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Hello, everybody, it is Friday, June 23. We are wrapping up the school year summer is in session. I'm calling in from London, London calling and I've also got Alex here with me. It is another week of this week in ed tech. So glad you can join us. Hi Alex, how's everything going stateside?
going fine. Just getting back from a little family vacation getting back into the swing of everything. It's a beautiful time of the year but at tech world is sort of roiling right now. So I'm looking forward to getting into it. Yeah, it's
been like Ed Tech winter. And now it feels a little bit like Ed Tech summer except it's the turning up the heat, not necessarily things thawing. Lots to cover in the pod today. But before we do that, what's going on in ed tech insiders land?
Yeah, so we just published in a really interesting interview beginning of this week with Imelda Aachen from Sirius labs. She's a middle of female Middle Eastern entrepreneur who's doing career acceleration for Middle Eastern women using tech, fascinating conversation and a really interesting insight into a part of the tech world. We don't often say she's a serious, serious AI researcher, a PhD, who has been doing it for 10
years. And so we had some interesting talk about AI finally hitting its stride, Judy said talked about how, when she was studying it, nobody knew what it was. Nobody knew if it was ever coming. It was sort of this mysterious thing in the background. And suddenly it's, it's on everybody's mind all the time. And next week, we're talking to Dan White is the CEO of filament games, really epic 18 year veteran of educational games that make amazing stuff. He's now working with Roblox.
He's working on VR things. It's really cool stuff.
Awesome. Well, let's jump in with a little bit of local news for me here. This week was London ad tech week. It was my first time here in London. And it's really a coming together of European ad tech leaders, as well as some transatlantic crossings from our American friends. It was a very, very busy week on Tuesday, we hosted an event with Cooley and Oppenheimer, where we had panelists talking about the future of tutoring. big takeaway on that one was, it's about the
humans baby. Also another one on higher education, where we heard themes about modularized, and more affordable higher education options. We also heard about how important it is for higher education and workforce development options to be very close to the job or job promotion that the learner is seeking. We had a roundtable on AI and kind of status update of edtech investing, especially with a European take. Overall, I would say the general vibe was
pretty negative. As a contrast to ASU GSB where I think the excitement was around AI and the possibilities and potential here it could be both a combination of you know where we were in April versus where we are in June. It could also be a combination of where things are in the European ecosystem. But Benjamin the dren cloacae, who is the leader of the EdTech X conference, opened up by saying
timing is everything. And in his opening speech, he talked about how the last 10 years of edtech progress has been disappointing. inning fundamentally. And his kind of three key takeaways were one, if you had told me 10 years ago, we would be where we were today, I'd be disappointed that we haven't really delivered on the transformational potential
of edtech. To that the systems and structures that existed before that really limited what learners could do what our systems can do, many of those same systems continue to exist and impede progress. And the third was that a tech X was stepping back from education as a solo focus and rebranding into impact x with a focus on food tech, health tech, and also ad tech. So it was a very muted in terms of the excitement about edtech. The conference itself on Thursday was kind of a downer.
But I did have some great sessions with emerge capital who has a $50 million fund, we also spent a lot of time with bright eye, who just closed their second Fund, which is $400 million. And then Frank over at a tech garage had probably the best Happy Hour of the week, just filled with really, really early stage entrepreneurs, thinking about how to transform learning from a point of view of excitement, possibility and transformation. So it really crossed the whole gamut. I don't
know Alex, curing all that. What questions come up for you, but also, how does that help you make sense of the European ecosystem?
Yeah, it's really interesting to hear that vibe, I think, you know, in some ways, the European outlook tends to be a little less sort of naively optimistic. And less salesy compared to sort of the American venture ecosystem, or just sort of the American personality, you know, cultural national personality. I do think, you know, when I hear that idea of this decade has not quite fulfilled its promises.
Even though, you know, we know that we've had like a 25x, almost increase in investment, we've had a pandemic, which shone light on Ed Tech in a way that, you know, it never has, and maybe never will, again, or not, you know, knock on wood. It makes me think, rather than that Ed Tech has sort of failed to put a fine point on it, it makes me feel like this decade has been a really interesting experiment in can you change the system from the outside, right?
I mean, we've seen so many tech startups, so many scale ups, big companies even try to change what you know, the definition of school. And when I hear that, and higher ed, and workforce development, and when I hear that sort of idea of Ed Tech, not delivering I agree that fundamentally the systems have survived, and they've even survived the pandemic, which was probably the best chance for Ed Tech to make its case that it could be a new version of
school. So I guess my takeaway is try to have an optimistic spin on it. But I also do believe this is that the decade that's ending, I think, is a decade of vast, frothy, very exciting investment in all sorts of education entrepreneurs, from big venture capital firms around the world, including in the
Europe and the US. I think we may be entering a different era and one in which, you know, as you say, you know, education may be lumped in a little bit with climate tech and health tech as impact investing, and how do we use tech to improve the world, rather than being completely standalone alone, in some people's minds, especially investors, it also might be a time in which the investing model start to change pretty rapidly. And I know you know, a lot more about this than I do.
But I it feels like one of the themes from the conference was also about sort of venture and private equity. You mentioned a couple of pretty big funds. But What were people's take about sort of the investing landscape overall? Yeah,
in general, I think the interest rate hit has been quite profound here. And that's a couple things are going on. One is 50 million and 100 million dollar funds, relative to the size of the American funds, these are relatively small, and government budgets have really, really come down quite significantly for schooling. Here in the UK, they're having major cuts. Part of that is because inflation has really hit school budgets quite
hard. And so the national tutoring program has been a very big failure by all accounts, the kind of cost of living cost of energy in particular, is really driving a lot of the EdTech tools out in favor of, you know, do we have enough money to pay our electric bills and our heating bills, and then the interest rates going up also means that private equity capital is a lot more expensive than it ever was the venture capital rate turns, have a higher bar or a higher
threshold. And so as people are reallocating their portfolio, you're seeing a very strong move away from venture to, you know, some private equity, but also just, you know, more conservative investments. And this may just this may be, you know, we're here in London, it's a financial hub. It's a more of a conservative investing
environment here. But there was a sense that the private equity party may be running out as funds that were raised to three years ago, spend and deploy their capital, what's the cost of capital is going to be for the new funds? And how can an ed tech company that has, you know, five, seven 10%, interest rate payments? How are they going to be able to invest the cash back
into their own business? So, you know, for our educator listeners out there, I would just say, you know, there's a lot that has changed in the financial models, backing these edtech companies. And for the educators, you've also probably seen out of every 20, edtech tools, 18 or 19, aren't transforming your learning, there's only a few that have really changed the game. And so the signaling here in Europe is there's going to be
a calling coming. And I'm not necessarily hearing that in the US is it will be an interesting conference this next week, with 30,000 educators descending upon Philadelphia, that tends to be a very exciting conference about the potential for learning and
empowerment of educators. But it remains to be seen how educators will will show up there because the reports that we've been hearing in schools all years that burnout continues, and that the you know, increasing number of edtech tools is actually creating too much noise. So lots going on, I feel like when you're a product leader, and you're trying to get a sense of, you know, user feedback, often the most frustrating thing is they can't tell you exactly what
the problem is. But they can definitely tell you the products not working. That was the feeling that I got from many of these sessions at the tech X conference, specifically on Thursday. That segues well to another looming an ongoing crisis we've been covering. Alex, tell us a little bit about the nape results.
So speaking of you know, ad tech, a little bit failure to deliver in some eyes, we just got the new nape. That's the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the big educational math and reading test in the US results back. And we saw enormous downsides. The numbers dropped a lot, even from last year, which was already lower than the last years before it. So basically, the first post pandemic nape score was a real shocker for lots of people because it went down
significantly. But this one is a really big, and it's they're starting to use words like you know, last generation of learning. To describe these things, history scores hit an all time low math scores are as low as they were in the early 80s. That's the last time we've seen numbers like this, the reading scores are down to about where we've seen in the in the 70s. So you know, you're seeing some really serious backsliding among these scores by the
national tests. And, you know, this is obviously being covered by big national news outlets in saying and the headline is, you know, we've lost a generation, the lowest scores in gender in decades, from an edtech perspective, and I've said this on the show before, I think, you know, the first post pandemic scores, we, as an ad tech community had a sort of half of an excuse, right, there was a lot of talk at that time about emergency ed tech implementations and people sort
of scrambling to find a way to school, you know, to keep schools running in the beginning of the pandemic. At this point, we're kind of coming out of pandemic emergency mode. These tools, as you just said, Ben, there are a lot of education technology tools being used in the classroom, many more than ever before. And we're still seeing seeing sliding. And that does not reflect well, on the industry. And I think it ties into some of what you're saying, you know, the pessimism coming
out of Europe. Just to double down on the point from before what it feels hopefully, you know, there's this famous, you know, nation in crisis report from decades ago in the US that sort of set ablaze the people's ideas of what schooling should be, there is this potential for a moment right now to say, okay, the pandemic didn't go well for us. We have, you know, children are in academic crisis. They're also in something of a mental
health crisis. We're also seeing burnout among educators, we're seeing a lot of problems in schools right now, maybe there's an opening, maybe there's an opening for the education system to say, you know, what we're doing is definitely not working, you know, with math scores, they had been going up for decades, you know, not always not super consistently, but they've been going up. So there's at least
something to brag about. But the idea that, you know, it crashed back 2030 years, in two years of schooling, maybe there's a little bit of an appetite for sort of more systemic change. And I wonder what we can do as
an edtech. community, I think we've sort of maybe we have run the gamut on the idea of, you know, having a startup company, go and sell to schools and expect that you know, that one tool is going to single handedly change the reading scores for the trajectory of the school, maybe that narrative is starting to slow down. And instead it should be about what are we doing wrong? In education in general, that needs to be fixed from a more root cause
perspective? I don't know, what do you think about this nape stuff,
it is a shocking kind of flashing red as the, you know, some of the coverage calls it. And the Nation at Risk Report in the 1980s was a catalytic moment for kind of classical ed reform, which was a standardized test focused really around urban and rural teacher training, quality, and so on. A couple of things that are, I think, are important to note. One is that this is an
assessment of 13 year olds. So went during the pandemic, they would have been 10, there abouts, 910 years old, and you know, would have been in like, fourth grade, something like that. And what we've always known is that, you know, student's ability to read by second grade was really predictive of their long term
outcomes. And then that kind of second, third, fourth grade, you know, sweet spot was really where that love of learning is cultivated, where, you know, mathematical thinking, applied, reading, all that kind of comes to life. And it seems like there's a group of students that have just had a stunted learning experience, when you also read the details of the report, things like chronic absences are five to 10%, across different
categories. So there's some sort of enduring element of kids missing a lot of school post pandemic, that continues to kind of plague schools. And so I think the question about the data is like, will there be a bounce back once this generation kind of, you know, passes through? And is this essentially a triage moment? Where were, we really need to focus on a
particular group of schools? Or is this actually a bigger environment of where schools are and where kids are, that is likely to continue in a downward trend, or at least a flattened flat, which would be a real step backwards? I think, you know, sitting from the school board standpoint, my superintendent and assistant superintendent tell me that they always know who the kids were, that were in the third or fourth grade, when
the pandemic started. And their view is that it's these nape scores aren't going to get any better, because we're going to start cycling the kids who are in first and second grade doing zoom school, I, for one would love to see the kind of results of the school systems that went back to school more quickly, versus those that didn't go back to school more quickly. The research that we've reported on the past has shown that the schools that got back more
quickly had better scores. And I think that, you know, liberal blue states, were health concerns, you know, kept schools closed, really have a reckoning with did they do the right thing for kids? And there's also kind of a rewriting of that history around. How did labor union show up for kids and learners versus not? And so the results here are really troubling and really show how much the pandemic disrupted
important time for learners. But if we're not willing to reflect on it, I'm just shocked that this isn't a headline everywhere. Alex, it's like, Nation at Risk. You know, every educator was reading this, I feel like this report the nape scores, which are really, really well studied. This is not sending the kind of alarm out to everyone. It seems like everyone's in our community is just kind of under the summer and yep, you know, scores suck. And it turned the page. I don't
know. You think this is the wake up call? Or do you think people have just kind of given up?
I don't think this one report is going to be the wake up call, but I I do hope and perhaps predict that this period of time, like starting in 2019, and going through, you know, maybe the next year or two and people say, Oh, these years this pandemic, and the resultant loss, and the fact that we couldn't rebound, you know, so far, at least a night, you we may not continue to not be able to rebound could become a catalytic moment, I certainly hope it is. And I agree it should be much more
everywhere. slight correction here, it's the biggest drop in scores since the 70s. But the average math score is now the same as 1990. And the reading scores the same in 2014, we're still talking two and three decades ago. So it's still
terrible. But that may be exaggerated a little before, I think that it should set the entire education community and the EdTech community into a different kind of problem solving mode than other things have, you know, we've seen sort of slow rises in scores, we've seen some drops before there was a drop, you know, in 2012. But this moment of, oh, the world is
changing very quickly. We there are some things in here, like, you know, 30% of students say they never or hardly ever read for fun, which is, you know, significantly higher than it was a decade ago. And you're seeing declines in across race and geography. So I mean, I think people are very used to the very sad drumbeat of lower income students having low test scores, and people being unable to move them. That isn't always true. But that's been, I think, a very
common narrative. This is across race, it's across geography. You're seeing scores down among everybody. And hopefully, you know, this story adds up with some of the other things we've been seeing to A Nation at Risk type moment. And then hopefully, we can step up as a society and say, Okay, if this is really where it's at, we suddenly have AI as a possible tool, is that a
real solution or not? we potentially could change our teacher pay system, we could potentially change how you know, regulations work in school, like there are a lot of options, but I just wonder where that conversation is happening. Because I don't see a national reckoning yet. But I think it should be coming. It should be coming any semester. Now.
I agree, Alex. And I think the last thing that we have to recognize is that if there is just a generational thing, it doesn't mean that we write it off, I think we actually are very, very likely to see incarceration go up, we're likely to see health outcomes that are poor for, especially in a generation where mental health issues continue. So while the money is running out of SR funds, the money is running out from like pandemic aid, we need to dig deeper and find ways to support at least
this Generation and beyond. Like I apologize has been a little bit of a downer of an episode here. We normally have so much upbeat stuff, but I think we should move on to our next title, which is about by Jews, and not good news. The theme was by Jews, and I should just caveat, you know, Alex and I, we are not reporters, and we don't have any material inside information on any of these topics. But by Jews, the if I were to say a phrase for by Jews, it's always been where
there's smoke, there's fire. And this week, we had a couple of reports one the by Jews, auditor, Deloitte, and three board members severed ties with the embattled ad tech startup. This has basically become an ongoing drama about the release of the financial statements retroactively, for by Jews that basically go back two years. Vivian Wu who is somebody I know and she's a really great person has stepped down, as well as rustle tree in stock of process.
And the process team was here at the Ed Tech Week, and they're just really sharp investors. And GV Ravi Shankar of peak 15, which was Sequoia stepped down. So, these are Vivian of Chan Zuckerberg process, you know, Sequoia, these are blue chip investors, and they're stepping down. And yet the press release from by Jews is that, you know, this is not, you know, this is not correlated. There's no timing here and that this, you know, the stepping down is
overblown. If you missed it last week, last time we covered they missed one of their debt payments. And so it just this drumbeat, Alex, of really, really tough news, and it really weighs on the rest of the EdTech sector. This latest bit What do you think this means and what does this mean for today but also the future of by Jews. Yeah.
Well, we should say that by Jews in saying that, I believe they're saying that the board members have not stepped down necessarily. They're saying that the reports of board members stepping down is speculative and by Jews is denying that part of the report. So it's a little bit of a legend situation coming from
that part of so by Jews is denying what bad br That is crazy.
Yeah. And you know what we covered by Jews announcement of their AI tools last week. And I think that's really interesting stuff. The other story that happened last week that didn't get covered, but we talked about it a little bit is that, you know, black rocks devaluation of by Jews was really by two thirds of their value. We talked about that a little bit when it happened by Jews is cutting jobs. There's rumors that they're trying to push one of their divisions
Akash to IPO. But I think it's, I mean, bad PR is sort of an understatement, right? It's like, this is a company that is so well known in the space, it's the biggest tech company, it's out there in India, it is absolutely a household name. And you see it just having headline after headline of embarrassment and scandal and it looks quite bad. I mean, that where there's smoke, there's fire line came from, you know, Matt tower has been a really close observer of bide uses bizarre headlines for
over a year now. But this one feels, this one feels like the wheels are starting to come off. I mean, it really feels like that with this basically the you know, Deloitte quit, because it was not getting the reports. And it literally was like, we're not going to get caught up in this situation, where we're the official auditor for a company that seems to be not forthcoming with what they're doing financially. And that does not look good.
Yeah. And, you know, Alex, this is the type of thing that you would typically see for a company that's been embattled, paired with a massive leadership change. And I don't know, you know, so by Jews is an eponymous company, you know, bite you himself, I believe still has, you know, a lot of voting power and a lot of control of the company. And, you know, when we covered it first, the smoke and fire thing was they did a billion dollar round of which he financed 500
million. So I don't know whether there are structural things that could be done. But certainly from the outside, it seems like, you know, the investors should be calling for a total restructure of management, you also look at all of the assets that they acquired, there's some good assets in there and do the some add up to greater than the
parts or not. And in this case, like epic, hugely impactful brand on its own great content, great, great things, you know, you think about a couple of the roles that they've had in India, each on their own would be unicorns. And so there's a way in which a deconsolidation of their companies or their balance sheet would probably be a clarifying task. And those companies would also be able to distance themselves from some of
this by juice tarnish. So I wouldn't be surprised if that came that said, you know, we have to also remind our listeners that they're still a juggernaut in terms of their size, they, you know, the World Cup, they were everywhere and sponsored messy, that it's hard for us companies to imagine the kind of scale that they're operating at. And because the public markets are so down on Ed Tech, that would be like Chegg, and Coursera, and so on.
baijings is really, really important and impactful for the private valuations of any ad tech company, whether you're a seed all the way to, you know, series D, and E. So it just signals that the drama is not over. Maybe it's just even beginning.
Oh, yeah. And I mean, you dig into some of these articles, and they're saying, basically, it feels like maybe by juice has not accepted the resignations of the board members, so they're covering it up. But some of the quotes are like, they've been ongoing differences between the founders and the board. And there has no transparency in the way the company was operated. And, you know, byjus is run by Baijiu. And two of his family members
remain on the board. And it sounds like three major investors are trying to leave, you know, not 100% confirmed yet, but it sounds like it's really, you know, it's a fight. It sounds like there's disagreement in there. And the sort of family unit of this has not been sort of on the same page as the investor unit. And as you say, these are very sharp investors. I know Vivian Wu, as well. She is a brilliant, super seasoned ad tech investor. So
it's looking bad. I mean, you know, we did I think at the end of last year, we took bets about you know, whether pi chips would be around, and my hope was
a year before we did the year before we did would bite us IPO or not? And then the last year we did, will it be around or not? So knows what our like our annual predictions will be this December? I don't know, where are you standing? We're mid year. Now, what do you think?
I mean, this one more than some of the other ones for me feels like the wheels coming off the bus, this combination of these two headlines together of like, the smart investors, you know, some of these really smart investors on the board are, are bailing. Deloitte, which is a smart auditor is bailing, and this sort of family is left holding this bag, and the people closest to them aren't really trusting them to run the company, like you said, by Jesus, you know, eponymous company, it's named
after Baijiu. What does it mean? Does it mean that it's not a public company? They can't, you know, I don't know, I think this is bad. I keep saying it. But I think this is like the first chapter in the, if the story of it falling apart is coming, I think this will be one of the first real chapters in it.
And you know, there's a degree to which the big story, you know, when it's written, finally, it could be a story of the COVID ed tech, and you know, by Jews was scaling pre COVID. And having a lot of success, pre COVID. But the Indian ad tech market really blew up in early days of COVID. And this idea that, you know, Ed Tech could be transformational.
The investors, I'm sure we're writing really high on those investments, valuations in the 15,000,000,015 20 $30 billion range, only to see it kind of spiraled back down to earth here. You can only imagine like what the, you know, if you're an investor and your entire funds, return, was predicated on by Jews returning, your LPs are calling you every day with each headline being like, what is
going on. And I just think that this is for the average edtech company, this will have outsized impact on you and the ecosystem that you may or may not realize.
So that's three downers in a row.
Bring us back, back to the good side. Yeah,
back to the good side. So if indeed the sort of through line of this episode is we may be coming to the end of an era in sort of venture backed ed tech, there might be a lot of slowdown or people just trying to figure out what to do next, we need the system to change, we need other things to change, we still have a little bit of a great white hope in the generative airspace and you know, anybody all our listeners know we cover this just about every week now, if not more than
once every week. So some interesting developments in AI these are not downers I think work era has a you know, friend of the pod, we've had Ken kind of flourish on a couple of times, they launched their generative AI and chat GPT assessments. As you may know, we're Kara is a company that basically tries to benchmark digital age skills, including data science and AI. And now they just came out with their
Gen AI ones. I've been playing with it myself, I really liked their assessments, it's very interesting to both learn and assess through them. And just the fact that they could turn that around, you know, in just a few months is exciting for the
space. And hopefully, it's going to start creating a little bit of a path for people to upskill formally in AI rather than just, you know, talking about how they know Chachi Beatty or sort of proving it with a little you know, internal brown bag lunch, it maybe there'll be some formal credentialing in there. That's exciting. We also saw nerdy online learning for nerdy, which runs varsity tutors saying that AI is now writing 30% of its
software code. So we're seeing significant productivity increases inside large edtech companies. And, you know, we also saw creator up which is an interesting ad tech brand that basically does video and creation services on demand. It basically connects creators to people who are creating educational content of any kind, or even advertising content. It's like it's sort of a creator marketplace kind of company.
They just launched their own generative AI platform called Daisy, which is a content creation platform, it turns quote, ideas into stories quickly, easily and at scale. And they're creating courses for their creative community about how to use AI to create content. So they're basically doubling down and saying, Okay, for the Creator, community, this AI world is a sea change and the CEO of creator up is putting the company's future really on it.
So still seeing some bullish and very interesting headlines about edtech. And AI. Is this enough to counterbalance some of the things we're hearing today. Ben, are we How do you feel about AI at this moment?
Yeah, these headlines are in line with the trends that we've been seeing for a while. I think this And the point out here is that the gains from AI are really on efficiency and productivity side of these companies, the efficient production of content, efficient production of code, the ability to, you know, teach courses that are about AI. So it is like a subject area, it's less so around user interface, leveraging AI, which I think is where the challenge has been around competitive mode and
differentiation. Because, you know, chat GPT itself is easy to use, and user interfaces are much more challenging. I also think that this is really about the application layer on top of generative or LLM models, there's still a lot of work that's being done at the
infrastructure level. But I think our themes from earlier in the pod around the tightening of the financial systems and markets means that these efficiency gains are actually quite essential for these companies to have longer runway, more efficient production for their students, and potentially a faster path to profitability.
And so a key takeaway that this last week in our newsletter, you wrote eloquently about, you know, our new database on all the tools, there's this quote, unquote, Cambrian explosion, you're the one who's actually been on top of that story for a while. So this idea that there's all of these tools, I think that that's getting a lot of attention. But underneath it is actually a fundamental change in business models as well. And so, you know, I think the question is, what's that tech business
model of the future? Is it I raise a seed I raised in a, I raise a bee, raise the sea, and I grow my business to $100 million company by hiring, you know, 500 people or 1000. People, I think that that business model is going out the door. And I'm definitely not an AI fearmonger, in terms of it's going to take all of our jobs, I think technology has consistently shown that it's been expensive in terms of our jobs. But I do think that it is going to be instrumental in new
business models and ad tech. And the two business models. One is, you know, theoretically, the 100 million dollar company with 50 employees, that's going to be quite profitable, that's going to be a great business
investment. And whether it's, you know, cash returns or selling to a private equity firm, that possibility is now prevalent and tech, the other could be that you could have the challenge of a small total addressable market, let's say I can only sell to first, second and third graders, you know, classrooms that used to be too small. But now with a 10 person team, you might be able to get to a $10 million in revenue
company. And while that's not venture bankable in terms of, you know, homerun returns, that could still be a super attractive and profitable company. And so, you know, kudos to our friends at work era, who basically are fueling the education of people across all industries, to make their businesses more efficient. And so maybe we don't need as much venture capital, as we thought, Alex, so maybe that's our saving grace here, it's not AI as a
tool. For our customers, it might be AI as a way to reconstruct our companies.
I love that take. And I think that puts together some of the things we're hearing in a really elegant, and I think, really prescient way, I think we're gonna see more small ad tech companies that aren't seeking serious big seed rounds and series A's that are maybe more niche, maybe content to grow at a slower rate, because they are very productive. They get a lot done with AI, they may be built
on top of AI API's. And they can do a lot with a little you know, we saw this switch with the whole Hewlett Packard, you know, build a company out of the garage, Silicon Valley paradigm in the first place. Arguably, this is a sort of extension of that companies can be even smaller, even leaner. And just in time, because it seems like the big investments, the era of these super rounds, that we've been, you know, mega rounds we've been talking about for the
last two years. Maybe you might not see so many mega rounds in edtech for the next couple of years. Instead, it might be lots of small companies. And I actually think that ties into your Europe read as well then, because I've been very excited about the tech ecosystem in Europe for a while, you know, we've had a number of founders on me too. Yeah. But the thing that excites me isn't, I mean, there are some brilliant
investors. But the thing that excites me isn't that there's more and more and more investment. The thing that excites me is that there are so many hungry, smart, young entrepreneurs who are just trying To solve problems in different countries trying to, you know, just skip go over borders trying to like really make change happen, it's very
idealistic there. And this could enable that you could be a, you know, young person working with to your friends in Berlin, or Paris or Italy or Romania or, you know, there was a Kazakhstan startup that just, you know, got some money this week, because ox startup and you can make a difference, you can make things really happen in your country, even throughout Europe throughout the world, without having to raise that much money without having to hire a 50 person, engineering team or even
attend as an engineering. I love the way you describe that. And I think that that's a great way to put the pieces together in a hopeful way, which is always nice.
Yeah, that's right. And you know, what, why do we all do edtech? We do it because we want to transform lives. And, you know, if we were rationally optimizing, we would go into other fields, if it was all about monetary attainment, I think that there's probably a sub sector of people very, very small, though, I think that were in edtech, because they thought it was the next big financial opportunity, kind of a get rich
land grab moment. But even on the investor side, I know many of the investors personally, they're in it, because they find that these businesses are meaningful. And the model of for profit business is really a mechanism for scale. But it's not necessarily the, you know, optimized return on capital. So I will leave it to those investors to convince people to still fund their fund, as opposed to $1 and, you know,
trading on the stock market. But I do think that this new era of you know, the long tail of business models, you know, Amazon sold books, and they made one of the most valuable companies in the world by being a bookseller, in part, because the longtail is so valuable. Who knows, maybe there's a world where we have hundreds, if not 1000 $10 million companies that find a way to roll up into some
mega company. But I think the developments we just covered in AI make me very optimistic for learners and entrepreneurs trying to get their idea off the ground. All right, well, that wraps our main headlines. All right. With that, I think we've got our show. Those were our headlines for today. This episodes, our last episode for the 2022 23 school year. Of course, we've got other pod recordings coming up this summer, you have a bevy of long form interviews, and we also
have newsletters coming out. But for weekend ed tech, this is going to be our sign off for June will be dark in July. We'll be coming back in August. Glad we were able to turn it around at the end here and leave on a little bit of a positive note. But I'm gonna hand ball to you, Alex for our final sign off for the school year.
Yeah, yeah, it's been a crazy year in tech. I can't believe scandals and you know, blow ups and things and big launches and things that have happened. It's obviously been a year of AI. And next year is probably also going to be a year of AI it's gonna be really
fun to cover. There will still be interview podcast throughout the summer we talk to the Chicago scholars, folks such as Lippmann, who's a BCG, higher ed consultant, we talked to Michael Chase, and he's the CEO of class technologies, then Whateley from memorize really great stuff, even the Office of Educational Technology that director Christina Ishmael, so keep an eye on the pod for the summer.
But in terms of news, chill, we're going to take some time off and we'll come back in August, raring to go for the next school year. Thanks for being here, everybody for this whole season. If it happens at a tech you'll hear it here on Ed Tech insiders, and you'll hear it here in August tech insiders. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the Ed Tech community.
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