help people with it right now. Let's try to create interactive experiences. I think kudos to them, and then we'll see how it rolls out. But I, I don't know. As a former product manager, it's very easy to find edge cases or make something go wrong. It's easy to do, it's happened. You can do it in, in many video games.
You can do it in lots of different ways. That's not really the point. The point is trying to get to the motivation behind what this product is trying to do. Because especially in the AI world, you know that it's gonna get better very, very, very quickly. Very everything
[00:12:22] Ben Kornell: one surmises. So one surmises. So, and I think it's interesting to juxtapose this announcement.
With the Stanford Scale announcement about, it's a meta study of research around AI and efficacy, and those of you who really care about this topic. Quick plug for our March 27th event on AI and efficacy at 9:00 AM Pacific time, and you can check out LinkedIn as well as our show notes on the information about this.
Basically what they did is they took over 800 academic papers relevant to AI and K 12 education. Only 20 of the papers found strong causal evidence of AI impacting education. One of the big takeaways is pedagogical design really matters. Tools designed with pedagogical guardrails, such as AI chat bots for tutoring that provide step-by-step reasoning instead of direct answers.
Show more promise than general purpose AI tools. So where are we going? Will open AI start building in pedagogical design? We have Google with Learn lm. And will we see a journey of these generalized tools into pedagogically designed tools, or will we see that the kind of defensibility of EdTech AI tools is in the pedagogy in design?
Before I flip that over to you for your thoughts, I do also think the headline news here is that while AI gains show short-term effects. It has uncertain long-term transfer, and there's a bunch of questions around cognitive load making things easier. Do kids really deeply understand the concepts? It's absolutely worth the read.
For those of you who've never read meta-analyses, this is actually one of the easier reports to read, and I think it raises more questions than it gives answers, but kind of shows the need for more. AI research around efficacy and evidence of impact, as should you pair these two together. What are your thoughts?
[00:14:29] Alex Sarlin: I'm again gonna sort of take the over on this, which is that we're early in the AI world in general. We know that right here we are March, 2026. We're talking about November, 2021, right? Or 2022. Was it? Oh my god, it feels like forever ago. No, it was March. It was March, 2022. So I think we're about on the fourth, right?
Aren't we in like the four year anniversary of the sort of the very beginning of this? Yeah. In research time, that's not very much time. The fact that there are this many papers already, and if you look at sort of in this report, how much research is happening about AI and efficacy, AI and education, the amount of research is starting to go exponential and you can totally see why there's lots of skip.
Again, lots of skepticism. People are worried about cognitive outsourcing. They're worried about what is this gonna do to reduce. The positive, productive struggle and the friction that people need to learn, but there's also incredible excitement. What does it mean to have AI tutors? What does it mean to have AI that can teach underlying concepts?
What does it mean for students? They say most of those studies here you have students as users. The fact that only you know a tiny percentage of them are showing causal effects is not that surprising right now. And yes, the findings here are certainly not fireworks positive, but they're also not negative.
It's very nuanced, right? They're saying, Hey, there seem to be some interesting things that are possible here. And to your point, the pedagogical design of what's happening in the AI is hugely impactful. That's exciting news because what that means is that. It's not that AI comes in and just sort of wipes the table clean and everything that's we've ever thought or known or suspected about learning is history.
It means we can leverage that and you know, we've talked about this a million times on this show, but I think it always bears repeating. These AI tools are designed for completely general purpose. Answering questions and being helpful. That is at cross purposes with teaching. It always has been. So the fact that we're actually now thinking, well, what can AI do?
If you're trying to use it in a learning context, you have to design it for a learning context. You have to design it to act like a tutor, not a butler. And none of this is news. Exactly. I feel like it's, some of it's a little self-evident, but that's what the evidence is actually showing. It's saying, look.
If you want to use AI for teaching, you have to make it a good teacher. You have to think about what good teaching looks like, what good tutoring looks like, what good modeling looks like. And I think it dovetails really nicely with what open AI is doing with these interactives because it's the same concept.
It's saying you can't just take a general purpose AI tool out of the box and assume it's gonna work really well for every use case. And. Teaching is a use case that is explicitly different than getting the answer as quickly and efficiently and as little work as possible, which is exactly what a lot of these AI tools are optimized for.
So the fact that they're saying, you know what, there really is potential here if we're thoughtful. I think it, it goes really well with what Open AI is doing, and it goes well with what we know Google is doing. We've talked to the Google people and they're saying the same thing. They're saying, we know that it's not just you take Gemini out of the box and it's gonna be a great teacher.
We have to make teaching modes. We have to use underlying learning principles and test against 'em. We have to create benchmarks because to use it in this very specific context needs another level of scrutiny and thought that we just don't have out of the box. So. I'm excited. I mean, scale is an amazing organization that AI hub for education is, I think, the best amalgam of AI research there is in the world right now, which is about education.
It's really, really exciting. The fact that there's no clear direction is not super surprising, but I think it's really a, a positive finding to realize that instructional design and pedagogical intent. Really does make a difference because that opens the door for all of these giant companies as well as all the EdTech companies that are building on top of these models to insert that pedagogical intent and learn more about what works in a pedagogical standpoint.
In this context, I just get super excited about it from a learning science instructional design standpoint, because it's basically saying. It's not that it wipes table cleaning. It doesn't start over. You gotta use what we know about learning. Great. Let's do it.
[00:18:28] Ben Kornell: Totally. I mean, I feel like this is both vindication.
For the people who said generalized AI won't work, but it's also a vindication for the AI companies to say learning has always been one of our primary use cases and we're willing to invest in making it right. So to me, as somebody from a parent standpoint, a school board standpoint, an EdTech standpoint, someone who just cares deeply about the impact in this space, these all seem like good trends to me.
I think one group that is really concerned are investors. How is this going to play out if Google's reaching in? Open? AI is reaching in anthropics, reaching in all in different ways. Will these create distortions in the kind of entrepreneurial EdTech space? And I think the answer has to be yes. And distortions can be good, distortions can be bad, but we saw with Google Classroom, the net impact was like prices are low and expectations are high about what it can do.
And I think that that is, at least on the AI learning side, we're gonna see these. These players aren't going away.
[00:19:44] Alex Sarlin: No.
[00:19:44] Ben Kornell: So this backdrop, which by the way, like you and I have always said, we're in the early innings now. This stuff is coming. We're excited. But I think if you were to have stepped off into a spaceship in January, taken off and you're just returning from orbit.
Alex, the other headline that you would wake up to today is like backlash. Oh yeah. We are full on backlash mode and I'm, when I say backlash, backlash against everything. Screen time EdTech learning. There was a clever report today that came out that just said over half. Of school systems have been cyber attacked, and these phishing schemes with AI are so complicated and students are taking the bait.
Imagine trying to secure your entire network and you've got like. Fourth graders, third graders with email accounts opening up emojis. I mean, we are seeing a big, big push to just rip out screens and EdTech altogether, especially in K through three, maybe a little bit in K through five. You've had a front row seat to all the speakers and all of this stuff for GSV.
Surely this is a theme that's top of mind for everyone that's coming to the conference. What's your take on where we are and was there anything in the clever report too that you found surprising or alarming?
[00:21:10] Alex Sarlin: Well just wanna build on what you said in there. You know, they talk about 81%, or you know, four out of five plus percent of districts believe that AI is increasing their cybersecurity risk.
30% total say that there's significant increases in their cybersecurity risk because of ai. So I feel the backlash. Don't believe me. I think the backlash against. Technology in general, screen time in general, this sort of teched world that we're finding ourselves in and that are, and the children are finding themselves in at a younger and younger age is the number one.
Threat to anything EdTech related. People are starting to attack EdTech as a field by name saying, does EdTech work? Does EdTech help anybody? Where's the evidence? All of this stuff. It is extremely important part if anybody who works in this field, anybody who works in it, in any context. If you don't feel that backlash and if you don't know that, that is what's happening at a, at a parent level, at a grassroots level coming up, people are activating and protesting it.
There's a whole group of parents starting to really starting to sue the AI companies about harm coming to children. This backlash is huge. This is a huge part of what we're all gonna deal with. And you know, I mean, Ben, you and I have been talking about this, I think for three plus years we've been saying.
This backlash is gonna come. We've said it from the beginning. We're like, there are going to be very bad things that happen because you have now empowered everybody to do things in this really unprecedented way we've just never seen before. And some very bad things are gonna happen. Bad things are happening for teenagers.
Bad things are happening for bad actors who are attacking schools with cybersecurity threats or attacking individuals. No question that the backlash is real and people are just very. Confused and concerned about this moment as every time anybody announces a new AI toy, there's a very direct and instant backlash.
It's not like, oh, this is cool. It's like, how is this gonna go wrong? How is this gonna be terrible for everybody? So the zeitgeist has really shifted and I think there's no avoiding it, but I do think that what we can think about is. When things change as rapidly as they have, and now people are also talking about AI disrupting jobs.
That's become a huge narrative as well, which is so that threatens everybody. Parents and future workers, AKA, you know, young people and children and college graduates and high school graduates alike. There's no way to avoid it. The thing we can do, I think as a field, the thing we can do is work to make it work.
Help be on the right side of these problems. Don't add to the concern, don't be blind or ignore these feelings that are very, very deep. They are often based in very real experiences. This is not just panic. This is people really being deeply concerned about the future as AI expands into more and more parts of our lives, as it becomes just more and more part of everybody's world.
What we can do, and I think it's not only what we can do, it's what we have to do is really think about how to make this work and actually benefit people's lives, benefit children, benefit teachers, benefit adult learners, benefit people who are retraining or training for work skills. We've interviewed so many people in EdTech and in the GSV role.
I've talked to so many people in EdTech and everybody is aware of the backlash, but what everybody is trying to do in their own particular way is say, how can I be part of the solution to this and not contribute to the problem or not be perceived as just part of this wave of problem? Everything comes in waves, and I think we are at a moment where sort of at a, not the low I think, but at a down ramp in terms of the public perception of ai, the data definitely bears backs this up.
People are now more worried about it, more concerned than they are positive about it in many different contexts. But I think that's gonna turn around. If not when, if you know, if anybody who cares about AI can actually prove, can actually show that this is working. That includes the kind of studies that scale is looking at in the research, but it also includes anecdotal and it also includes a world in which people say, my children, it's not just they love Roblox, it's not just they love Duolingo doing it on the weekends.
It's like. They have leveled up their learning because of something that has AI baked into it. And until we can make that happen, and by we, I mean open ai, I mean Google, I mean every EdTech company you can think of, right? Until we can do that collectively, the backlash is, is gonna keep growing. If there's not enough positive there, especially well-known, well-documented and well distributed positive to counter the backlash, it is real and it will not go away until we can build enough positive momentum for all the good things it can do.
Until there are AI tutors that truly, and I don't mean just AI tutors, you know, AI backed tutoring systems, whatever that looks like, that actually can make people's lives better, make them love learning, make them succeed in whatever they're trying to accomplish with their learning. The backlash is gonna be real.
It's, it's on us to turn it around.
[00:26:09] Ben Kornell: Yeah. And this is where I feel like we need a three layer cake. At the top, we need clear messaging around. Yes, like some screen use in schools is productive and other screen use in schools is not productive and totally here's how to tell the difference. Second, we need to arm decision makers and policy makers with evidence and research that shows what's effective and what's not effective and so on.
And then finally, each organization needs to push out to their teams, essentially messaging and playbooks so that their customers or their partners can evaluate. I think the worst case scenario is that schools or districts just decide that it just easier to just turn it all off. Rather than doing some sort of like task force that's analyzing what is our technology use in our K through five and what do we want to establish as benchmarks.
I mean, a lot of the stories that we're getting, it's actually just YouTube and people are showing YouTube during a recess break or on a rainy day. That is not what EdTech is selling,
[00:27:23] Alex Sarlin: right?
[00:27:23] Ben Kornell: It's kind of adding to the perception that all tech bad, all screen bad, and. I also think when you have these task force, you can also surface areas where our English language learners are particularly supported by these particular products that leverage technology.
You start getting actual concrete facts around what's working in our system. Yes. At a local level. So we've gotta have unified high level messaging. We've gotta be able to like push out to our policy makers and decision makers, the right supports. And then on the grassroots level, we've gotta have. Kits, playbooks for people to actually evaluate it for themselves.
I basically feel like, I saw this in the Moms of Liberty stuff when I was on the school board. It's like when you take a very simple to understand, but extreme perspective. It can galvanize disaffected parents and students and so on. But ultimately, the truth is more nuanced. And I think this is where EdTech players, we as an industry, need to come to the support of our partners in schools.
[00:28:34] Alex Sarlin: Yes. And we have to create non nuanced, positive stories. I mean, that's the thing you, you can never fight. Very clear, easy to understand messages with very careful, nuanced messages.
[00:28:45] Ben Kornell: Well, that wraps up our show today. Thank you everyone for joining EdTech Insiders. If it happens in EdTech, you'll hear about it here on EdTech Insiders.
Thanks everybody. Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. I'm so excited to have Oliver Page here. CEO and co-founder of CyberNut, an AI powered cybersecurity training platform built exclusively for K 12 schools. He previously founded and scaled multiple startups and is on a mission to protect school communities from phishing attacks and cyber threats.
Welcome to the pod Oliver.
[00:29:19] Oliver Page: Thanks for having me, Ben. Excited to be here.
[00:29:22] Ben Kornell: I mean, we've been covering in Week in EdTech wave after wave of cyber attacks. It's recently been disclosed that just in the last year, something like 50% of all school districts have had an attack of one or the other, and schools, they're just targeted by these phishing attacks.
From your experience, why are K 12 schools particularly vulnerable compared to other sectors?
[00:29:45] Oliver Page: It's a great question, Ben. I think the reality is that schools are built on trust and phishing really exploits that. We've found that the primary reasons schools are so heavily targeted is they have a massive attack surface area.
We're talking about potentially hundreds if not thousands of employees as well as students that are unfortunately starting to get targeted, which makes it a very juicy target, right? You have a lot of attack entry points for these malicious bad actors that are going after 'em. Additionally, there's a very high trust culture, right?
Teachers, principals, employees. It's a high trust environment. People trust one another in general, more so I think than other environments, which makes it all the more complicated when malicious emails are being circulated. Where there is that like well-intentioned thought that the email is probably legit, and that's kind of like the first impression of a potential email, which is also why schools are so heavily hit and why that.
Horrific statistic that you shared is, is is likely true, but ultimately I think the high attack surface area, the high trusts culture, the fact that there's so much valuable data that school districts hold as well. We're talking from healthcare records to grades, to social security numbers, to private personal data of faculty staff.
Students. There's just so much information there that makes it a great target for a bad actor to try and access and ransom. And for those reasons, those are really why schools have unfortunately been the primary attack target right now in the public sector.
[00:31:26] Ben Kornell: Yeah. So that attack surface makes it really, really hard to fortify.
I guess the challenges, how schools can actually respond to this threat. What are some of the biggest misconceptions that school districts have about cybersecurity training and how do they impact the effectiveness of cybersecurity training programs?
[00:31:46] Oliver Page: The biggest misconception is that cybersecurity training fails when it's treated like compliance instead of behavior change.
Right. Unfortunately, most districts still to this day see cybersecurity training as something they have to check the box on once a year, and that's it. Part of our platform offers a phishing assessment that's free of charge to school districts, and that's what school districts usually try out before they really do a full product experience.
And it is mind blowing. Just what a wake up call it is. After a school district runs our phishing assessment and sees the results, people don't recognize that to change behavior. You can't be serving teachers and administrators who have very busy lives, a video once a year and expect them to actually learn anything.
So that's really how we've been able to truly stand out is by developing a solution that really strives to change end user behavior. Through a very unique gamified product experience. But I would say that's probably one of the biggest misconceptions around it. I also think that there's probably a technical aspect to it as well, where teachers are just not well versed enough in understanding the intricacies of all the different malicious attack types, and that also ties into the fact that you can't.
Cover every single malicious attack type across the board in just a couple videos a couple times a year. And so that's really, I think, the biggest misconception.
[00:33:26] Ben Kornell: Let's talk real examples. Can you share a real example of a phishing threat in a school environment and how it could have been prevented with better training?
[00:33:35] Oliver Page: Yeah. I think from a faculty and staff perspective, the most effective phishing attacks in schools are usually. Normal administrative requests to unknowing teachers and administrators, right? That's usually what gets the adults in the school district. But for the sake of a little bit of storytelling, I think it's actually interesting to, to double click on this phenomenon that's happening where students with school district emails are now also being targeted.
By bad actors, and the way that usually goes down is a teacher account gets compromised with a phishing email that ultimately ends up having the teacher give up a two-factor authentication and allowing a hacker to take over their personal school district email instead of targeting the teachers. After that hacker's taken over the account, they end up sending malicious emails to students with internship opportunities.
Discounted Xbox or musical instruments and things of that nature where students who trust Dr. Joe, the physics professor, they're getting an email from someone they trust, someone that they go to class with. Why would they think twice that they could possibly be getting phished? And so I think this is unfortunately a reality that a lot of districts are beginning to wake up to.
Is also one of the reasons why part of our core product is now also servicing the training of students. What's cool about that is we're not only providing highly, uh, specialized student friendly video modules, which are critical to help kids understand how to identify, but we're also the first to have developed a phishing simulation environment where students can learn how to spot real threats.
In their school district email inbox. So they might get a TikTok phishing email from us that looks like a TikTok message. They can report it, they can learn to click on it in a safe environment. And that's also been, I think, a real interesting differentiator for the platform. But yeah, it's, it's pretty scary what's happening right now.
[00:35:46] Ben Kornell: I mean, that in some ways it's kind of fun because you get to pretend. That you, you're trying to trick them and see how effective your attacks can be at teaching them the rules of the road. Exactly. Only imagine now with AI how much more that arms race has ramped up really. Can you help our audience understand both on the attacks side and on the defense side?
How has AI been a game changer?
[00:36:11] Oliver Page: Well, AI is unfortunately transforming phishing training for the better, but it's also training phishing attacks for the worst, and it's pretty much lowered the cost of sophisticated phishing to almost zero. So the days where you're getting the suspicious emails from, you know, the Nigerian prince offering you a million dollars those days are, are definitely starting to fade away.
We're now seeing attackers leveraging open source models and AI to create. Perfect grammar, perfect tone, incredibly personalized messages at scale, targeting the leadership community or the cabinet members of school districts mimicking and leveraging public data on the internet to craft these spearfishing attacks.
So it's really a moving target as consumers and businesses get access to these transformative AI platforms that can be leveraged for so much good. The bad guys are also getting these cracked, illegal versions that are making it easier for them to fish in a personalized manner at scale, which is horrifying and unfortunately something that we're not gonna be able to stop entirely.
But I do think leading back to what we said earlier around teaching people how to really change their behavior, that's really the only true protection that we can offer districts is letting people understand. And giving them the tips and the tools that they need to develop those skills of identifying what's really real versus what's not.
[00:37:48] Ben Kornell: Yeah. And can you also do this for elderly parents? 'cause I'm telling you, it's getting crazy out there.
[00:37:56] Oliver Page: The elderly parents, the communities at large. That's interesting you ask that. We've definitely explored some ideas. We're not at a point yet where we're extending cyber nut to the parents and the communities just yet, but I could definitely see a future where we might build out some form of freemium version or something that students could pass along to their grandparents or their parents to help them learn along the way as well.
We all know our parents need some extra help with this stuff. At least mine do.
[00:38:26] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Well, and then you've also got universities and other government agencies and they range in terms of how trusted they are, especially in this political moment. But you know, if you're a university sends you something, sign up for this or validate that.
[00:38:40] Oliver Page: Yep.
[00:38:40] Ben Kornell: They're really playing on the trust.
[00:38:42] Oliver Page: Exactly.
[00:38:43] Ben Kornell: So on the business side, you scaled CyberNut to 350 school districts in just two and a half years. Super impressive. We all know how slow districts are. I can already like infer a little bit of your sales motion, which is try for free our diagnostic assessment essentially.
Mm-hmm. And then you can see where you're at. And I guess I'm curious for our audience, what were some of those key strategies or lessons that helped you grow so quickly?
[00:39:13] Oliver Page: My background was I operated another business that sold into K 12, so this isn't my first rodeo. I've done several startups and this one is by far the most successful and the fastest growing.
But I did have a chance to cut my teeth in the world of selling into K 12 for almost a decade before starting CyberNut. And so that gave me a lot of insights into the way these decision makers purchase the communities around these school districts. And really the different points that we need to be mindful of when building and scaling a, a trusted brand.
And I think that's really the first point. Trust in community drive adoption in K 12, far more. Than just traditional marketing. And one of the ways we did that is unlike perhaps most software companies out there, we're at like 50 plus conferences every year. So we are boots on the ground at events, hosting dinners, hosting after parties, hosting fun activities at our conference sites and booths for school district leaders to come in.
Get to know us, hear about us through word of mouth, and it's definitely a big investment from a capital perspective to go to that many events, but it's definitely paid off in our rapid adoption and scale of the brand. I think the other core thing is we really listened to our customers. We have an unfair advantage, I think, where we have an advisory committee of IT directors and CTOs who meet with us every two weeks to give us feedback.
On roadmap, on existing functionality, on new features. This has been a tremendous way to really hone in and craft the product so that it really solves and scratches the itch for the folks that are using our product day in and day out. So, yeah, there's a few other areas that we've obviously been, you know, heavily focused on.
But I would say by really listening to our customer needs, supporting them, giving them the time of day whenever they need to share feedback, and you know, regardless of any type of feedback at all, we're really trying our hardest to be the most customer centric driven brand out there in the space. So, yeah.
[00:41:26] Ben Kornell: Compliance is not a sexy space, and you've really turned that on your head and actually made it a real product that teachers and students can use. When you're re-imagining something that's viewed as a compliance product and kind of repositioning as a behavior change, but also as a product experience itself, what are some lessons that you've learned from that?
And if you had other people who were going after similar type things. How do you get customer perceptions to change?
[00:41:56] Oliver Page: Yeah, I think we, from day one, had a very clear mission to kind of disrupt the traditional reputation of compliance training. Why does compliance training have to be boring? Why does it have to be like watching Paint Dry?
We had countless customers who, who told us in the early days that their biggest issue was their staff and administrators would click play on a required mandatory training video and then walk away and then come back and pretend that they listened and try and take the quiz, having not watched any of the content.
And so we from day one really decided that with Cyber Nut. From the name, the brand, the product experience, the end user experience. We wanted to try to make it fun and activate a different part of the brain and the heart so that people could actually get excited about doing it. And so I think that's really been the secret to our success.
We found a way to gamify the product experience so that all of a sudden doing your annual cybersecurity training isn't something you're dreading, but it's something you kind of look forward to. So that's really what has done it for us. So I guess for other founders out there, if you can find ways to make your product more fun and engaging for the end users, people that have to actually use the product on a daily, weekly, quarterly basis, that gamification aspect.
Kind of sounds dated, but it really isn't. People would rather play a game if they got the choice rather than just do something without a game, in my opinion. So that's really what's resonated and, and how we've been able to, to create this evangelical sort of community around our brand so far.
[00:43:42] Ben Kornell: And then for students that are playing CyberNut and having this experience, how does that translate from your perspective to like real world life skills?
[00:43:52] Oliver Page: Well, the real world life skill is that every student is given a phishing simulation reporting tool, right? So in their inbox, there's a tool through an Outlook add-in, or a Gmail add-in that's actually utilized. To report malicious or suspicious emails. And so the way we translate it is in addition to having videos that give them skills and knowledge on different attack types that are all age appropriate, because obviously we make age appropriate content for elementary through middle and high school.
We also give them a way to. In a contained and sheltered and safe environment, see what real malicious emails look like and feel like. I think that's really the takeaway for them on a personal level. When they go back home, they log into their Twitch account, they log into their Gmail account on their personal device at home.
All of a sudden the phishing email that targets their real live personal Gmail looks a lot less intimidating. Or a lot more like a phishing email because they learned these valuable skills in the classroom and in a school environment. Mm-hmm. And not only that, similar to your point earlier, they can actually tell their parents about it too.
Where we have stories where students are teaching their parents, and parents are like almost grateful for also getting this second degree cyber nut training as well.
[00:45:20] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, it's one of those really challenging things where we want everybody to be on that same domain so we can do sharing and we're, we're all collaborating, and yet that's really just creating our cyber risk.
Well, if people wanna find out more about cyber, not, where should they go? How can they find out more?
[00:45:39] Oliver Page: They can definitely check us out on cyber nut.com. We've got a website that is pretty self-explanatory on some of the key features differentiators. I would highly advise that if anyone wants to learn more, the best ways to hop on for a quick demo to learn about the platform and how it compares to what they might be already using.
I know you mentioned at the start of this that there's a lot of higher ed folks in your community as well, where while cyber not, is not built specifically for higher ed, nor is it a a priority market for us today. It's definitely an interesting market to learn about. So if anyone in higher ed is doing something like with phishing training, I personally would love to learn more from you on how it's working in the higher ed space.
'cause for the last two and a half years I've had kind of blinders on for just K 12. Which has definitely paid off. But yeah, to answer your question, visiting our website's probably the best way. I have also an active community following on my LinkedIn where we're also posting a lot of case studies and news about cyber and K 12 cyber related articles and, and things of that nature as well.
So those would be the best places.
[00:46:47] Ben Kornell: Awesome. Well, I'm excited to keep following the journey, and of course, when you're ready to announce new entry into University space, grandparent space, or outer space, you'll let us know and we'll have it here on EdTech Insiders. Thanks so much for joining us Oliver Page.
Co-founder, CEO of CyberNut. Thanks so much.
[00:47:09] Oliver Page: Thanks, Ben. Great to be here. Cheers.
[00:47:12] Alex Sarlin: 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 EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.