Troy Williams is a Managing Director at Achieve and University Ventures. Troy leads both firm’s investments in education technology companies, including AdmitHub, EverTrue, Examity, Motimatic, Packback and Ready Education.
Prior to UV, Troy was a senior executive at Macmillan where he was CEO of Macmillan Enterprise Solutions and President of Macmillan New Ventures. Previously, Troy founded and served as CEO of Questia Media, an early ebook company. Prior to Questia, He was previously employed in the mergers and acquisitions practice at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York.
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Troy Williams is a Managing Director at Achieve and University Ventures. Troy leads both firm’s investments in education technology companies, including AdmitHub, EverTrue, Examity, Motimatic, Packback and Ready Education.
Prior to UV, Troy was a senior executive at Macmillan where he was CEO of Macmillan Enterprise Solutions and President of Macmillan New Ventures. Previously, Troy founded and served as CEO of Questia Media, an early ebook company. Prior to Questia, He was previously employed in the mergers and acquisitions practice at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York.
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Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work and leading ad tech companies. Troy Williams is a managing director at Achieve partners and university ventures. Troy leads both firms investments in education technology companies, including admithub effort true examinee mode, thematic, packed back and ready education. Prior to university ventures, Troy was a senior executive at Macmillan, where he was CEO of Macmillan enterprise solutions and president of Macmillan new ventures. Previously, Troy founded and served as CEO of quest to media, an early ebook company, and prior to question, he was employed in the mergers and acquisitions practice at Cravath Swaine and Moore in New York City. Troy Williams, welcome to Ed Tech insiders.
Troy Williams:Well, thanks so much for the opportunity to be here.
Alexander Sarlin:It's great to have you here. So Troy, you've worked as a lawyer, you've been an ad tech entrepreneur, and you've been in venture in a variety of different contexts. Give us a little overview of your journey in edtech, and your philosophy what you love about it?
Troy Williams:Yeah, well, I'm an attack because fundamentally, like many people, I just, I want it to have meaning and purpose in my career and make the world a better place. And education made the difference. For me, in my life, I grew up in a blue collar family, first generation college. And, you know, I made it all the way to Harvard Law School, right. And I didn't go to great high school either, right. And so the reality was education and the opportunities of so many people donating money and time, and resources, generations before I was even born, to make that possible. And I really felt like there was an opportunity to give back in that way, I was a history major in college. And, you know, I saw the internet taking off while I was in college and felt that it was like the industrial revolution that I had studied and that there would be Carnegie's and melons and Rockefellers being created during the next 20 years, when I was a younger man. And I think that that, in fact, has happened. And it just seemed like such a democratizing impact. And so, while I did go to law school, and briefly, very briefly was in Manhattan at a top tier firm doing mergers and acquisitions, I didn't feel the sense of meaning. And so I had seen the opportunity to have a full access to every legal case online and search them but but no books were online at the time. And so I decided to leave the law, and found what was one of the first ebook companies or first library companies. And we started digitizing and putting books online so that kids around the world could have access to a full library like I had had at Harvard, whether they be in Montana, or the Faroe Islands, or wherever they were in all it would be searchable and accessible. And so that's the business I founded. I ran it for nine years. Ups and downs raised a lot of venture. Google launched Google Books after about four years and started to compete with us, which had us pivot into selling to K 12, which is kind of how we became an ad tech company. Prior to that we were really a b2c company. And then after we sold the company to Cengage one of the big publishers, I was recruited into Macmillan to help build them an edtech division, a software division to add to their content, and did that for about six years. And through the course of that I reconnected with Brian Craig, who I had known. He had also founded in a tech business back in the late 90s. And I had met him at that point, and one of our other partners Daniel Bianco. And the opportunity came out to join them at university ventures and add the EdTech investing that I didn't McMillan to the future of work and alternatives to higher ed strategies that they already had at university ventures.
Alexander Sarlin:That's it's a really interesting story. And I'm sure it's given you a very wide ranging perspective about, you know, everything from mergers to what it's like to be in a lane that Google swerves into, which is quite an experience, to to, to everything in between to all of the amazing portfolio companies that you've been investing in at university. And now that you've partners, it's exciting to hear
Troy Williams:Yeah, the most valuable part was the founder experience. And today, it's a differentiator for me in that we tend to invest in Bootstrap founders in the ability for me to kind of put myself back in their shoes know what it feels like to be up at 2am worried about your business. When you're a bootstrap founder you have insufficient capital, as opposed to a well funded venture backed company and know that you've convinced 30 or 40 or 100 people to agree If they're good paying jobs and join you on this journey, and now they have their families dependent on you in some way, there's a lot of stressors that come with that. And being able to commiserate and understand where that founder is coming from, and understand how they're weighing the decisions in front of them is helpful for us. And figuring out how to put an investment proposal in front of them that makes sense for them.
Alexander Sarlin:I'm sure the founders that work with you at at achieve really appreciate that empathy building. And I it's, it's such a specific type of worry that founders have to do, because it's all really on their shoulders. And as you say, they're responsible for many people's livelihoods. So I'm sure they really appreciate that you can sort of meet them halfway and know exactly what that feels like. Yeah, I
Troy Williams:think there are fewer and fewer people with operating experience in the financial community. And increasingly, many of the people in VC and PE, you know, graduate from college and either go into my banking, go back to B School, and then they're in the financial profession. Very smart people, very talented people I learned from them every day. But it's a differentiator to have been in the trenches and actually at a relatively small company as well. And having scaled it.
Alexander Sarlin:I feel like being a first generation college student is also probably a differentiator in terms of having, having empathy and understanding the needs of the learners that you're reaching out to. Yeah, look, I
Troy Williams:mean, I think most bootstrap founders are first generation college students, I find that a lot of the folks who are founders who come from more well, heeled backgrounds, tend to be more likely to have moved to one of the big cities and raised venture capital through the networks that they were able to build the confidence that they have in the back. And the fact that they have a backstop, perhaps. And a lot of the founders we invest in just happened to you know, not only are the bootstrap many times, they happen to be in middle America in smaller towns like Idaho Falls or, you know, Richmond, Virginia, or another place like that, as opposed to having moved to the Bay Area, or Boston. Yeah. And there's
Alexander Sarlin:there's so much talent and so many good ideas happening in places that are not concentrated on the coasts of the US or in London or in you know, some of the Boston units. He said he's, you know,
Troy Williams:the great thing about ITT Tech is founders are mission driven. And most of them are former teachers, or professors or administrators. And you have you have a school in every town in America, around the world, you have universities, 4000 universities, and they're spread. Many of them. Most of them are not in major cities. They're they're actually in relatively smaller towns. So Ed Tech ideas and growing edtech companies, tends to be much more spread across the country than virtually any other sector that you see, of the startup ecosystem.
Alexander Sarlin:That's really interesting. I never thought about it that way, even in biotech,
Troy Williams:I think so I think biotech is pretty focused around some big pharma companies. So you'll see a lot of biotech in Boston, for instance, both through to the the pharma footprint there, as well as the Harvard MIT and 31 colleges and universities, they're so you tend to see biotech around major university hubs and cities where you see research and development teams from big pharma.
Alexander Sarlin:What's really, really interesting, so let's go into some of what achieved partners has been doing because it's really, really transformative in my personal opinion. So chief partners mission statement is about investing in the future of learning and earning. And the thesis of the firm is really that legacy education systems have not adapted to the challenges of the 21st century, I'm quoting here, and innovative new approaches are required to improve learning and bridge the gap from education, to employment. So I want to start with the sort of problem that is being identified here. Why haven't legacy education systems adopted to the new world?
Troy Williams:Yeah, I think the core thing is we have 4600 universities in the country, you have a group that are community colleges, but you have the majority of them are four year institutions. And they all look relatively alike, especially the four year institutions. And they're staffed by faculty members who come from roughly the same 25 or 50 institutions. And they're recreating those 25 or 50 institutions across the board, even though, you know, while it may be inappropriate to tier universities, there are second tier third tier universities and the likely outcome and job prospects for students going to those institutions are different. They're recreating that top tier elite type of environment for those students. And the reality is we believe that many students, in fact, the majority of students today who are going to college to get a better job and to get a better employment outcome, but University wasn't designed for job outcomes. It's learning for learnings sake and I certainly think there's a place for that in our ecosystem, but there isn't necessarily a place for that for four years. costs, you know, $200,000, for every student is certainly not for 50 some percent of the students in our economy who go to college and so the reality is the job prospects in the learning that happens at those universities, while important at some civilization on democracy that, you know, advancing our democracy may be good, they're not helping those students necessarily get a job. And the reality is, they're shorter pathways, that could be three to six months, that are not nearly as costly in terms of time, or money and debt, taking on debt that can get people much better jobs, for a relatively fraction of the investment. The whole concept of higher education is built on a concept where you go to school, when you're 18, or 20 years old, for four years, and then you're done for the rest of your career, and you just build on it. And the reality is, our economy is moving fast. And new technologies and new things are coming along, and you have to constantly learn. And so we're probably better off if we break up that four years into six, three month chunks across your career where people can go back and top up and get more just in time, if you will education that gets them to the next level. And we don't ask them to make such a commitment, both in time and investment and taking on debt at the beginning of their career. You know, we would say if you can get into one of the top 100 universities, you should probably go certainly if you can, if your family can afford it, or if you can get loans. Or if you can get grants, you know, certainly it probably makes sense. But if you're taking on tremendous amount of debt, and the job prospects out of your university are more modest, you should really think hard about that.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I love the point about people replicating the sort of model and the experience of elite, and, you know, very selective colleges, at schools all across the country, and really not focusing on the return on investment and sort of creating the situation where people are coming in and explicitly saying, I'm here, because this is my path into the middle class is my path to a good job. And then having the university say, Well, we're treating it this way, we're treating it as if it's a, you know, monolithic four year, you know, these particular majors, this particular type of social experience, it doesn't match. And I like the distinction between, you know, some people go to, if you can afford to go to a top 100 school, it's probably worth it. If you can't, or if the loans are too onerous, you have a different experience, it's actually not worse, it's just a totally different model. It's not worse than going to a school that is promising that type of experience, but not able to truly deliver the outcomes you need and just put people in, in long, long, you know, decades of debt.
Troy Williams:Yeah. So we have two strategies. One is our future of work strategy and the other one's rent tech strategy, I actually run the unit tech strategy. But the Workforce Strategy is focused on figuring out shorter and faster pathways to good paying jobs. And the ad tech strategy is working within the existing K 12, and higher education system to add technology solutions that we think make that outcome better for students. But when you pull back and think about our workforce strategy, I mean, our core goal here is adding European style shortform apprenticeship models to service companies in skills, gap areas. So think Salesforce, or workday, or other big enterprise software systems, where there's literally 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of too few people who have those skills. And what we're doing is we're adding a three month or so apprenticeship, which the student doesn't have to pay for, we actually pay the student while they get the training, and the student is getting paid, they're getting 401k benefits. But at the end of that they've upgraded themselves, they're meeting this demand that's in our economy, for people with the skills and they're getting paid a lot more. And so at the end of it, the goal is for these folks to come out and have six figure careers with only a three to four month investment in terms of training. And so the model works because that enables our portfolio company to grow even faster. As our these portfolio companies are, their growth is governed by their inability to hire talent. And if you're expecting to hire as most companies do today, people who are already skilled, it's pretty hard to find people. But if you're willing to hire smart people, many of them already have some college but didn't complete their college degree. And they have debt and we're willing to hire them in give them three months of training and enable our companies to grow faster. It's been very remunerative and a great investment as well as I think great for both the students as well as the broader economy, that these companies grow faster, it's a really
Alexander Sarlin:exciting vision. And you know, that workforce vision of sort of reversing the relationship where instead of students owning all the debt and having to sort of jump through hoops and owe money for long time, actually, you know, shifting that burden of responsibility for paying onto employers onto governments, in some cases, as well as shortening the path to gainful employment. It's such an exciting movement, and it actually feels like it's finally coming to fruition. I think that's something people have dreamt about, for years, the idea of a tuition free education that actually gets people meaningful employment outcomes. And now with, you know, the rise of all the Achieving university partners, companies with multiverse who we just spoke to on the podcast with the Google Coursera, you know, partnership and many other really innovative approaches, it's finally starting to feel real, it's really exciting moment.
Troy Williams:Well, you're following it. And so you're seeing these trend lines, and they are there and we are building momentum. But we're just at the beginning of the battle. I mean, the reality is, there are over 12 million open job wrecks in the country today. And I think probably at least 3 million of them require some type of advanced certification, that, you know, there's no way if you're an underemployed person working at Starbucks, the proverbial Starbucks barista person, right? And you want to do better, where are you going to go and learn that the thing you should do is become certified as a Salesforce administrator, or workday, or ServiceNow, epic health systems or some other enterprise software, there's no pathway because community colleges don't train you in that. Universities certainly don't. And there's no other kind of structured place in our economy, where you can say, hey, that's, you know, there's, that's a job waiting for me, I just need to do this three months worth of training. It just doesn't exist, there's no structure. And that's a big failing in our economy. You know, the American economy is amazing in so many different ways. But Europe has been in some ways in this space, where they recognize these needs and set up, you know, a workforce board and training programs to train the people to have these. And then they trap people into those those apprenticeships. So we're coming at it kind of backwards almost by what we do is we buy a service company in that space and add what we call last mile training to that company to enable it to grow faster. But it really needs to scale. I mean, there's millions of operators of job wrecks out there that need to be filled in this way. Yeah, I
Alexander Sarlin:think I would even double down and say it's worse than just the information gap where How would a Starbucks barista find out about these high demand skills, it's actually almost the opposite. They're getting told through many different channels, that the only path forward is a four year degree or to go to the local community college, or it's always the same message. And I think it actually makes people unable to even parse the different options in front of them. And I know that it's something you know, there's been a couple of companies that have been trying to surface alternative pathways. And it's been really interesting to watch that they start and they try to make it very clear and try to sort of show the different ROIs and, you know, different options for students. But what tends to happen, we had a great article about this from Sabrina Manville of admin, what starts to happen is those platforms that are trying to surface the different options over time, they need to make money, and they usually make money from the people who are trying to advertise their programs. And those programs tend to replicate the same programs we've seen that are pretty high cost and longer term. And you know, there's just no open, there's no way to get the information in the right hands without it being sort of tainted in some ways.
Troy Williams:Yeah, I mean, it is a challenge. It's just our system is not set up for an apprenticeship model. Now, the Biden administration recently has had some initiatives that there's been some recent recent movement in funding apprenticeships, it was part of some of the funding bills that have come out. And we're hopeful that we'll see more federal dollars going through apprenticeship programs,
Alexander Sarlin:I really hope so. And I think it's the wind is blowing in the right direction. But as you say, it's still early in the game. So, you know, we're talking a lot about workforce. And I know that's a big part of what what achieve partners does, but you are really deep in the EdTech space, especially in the K 12 world as well as as universities, but not always in pure workforce. I'd love to talk through some of the really interesting portfolio companies that achieve has invested in and just talk about what they do. And I'd love to hear your take, as you know, a managing director about what excites you about them and how you think they can sort of be part of the positive change in the tech system.
Troy Williams:Does that work? Sure. Happy to do it should work.
Alexander Sarlin:Let's do it. So let's start with Examity. So examine the online proctoring solution. and works for standardized exams, as well as licensure, exams, certifications, and all sorts of online proctoring needs. Tell us a little bit about examining
Troy Williams:Yeah, we invested in this company in 2016, and actually exited it in 2019. And the company is a remote proctoring solution that enables students to take tests at home, which we felt was part of the picks and shovels of moving to online education. We actually exited it a year before COVID, when it became a little more obvious to everybody else, but we made a great return on it. So that was fine. The reality is, you know, many test takers are limited by their ability, you know, in order to get a certification, usually, you have to take some type of summative exam, if you have to take that someone in the exam in a particular building in a particular city, you know, that really limits the number of people can take it, right. And so a lot of people have families or live in more rural or distant areas, or keep multiple jobs, have a hard time scheduling those type of exams. And so we felt like this company had a significant impact in opening up test taking, it also had the advantage of keeping people honest. So it catches people who may be cheating, right. And so that, you know, holds up the value of online education, one of the things we felt was, online education was, at least at that time being treated as a second tier cousin to in person education, I think COVID has changed his calculus a bit. But in 2016, that was certainly the case. And we felt like until you could have as much confidence in a remote exam as you did an in person exam, and the efficacy and validity of that test result that online education would always be a second cousin. And in that this would mainstream. So that's why we invested in it. And it was primarily a hybrid solution. When we invested in it, we encourage them into professional certifications and on a global scale. And the company has grown quite dramatically, as well as its core competitors have done very well, too.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, the whole space has really exploded the online proctoring, especially in the last couple of years. Really interesting to hear your thought process on that it makes a lot of sense. And I agree, integrity has been has plagued online education for a while. The Pearson VUE centers, I believe, is a really widespread solution for in person certification. But you know, online learning is all about not being locked to a single location having to show up at a certain time. So it makes a lot of sense.
Troy Williams:Yeah, I mean, we all had to do it when we took our SATs or my LSAT exam or my bar exam, right, I had to schedule it and go 8am into this big auditorium and go through this whole process. And just not convenient, right? And we felt that need for convenience impacts people on the lower rung more than it does the people on the upper rung. And so this is a democratizing effect on access to certifications in inequality exams.
Alexander Sarlin:Let's talk about mode. thematic. Yeah, Moto
Troy Williams:Matic is an interesting company. It uses behavioral science to target messaging on social media. So Facebook, could be on any advertising network, Google could work on Snapchat, Twitter, various other places. And the messaging it's giving students is basically to complete the work. Automatic motivations is effectively what the name is trying to get across. And it's using behavioral targeting on the sides instead of to get you to buy something, which is basically what everything else on that platform is trying to get you to do. It's trying to get you to get back and get your homework done, or register for classes or fill out your financial aid paperwork, and get back to school. And so it is a platform that sends motivational messaging to students based on their actual performance. There's usually some type of cookie that we know the student maybe hasn't logged into the LMS for three days. And so they're getting certain messages when they're on Snapchat or Facebook or Tik Tok. And that messaging hopefully brings them back. And it's effectively advertising for good, they probably wouldn't like me putting it that way. But that's the way we look at it. And today, the company is growing quite quickly. And its primary revenue stream is helping students who have stopped out of universities get back and finish their degrees. And that's a key part of you know, the worst case you can be in isn't not having gone to university is having started university taking on a bunch of debt and not gotten the degree. Once you start and take $30,000 in debt, and you're only a few credit hours from completing. It's a good idea to to finish off those credit hours and get it because you're already almost there.
Alexander Sarlin:Super interesting idea. I love the behavioral component of meeting students on the social media platforms they're already on and using that to reduce attrition and all sorts of things really, really interesting. How about admithub I think it's been rebranded Reese As mainstay,
Troy Williams:yeah, it's called mainstay. Mainstay is a great Boston based company that uses conversational AI to help students persist and thrive. Most of the students who utilize it are first generation college students, and oftentimes from disadvantaged backgrounds. And so when you're talking about disadvantaged students, first generation students, there's a very common thing called summer melt. They get admitted in May or April to university, they say they're going to come, and then they just don't show up and life gets in the way over the summer. And as they have to plan and pack they've never gone to college or university before. They don't know what's ahead of them. There's so many questions, and there's no one really to ask those questions to. And so what this is, is basically a chat bot that engages with that student throughout that summer. And they can ask the questions at 2am that they're worried about, can I bring my car? What happens if I get sick? Various other questions, right? And they get immediate response, it can answer 70% of the questions right away. And then the other 30%, it kind of tracks to someone at the university to answer the next day, if you will. But that was the initial product, it's had a huge impact, nearly increasing persistence by 10%, that many institutions that use it, it's had a number of RCT randomized control trials, which is pretty rare in education, and edtech, that have proved out its efficacy. And they added another product that now helps students once they're there persist. And so the first semester is always the hardest semester for first generation college students, tons of questions and, and loneliness and homesickness and various other things. And this is a chatbot that doesn't judge, and it's uncanny how many students actually develop a strong affinity for this chatbot
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, that I think that doesn't judge is a really great point. And it's something you know, my philosophy and Ad Tech has always included some of that idea of, you know, technology doesn't know who you are, it doesn't judge you for what you said last week, or for what clothes you're wearing, or anything like that. It's really very fair and meritocratic, we sort of take it for granted that it is. But that really matters in situations where people are uncomfortable, or don't feel a sense of belonging, like a first generation or brand new college student, I can imagine why the technology would feel like very comforting, and have that kind of efficacy.
Troy Williams:Yeah, and it's a broader trend that we think, you know, I think AI and conversational AI, is something that is going to be endemic. In virtually every product. You know, I'm old enough to remember when companies were called Internet companies, we don't really talk about internet companies anymore. And then there were companies called mobile companies. And then there were, you know, social media companies. And these things, kind of, and now we talk about AI companies. And the reality is, every interaction on campus is going to be intermediate by some type of chat interface where you can ask a question, whether it be how far the buses away, what's on various cafeterias down to all kinds of daily things that are happening on campus and have instant knowledge of where it is? I think it's the opportunity for conversational AI, not just in higher ed space, but throughout our lives is again, at its infancy today.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, it's a really interesting point. And I think, you know, as somebody who tries to keep a finger on the space, I've definitely seen a noted increase in the number of companies that are using artificial intelligence in various ways as a as one of the tools in their toolkit to make whatever they're trying to do happen, but increasingly not having it be the only tool. It's not like, you know, hey, our special sauces guy, and that's what all we do. It's, we do this, this and this. And, of course, this part's handled by artificial intelligence or by a model or by a chatbot. And I think that's good progress for the sector.
Troy Williams:Well, what I love about Mainstay is they did not take any of the off the shelf, conversational platforms, whether it be Google or Amazon's or drifts, they built theirs and patented theirs, specifically for a higher ed use case. And so the efficacy is dramatically different. And, you know, their competitors tend to be, I think, in every case are using off the shelf AI, which, you know, maybe fine, I don't think it's as good, right, it's AI that was developed to handle, you know, weather making reservations on an airplane or various other things, not necessarily the specific needs of college students the way that Mainstays is developed.
Alexander Sarlin:So I want to ask about about two more because you just each of these companies has a whole you know, philosophy and story and a vision and I find it really good just seem to hear you, you chat about us even talking about conversational AI. Let's talk about ready education, which is also different kinds of student communication platform.
Troy Williams:Yeah, so ready is a platform that builds the mobile application or mobile interface for university. So it's a white label solution in over 700. Universities, if you go to the university, you download the app fill in the university app, it's built by ready education. And the key differentiator with ready was they had this what they call the wall, it's a way for students to interact with each other and communicate with each other on that. But it also enabled universities to communicate with the students via the app. And the alternative is and most universities still today send most of their communications via email. And for today's college students, emailing them is roughly equivalent of me sending you a letter write, I mean, it's, I write letters to my parents, or my grandparents, who's still with us. And that's the way that I can communicate with them, I'm not going to email them very much. That said, I email my friends, and today's college students don't email their friends, they text for our messaging on another platform. This is enabling the universities to communicate, interact with the students the way that they need to. And the students can form groups and communicate with each other on that platform. And it's integrating in with all the other campus systems so that all that informations on their phone, as opposed to having to go onto a website and interact with all those other campus systems. So we saw it as a huge opportunity. We invested when this company was relatively small, it was called hula mobile at a time, we combined it with another company called Double labs in 2018. And granted, it is really education. And then last year, we brought on investment from level equity. And we've added four more companies since a few in Europe, and one in the US called campus groups. And so we've expanded it quite quite broadly. But it's having a huge impact on student engagement. That's been true throughout the pandemic as well. And that students when they weren't on campus had a hard time interacting with each other. And this is a platform that if it was in place, students were able to interact with each other, as well as the professors and others. And we just see that as the opportunities upstream from all those other campus systems. And it is the mobile portal by which hopefully, you know, 10 million students will utilize it multiple times a day, and we think it's a big platform for the future. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:it feels like a very important need for a generation that has gone beyond email that is mobile all the time that works through all sorts of native platforms. It strikes me as you talk about the wall technology that you know, that was the original thinking behind Facebook, right? It was a college app where you could leave messages on each other's walls. And it's so interesting that it comes all the way around again, and but in a meaningful way. Because people can't use a tool like Facebook as a campus platform for a large variety of reasons.
Troy Williams:Yeah, that's right. And so it's one of those companies that has so much potential and it's going to grow for a lot longer than we will remain an investor just because we have a limited amount of time. But it is another company that has research studies done on its impact. And it helps students persist students at institutions with ready persist more than students. We've done the studies before and after already was launched at a university and the persistence rate goes up. So students feel a higher sense of belonging and attachment and engagement to each other. They're going to persist longer at university, which again, once you start, you should finish.
Alexander Sarlin:And that persistence, or the reenrollment use case that you mentioned from automatic, they're really win wins for everybody a students do not want to drop out and take on debt. That's the worst situation for everyone. Yeah, and schools, for the most part, you know, don't want their students to drop out except in very extreme situation. So I mean, they're trying to reach their students and keep them in the loop and in the fold, and make sure they finish that last, you know, paper or say register for classes or show up after a summer. So, you know, this type of medium that allows both sides to get closer to the relationship they want a really exciting, I want to ask you one more, which is about a company called pack back. Tell me about pack pack.
Troy Williams:Yeah, so pack pack is a Chicago based company that uses AI to drive online discussions in a course. And so this is the out of class discussions. So what happened, you know, a student classes moved online or got big, it got hard to keep your class participation to be, you know, people raising their hands and you know, 10% of your grade or whatever is tied to class participation. So that tended to move online into discussion forums. And the only way to really great that for a lot of professors was say you have to participate 10 times and many students would just say I agree, period. One and then the next day Nope, that's too Right. And that's not productive. And so what this platform did was it used AI to automatically grade and give feedback as a student was typing on a scale of one to 100. And moderate and remove things that were negative, or, you know, flaming posts that were just counterproductive, before people read them. And the result was that students gotten much more engaged in it taught students how to like, produce a response to a question or position and back it up with sources, in order to get 100 points, it's pretty tough, you have to have a lot of source material and your logic has to be pretty strong. And so this is a solution that enables professors now to scale that online discussion that which is happening asynchronously outside of the classroom in off hours. And the result of it is that students learn more and get more out of those classes were packed vaccine in place. And so again, it's another AI solution. It's using machine learning to do the grading, and to give the students feedback on their writing in real time, as they're typing, making suggestions. So students hopefully learn to be better writers better question askers. And better question answers with more, you know, more logic, and ultimately a better community inside that class. That's a course level product University.
Alexander Sarlin:So interesting. I imagine many of our listeners are sort of furiously taking notes about the names of each of these companies, because you the way you describe each of them, they all are, are really, really trying to address serious problems within the higher ed especially and K 12 campus are problems of disengagement problems of attrition problems of, you know, people posting nonsense, or flaming in discussion forums, they're all truly truly addressing what we need to address in education to keep it working for everyone. One thing that strikes me, as I hear you describe some of these companies is that there's a through line of communication, of really creating of using technology to build platforms that make the type of communication, the type of engagement that we all want in education, you know, thoughtful, consistent ones, that people actually will see if, you know, actually actually land the way they want to. I'm curious if that's something that has sort of informed your opinion about your investing strategy in any way?
Troy Williams:Well, to some degree, yes. I mean, we definitely are looking at trend lines and where we think things are going and communication, engagement and persistence, are certainly part of it. We have slides in our deck that that is a theme. For us, I wouldn't say we're so prescriptive that we went out and studied everybody in a specific space and said, Hey, we're going to make three investments around communication and engagement. We were much more opportunistic in that. But we certainly have a belief that student communication platforms, or any type of communication platform, is probably solving issues. And so that's going to make it interesting to us. And then we want to understand, are they really efficacious, and that's one of the things in ad tech was one of the big challenges ad tech that's been there all along, you know, you hear you'll hear people say, we spent billions dollars in ad tech, and we haven't gotten anything for it. And that is because it's hard to study efficacy in education. I mean, education and healthcare are the two things people care about the most in their lives. And those are the two things where we spend a greater piece of GDP every year on them. budgets have gone up every year since World War Two, and they're not likely to stop because we care so much about them. But at the core, it's a really complex thing. In both cases, whether you're studying a new pharmaceutical drug, or you're studying a new piece of technology that's helping people learn, the human body and the human mind are very complex. And trying to understand whether or not you change this one thing, it actually has efficacy requires a large dataset of lots of people. And it requires studying over time. And the result is we have insufficient, we don't have an FDA enforcing it in education. So when you have a VC horizon of 18 months to the next funding event, it's pretty hard to study things, we tend to have a five to seven year old period, and we've made a commitment to studying the efficacy of the investments we make. And so we start it right at the beginning of when we make an investment that we're going to do this kind of third party research on the efficacy of our products. But ultimately, you know, parents don't necessarily want their kid to be a guinea pig. And so, you know, it's a balancing act of setting up studies that will advance it. And so what we've made, the commitment is that we're going to permit the researchers not only to study it, but to publish the results in academic journals, whether or not they're good for our companies within our company looks good in the result. The reality is by time they publish it, we will have another version or two subsequent already out, but we believe that that research component is important too. advancing the efficacy of edtech. Broadly,
Alexander Sarlin:that's a really responsible data driven approach to efficacy research. And, you know, luckily, I do think that this is we've begun to turn a corner from my perspective on the sort of caring about efficacy in a serious way. In edtech, we've had Karl Rove tennis from like, learning platform on the, we have a small investment in there. Yeah, they're, they're amazing. And they're really thinking about these sort of how to how to certify that somebody has, that the product works on these various tiers, the ad tech evidence exchange has been doing some interesting work. So I'm really happy to hear that you're doing that. And I hope other investors who are listening can see the value in, in publishing and really, in really getting the not only doing the randomized control trials, but actually making sure they get out there that all the information is, is transparent, even if it isn't, doesn't necessarily look as good as you'd want it to for an individual company. I want to ask you, you know, one interesting aspect to this set of companies and others in the achieve portfolio as well is that many of them are designed for a, you know, semi traditional environment, like for a campus community or for colleges or for schools. But it strikes me that a lot of them could work equally well, in a less structured educational environment. I mean, if you had a apprenticeship program or a boot camp, they still want to communicate with students avoid attrition, you know, retain students do online certifications, and, and proctoring, you know, AI chat bots, so that you don't lose people after they sign up. And I'm curious how you think about that? Do you look at the companies you invest in and say, Well, this is going to be purely, you know, existing legacy system? Or is it going to actually have some use cases that will allow it to span different types of education?
Troy Williams:Yeah, well, what I'd say is most of these companies are opportunistic. And if there's an opportunity there, they'll go after it. The reality is the alternatives marketplace is nascent, as we covered earlier, it's not big enough for these companies to support that as their primary market. And when I say to most companies, we invest in K 12, companies, as well as higher ed companies, as well as early childhood and lifelong learning or corporate l&d, that type of companies. So we're not just hire advocates well, but I encourage companies to focus on one of those markets until they get to about 10 million in revenue. It's just the markets are different enough in the use cases and requirements that it takes time to get to product market fit. And you just can't support multiple markets with a small team. And so you have to choose your market initially. So once they're above 10 million in revenue impact Mac crossed 10 million in revenue a few years ago, and we encourage them to move into K 12. And they're doing well on K 12. But initially, they were Iread. Only product. So we do expand it. But it's it's after we've had 39 portfolio companies, I guess at this point, and we've learned across that period of time that it's improving, for them to focus on more than one market when they're a small company with a relatively small team where everybody to three jobs.
Alexander Sarlin:wise, wise, wise words clearly come from experience. And I think that's a very powerful rule of thumb, I'm definitely packing that away in the back of my head that 10 million in revenue is is a threshold by which before which you maybe shouldn't think about trying to handle multiple markets makes a lot of sense. Very, very interesting. So I want to ask one more question, because I think this is, you've mentioned it a couple of times. And I think it's core to achieves work and university ventures before it across all its different portfolios of portfolio companies and funds, which is it's about sort of evening, the playing field for first generation students or under represented students in education. A Pew Research study just came out that's very, very interesting basically says that, among adults 25 and older, 61% of Asian Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher 42% of white adults. So that's about you know, two thirds as many 28% of black adults, it's about half as many as Asian, and 21% of Hispanic adults, about a third as many have a bachelor's degree or higher. So there's just wild disparity in educational achievement based on race in the US. And moreover, one of the main reasons that that happens is that it is because college has become unaffordable, and people are have to work to support their families, rather than go get an education. You've mentioned, you know, diversity and the commitment there a couple of times in passing, but I'd love to hear you talk about how achieves work, both in workforce and in education, really try to even out that disparity and how do you see things through an equity lens?
Troy Williams:Yeah, I mean, I think it's complex, right? Because to some extent, we would argue that, you know, a college degree meant a lot more in the 70s and 80s, when there were either even fewer minorities going to college. In that, now it's much more expensive. And so there's large numbers of minorities being asked being told they should go to college and take on huge amounts of debt when it actually has less impact and is more costly. And so, you know, it's a complex story, we definitely think that minority should have access to and should represent a significant portion of the population at top tier institutions and where we care about getting them into top tier institutions, at every level, and if you're going to make a decision to start university, we want you to complete that degree, because you're making a big investment in terms of time, four years of your life, we don't live that long, you know, you're probably not making a lot of money during that period of time. And instead, you're going into debt. So let's make sure you complete it and get a return. So that's why we invest in it some things around persistence and other things. But I do think that, you know, smart kids who have the capability of being top tier institutions are not always given opportunity. And that's the group we want to see most at top institutions, because we know when they get to top institutions, they have great careers coming out of top institutions. And they make a huge impact. And they become role models for lots more students further down the pipeline. On the workforce side, I mentioned that the apprenticeship model where, you know, many times, we're hiring hundreds of students into cohorts that are three or four month programs. And at the end of it, they they have a certification that enabled them to have what's really a six figure job. I think, on average, 78% of those students in those apprenticeship programs are women, minorities, or veterans, that's a concerted effort. That's not, that doesn't just happen. That is a conservative effort we've made to target folks from those groups. And look, they perform. And a part of this whole model is the apprenticeship model is, you know, as service companies, the students get a certification, and then the service company starts placing them with clients, and the client can pick, you can say, Look, I need you to send me somebody else, if they don't want the person that's there. So the the people are performing, no matter what their background, gender or affiliation is, you know, it's not a factor in their ability to perform at the front end of our apprenticeship model. We're doing the appropriate filter capabilities, and you know, soft skills, various things of mentality and commitment, work ethic and things like that. And so, you know, 78% of the resulting classes are from, like I said, minorities, women and veterans. So that's a commitment we've made, and we're trying to get that number even higher.
Alexander Sarlin:So what I'm hearing there is that trying to increase the number of people from any given, you know, background who go to college may or may not be the actual core goal, it's complex and nuanced. And sometimes, it's not always the best choice.
Troy Williams:I don't know what the right percentage of students go into college, is it years ago, it was 15%. Now, it's 50 Some percent if the right answer, maybe 20%. But if it's 20%, then that should be representative of our country from an ethnicity and agender point of view. And there shouldn't be a disadvantage from being from certain backgrounds. That's why I say like, yeah, so those numbers, you know, it's not the heart number that I'm most worried about. It's the number that we're worried about.
Alexander Sarlin:Great point. So just one final topic, you know, part of what put achieve on my radar recently, I've followed Brian Craig's work for years, I've followed what you have all done at a university achievement, it's always been really impressive. But there was a recent acquisition, which is that achieved partners acquired a majority stake in Oak clips, which is a really interesting company that curates video clips for use in a variety of educational contexts. I'd love to hear your thinking about that acquisition and how the bulk clips acquisition complements achieves goals.
Troy Williams:Yeah, so I'm really excited about this company. We just made this investment maybe six weeks ago, well clips aggregates video from over 360 top tier content producers like the BBC or Financial Times, or Bloomberg or various others, and then enables that to be used in courses, both at the K 12 and higher ed level. They're also have a subsidiary called Listen, why's that aggregates podcast, NPR and various other things like that, for use both in listening skills at K 12, but also in English language learning, and of course materials. And so the overarching trend here is that there's a shift from text based learning materials to interactive course materials. And so as you move to that interactive content, it's got to come from somewhere and filming something didn't know Have our from scratch is incredibly costly. And it's easier to take something that's high quality produced. And so what Bo Eclipse does is it tags all this to learning objectives and Bloom's Taxonomy and various different taxonomies. So that a course designer can go in there. No, it's copyright clear day one, search by these taxonomies, find something at the right reading level, or the right educational level and the right maturity level, for the course content that are creating and integrate that into their course materials in a matter of minutes. As opposed to the alternative, which takes days and weeks to find out who owns a piece of video, how much it might cost, negotiate it, and then get the content if they're even successful doing that. And so we think that this is, again, a picks and shovels type of thing, that you're talking about the shift from text based learning materials to interactive, that this is the type of platform that we think is again, very early on, very nascent, it's global and scale, it has customers around the world, utilizing it integration, of course materials. So we're extremely bullish on this company excited thanks for asking about it.
Alexander Sarlin:Sure, if I remember correctly, what some of the providers from both clips are actually really excellent educational YouTube channels. Is that right? Yeah, that's
Troy Williams:true. Yeah, that's true. There's some, some YouTube channels created content. And, again, that content is not searchable by taxonomy. So and then you can integrate that content directly off YouTube into a course material that you might sell if you're a publisher, without a YouTube ad running, which is not going to work. And on top of that, you know, if you're just leaking out to you, too many school districts, Ban YouTube, and you know, the recommended next video on the right side of the screen is more likely to be based on what the student was watching last night than what you just watched, which might not be appropriate for the typical educational setting. So there's a lot of reasons why even if it's a YouTube video, it might not work outside of this platform.
Alexander Sarlin:I'm very excited about that, as well. I think it's powerful for a wide variety of stakeholders, certainly education publishers, it could also be relevant for course creators for you know, a lot of people who want to have top quality educational content, but don't want to make every single video themselves or don't want to make any of the video themselves. Because it's the it's a huge expense. Well, it's
Troy Williams:pretty hard to think of, you know, it's pretty hard to be creative. I mean, if you're, if you're doing a video and you're talking about terminal velocity, seeing Lewis Hamilton drive his f1 car into a wall tells you a lot more about terminal velocity than any video your I can think up and film. It's much more engaging. So that's the reality of why top tier content is valuable. from an educational perspective.
Alexander Sarlin:No question, I actually have some funny, funny experiences with this, I've sat in rooms with, with sets of university professors who are teaching online for the first time as a trainer, and actually shown them really excellent YouTube education videos. And so you know, this is how you make this is how you make an engaging video because they, they're, they're brilliant, and they, you know, people have incredibly great editing skills, great filming skills, great scripting skills. So the ability to not only show them that kind of clip, but actually allow them to say, hey, just grab a minute of this or grab a four minute video and use it as a as a hook or use it as a as an example would have gone a long way. Well, we
Troy Williams:think that's the future. So we think, hopefully, we're ahead of the curve like we were with examining an online proctoring in 2016.
Alexander Sarlin:No question about it. So speaking about being ahead of the curve, we always end the podcast with two questions. The first is, what is the most exciting upcoming trend that you see in the tech landscape right now that you think our listeners should keep an eye on?
Troy Williams:Well, I continue to believe it is the conversational AI we talked about earlier. I think we're at the very early stages of that. And that's going to become, like I said, endemic in solutions. And so I would, I would keep a close eye on that one.
Alexander Sarlin:And what is one book or you can name a podcast, a blog, a Twitter feed that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today? Well, I
Troy Williams:would have to plug my partner's Daniel Pacos podcasts that are money bet a world in which he talks to impact investors around the world who are investing not just in education or workforce, but in other ways to make the world a better place. So a lot of climate change various other investments, just fascinating people he talks to who are investing large sums of money to solve the biggest challenges facing the world.
Alexander Sarlin:That sounds great. As always, we will put the links to the podcast as well as to achieve partners and all the portfolio companies we talked about today in the show notes for this episode. Troy Williams, thanks so much for being a guest with us at ad tech insiders.
Troy Williams:Yeah, it was really fun to be here. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks for listening
Alexander Sarlin:to this episode. Go to the Ed Tech insiders podcast. If you liked the episode, remember to subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple please leave a rating and review so others can find the podcast. For more ed tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at edtech insiders.substack.com.