Making Enrollment Equitable with Greg Bybee of Avela Learning

Greg Bybee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Avela Education and the Co-Founder of PoliScribe. 

Greg was an early employee at NovoEd where he ultimately ran every business function from marketing to business development and customer success, and ultimately helped sell the company to Fidelity.

Previously, he was a Fellow at NewSchools Venture Fund, the first product manager at Coursera, an advisor to Renren’s expansion into education, the lead for VMware’s vCloud Suite launch, and a strategic counselor to Fortune 500 executives at McKinsey & Company. He's also an advisor and mentor to several education organizations and tech startups, including Vendition, Veery, HiCounselor, and Rutgers University

Avela's mission is to increase equitable access to education. Avela offers a modern application and enrollment system for schools, districts, and mission-driven organizations, which focuses on empowering families and enabling data driven decisions.

Recommended Resources
Expanding Access to High-Quality Schools report by Center for American Progress
Who Gets What ― and Why by Alvin Roth
School District RFPs archive

Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 0:04

Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top edtech companies. Greg Bybee is the co founder and CEO of Avila education and the co founder of poly scribe. Greg was an early employee at Novo Ed, where he ultimately ran every business function from marketing to business development and customer success, and ultimately helped sell the company to fidelity. He was also a fellow at NewSchools Venture Fund, the first product manager at Coursera, and advisor to renderings expansion into education, the lead for VMware as Cloud Suite launch, and a strategic counselor to Fortune 500 executives at McKinsey, as well as an advisor and mentor to several education organizations, and tech startups, including the ambition viri high councilor and Rutgers University. avila's mission is to increase equitable access to education. Avella offers a modern application and enrollment system for schools, districts and mission driven organizations, which focuses on empowering families and enabling data driven decisions. Greg Bybee, Welcome to EdTech. Insiders.

Greg Bybee: 1:34

Alex, it's great to be here. Thank you.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:36

So Greg, you live a really interesting career in edtech. We've known each other for quite a while, give our listeners a little bit of an overview of your journey through a lot of different interesting companies and different roles in the tech space.

Greg Bybee: 1:49

Like sort of consider myself, an education technologist. You know, I've been really passionate about innovating in education and government, started my career in traditional tech and consulting, very quickly realized my heart was in education, went back to get a Masters of Ed. And there was very fortunate to be at Stanford during the time of Coursera. And had the opportunity to intern there early on as a product manager. And then since have had the opportunity to work with a variety of innovative ad tech organizations, including Novo ed for about five years, helping to build that online learning platform and ultimately sell it. And then since then started a couple of companies, one in the government technology space called poly scribe that helps elected officials communicate with their constituents and help educate them about policy decisions. And then most recently, Avella.

Alexander Sarlin: 2:37

Yeah, so let's talk a little bit of about Avella. It's a really interesting platform, really, to support schools, in matching schools, to students and students to schools. Give us an overview of how Avella works, I'd love to

Greg Bybee: 2:52

I mean, I would say our ultimate focus is on increasing equity and access to education. We believe that there's a lot of great educational opportunities out there from traditional schools to alternative models, but not everyone knows about them. And it's often hard to get into them. And we're seeing a proliferation of options that's quite overwhelming for families. And so ultimately, what we want to build is a single one click application for all things education. So we want a parent to be able to come onto our platform, you know, while on the bus between jobs holding a child in one hand and on their mobile device, figure out, you know, what program would be best for their child apply to that program, and then track the status of those applications. So, you know, ultimately, we want to be kind of this universal one click for everything from daycare to after school programs, to enrichment programs, CTE, k 12 programs, but we're really starting out with large urban pre K 12 enrollment, we sell directly to large school districts and become their kind of application and enrollment management system.

Alexander Sarlin: 3:55

And your focus is on equity. The technology itself is informed by Nobel Prize winning economist and sort of economic theory of how to do matching. Tell us a little bit about that background. It's such an unusual partner for an edtech company.

Greg Bybee: 4:11

Yeah, and it's actually it's sort of a an awesome intersection of a lot of my interests. And I was a math major in college and have always been fascinated about kind of quantitative analysis side of things. And so my co founders are two professors of economics from MIT, who study, you know, one of them really studies enrollment algorithms, as you mentioned, kind of matching and market design, and the other studies, causal inference and econometrics. And how do you leverage this information to make inferences about the quality of schools and the impact that a school had on a child? And, you know, my co founders advisor Al Roth was sort of famous for taking a lot of these early algorithms around matchmaking. And actually, let me back up on that because I think that's relevant. So when we say matchmaking, we don't mean necessarily finding the best fit for the right person immediately that comes later or we mean is given 10s of 1000s of people and hundreds of schools, how do we find the best system wide solution to put every kid into the right school. And this is a really complicated problem, because there's a lot of different preferences and priorities. You know, the naive way to do it is first come first serve. But that, of course, was highly inequitable, it means families with privilege that can either wait in line or Can, can be there at the start get their first choice. Another naive approach is to have neighborhood schools, I mean, makes a lot of sense. You want to minimize your commute to school, and you want to feel like you have a relationship with the school and your community. But this also means that wealthier neighborhoods are going to end up with wealthier schools, the schools are gonna perform better, because those families have additional resources to invest in both the schools and the students. And then they're gonna get more resources, you kind of get this positive spiral. But it also means lower income neighborhoods have a negative spiral. And those schools tend to underperform, which is also clearly inequitable, because the whole point of our public education system is to bridge that achievement gap and give everyone an equal playing field and sort of educate the populace. But if starting from day one, the quality of your education is determined by your zip code, and therefore your socio economic status. You know, clearly that's not the solution we're looking for. And so the sort of next solution people come to is like, Okay, well, let's have a broader system, where people can express their preferences can rank the schools they want to go to, and we can take into account a variety of factors, including proximity to school, so we can optimize around transportation, but also including diversity goals, and including maybe if your sibling goes to school, there's a reason why you might want to go there as well. And so that now requires, you know, sort of complicated algorithms to think about, and my co founders advisor won the Nobel Prize for coming up with a system that actually gets used for things like kidney matching and the medical residency program, and my co founder, Parag Pathak, so he started thinking, well, couldn't we apply some of that work to K 12 education. And so he spent the last 20 years or so working with districts like New York City, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, to design their enrollment lotteries, and the algorithms that are used to assign kids to schools. And then my other co founder, Josh, anger has actually figured out, well, given that there's a little bit of a lottery here, we can actually use that to help measure the quality of schools. Interesting thing to think about there, just in terms of how in hard sciences, you're able to do random control trials, you know, a placebo group and a treatment group. And then you compare the the difference between the two groups, that doesn't work in the social sciences, you can't randomly assign kids to schools, there's a lot of preferences and factors you have to consider. But what he realized was that there is a little bit of like natural experiments going on public school assignment. And so we actually looked at that to measure the the true value out of a school. But yeah, so Josh, and Prague had been working in this space for districts for a while, but quickly realized that in order to really scale this impact across the 15,000 districts in the country, that this needed to be really in software. And so that's where the idea for Avella came was, let's create an enrollment system that bakes in these best practice algorithms. And then since we did this, Josh actually won the Nobel Prize himself for some of those in Prague and won the John Bates Clark Medal. So I feel very fortunate to be able to work with both of them.

Alexander Sarlin: 8:25

Yeah, it really is amazing. So just to make sure I'm understanding and our listeners are Avella sort of incorporates these matchmaking algorithms, these ways to combine multiple factors, including, as you say, proximity, whether a sibling goes to the school, a number of different factors to be able to help both sides help both families and as parents and schools, sort of optimize and find the right mix and match of students in schools. Am I close?

Greg Bybee: 8:54

Yeah, you're very close. And I'll say two things on one, because I think probably interesting to your listeners is when we started Avella actually, you know, funny fact, the original name was matchmaker information technologies, her match tech, you know, we thought the product market fit, you know, our thesis was that it was all in the matching that we were going to bring this matching technology to school districts, and that would be the product. And it turned out that it was super exciting to districts, but just wasn't quite enough. We didn't have product market fit. Because they said well, we have this whole there's a lot to enrollment, right? There's the application form. There's the school finder, there's the process, and the workflow is in the verification of eligibility. And the matching piece is sort of just, you know, it's a very, very important piece of it, but it's just one part. And so Bella, actually, when we renamed to have Ella and evolve the company into being really an end to end application and enrollment management system. So what we did is we actually, we have really we think of it as one main product which is Avella, enroll the whole suite, but we have sort of three sub products within that Avella Explorer, which is our We'll find a tool which helps families find the right schools for their kids. Based on a variety of factors, they can look at things like special education programs, IEP offerings, after school programs, what sports they offer, what AP classes, they offer the class sizes. So they're really able to navigate the system and also understand the requirements, the deadlines, the application processes. The second product is Avella apply, which is the actual application system. That's the biggest one, because that's everything the parent sees to actually fill out the application, as well as the backend for the administrators to review those applications and make decisions. And that's, you know, we're innovating a lot there right now, to have ideas where we want to make it like I said, one click apply, where we store information on behalf of the families, kind of like you know, Apple Pay, or Chrome's autocomplete, where it's like, you can fill out the application, send all the information. And we'll even automatically verify things like residency or income. And then the third product has Avella match. And that's that lottery tool that you're alluding to where the school district or the charter school or the nonprofit can put in these various factors and then run that lottery. And that's, you know, definitely our, you know, most distinctive, I would say feature, the thing that like no one else in the world can do that, you know, I can confidently say we're the best in the world. And there's a lot that goes into it. And I'll sort of say a little on that. In case it's interesting. But you can imagine, a common approach is, hey, we want to give the most number of families their first choice, that's something that a, you know, someone running for school board might say, and it's a very well intentioned statement. And a lot of people can't get behind that. Yeah, let's give the most number of people their first choice. The problem is this results in a very scalable system, because and we've probably all been in situations like this where you're like, Well, my first choice is this really high demand highly competitive program that I know a lot of people are going to apply to. So maybe I'm actually better off ranking my second or third preference as my first so that I've got a higher chance of getting it? Well, this is what we call, you know, a strategy or sort of game bubble? Well, what happens is two things, one, more privileged families understand how these kind of games and systems work, they often have Facebook groups and communities that are sharing tips. In fact, there's a lot of stories in cities where like, you know, wealthy families get together and actually share what they're ranking and they kind of strategize. But the second thing that happens is who can take risks, if you're a family with a lot of privilege, you're able to take a risk, you're able to shoot for the stars and rank your first choice school first. Why? Because if you don't get it, you have other options. You know, what I like to say is school choice exists, and always has, and always will, for families with privilege. And so the question is, do we want to also give some of that choice and opportunity to other families, because if a family of privilege doesn't get their first choice public school, they're going to go to a private school, or they're going to move, and they're going to go to a district where they're guaranteed admission based on their zip code. And so what happens is, they're able to rank that school first. And then other families might not, they have to like rank their third choice as their first choice, they'll end up getting it. But now we basically had it where family is a privilege, I'll get the best, you know, kind of, I won't say best, because that's a big part of our research is it's not necessarily the best, but the most desirable school, they'll get. And then families that don't have that privilege will get the less desirable school. And so that's where the algorithms actually really help bring in equity, for the families that are able to, you know, truly rank the schools that they want without fear of bias or have that sort of strategy. And then the system actually tries to find the best system wide solution. And so it's not just getting the most number of people under their first choice, but it's actually making sure that there is no, what we call justified envy. There's no two people that would like to switch who could both be better off sort of a Pareto efficient outcome or kind of a Nash equilibrium in a way to the game.

Alexander Sarlin: 13:45

Yeah, I hear a lot of these economics principles, you can quickly see why this is an economics problem. When you start getting into all of the gamification and gamification, the sort of game of all aspects and the strategies and the equilibrium and I like that term, no justified envy. That's interesting. So you know, on the Avella, explore side, you're mentioning how families of privilege usually have access to more resources, they may be on, you know, forums or sharing strategies are working in groups. And I imagine that because you're so equity centered. Avella Explorer is meant to be, you know, accessible to families from all backgrounds. I'm curious what you're doing and what has been done in school districts to make sure that Avella itself is not only available to those who have the cultural capital to sort of find it. Yeah,

Greg Bybee: 14:34

it's a great question. And you know, we're a for profit organization because we believe that the best way to commercialize this technology scale and have the impact we want and be able to hire the best talent and I'm so proud of the team that we've attracted. But you're right, there's this question of, well, how can you be for profit but also for equity? And I think there's a really clever piece of our strategy, which is we sell directly to the school district or the state, or in a lot of cases a large A nonprofit that sits adjacent to the school district Harbormaster or quarter quarterback organization. And they then offer it to everyone for free. And so I'll explore, you know, we don't charge any family that's available for free to everyone, we sell it to the school district who then makes it available. And this is different than you know, there are nonprofits that offers or school finder like tools. And I think they each have their pros and cons. But a lot of them have to make money from ads, which you know, who's going to advertise, it's going to be the affluent private schools, or some charter schools. And so that kind of results in a bias there. And also, they rely on publicly available data, which often includes accountability scores, which are very important. But the problem is, there's a lot of bias in those accountability scores, you know, they tend to report on test outcomes. And we know that for kind of previous discussion, more affluent schools are going to have better test scores, because they have a lot of other resources that go into them. And magnet schools, and schools that have sort of criteria to get in, are also going to result in better test scores, because they're selecting kids with better test scores coming in. So neither of these actually says anything about the quality of the school or the impact that school is going to have on your kids. And so because we work directly with school district, and we're able to get kind of more inside information, we're able to show the information that we think is going to help families make the best choice, we're also able to get a lot more detail about our curriculum course offerings, mentorship, availability, and that sort of thing. This sort of public aggregators aren't able to get, yeah, it's

Alexander Sarlin: 16:29

really compelling. That makes a lot of sense. So it becomes almost a public good, because the purchaser of the villa suite of the Abell enroll suite, our districts and then every individual family, you know, in the district gets access to these school finders and resources and gets to be able to explore and see the different data and cut it in all sorts of different ways. It's a really interesting model.

Greg Bybee: 16:53

But the other thing I would add, which is something that I think in Silicon Valley, we don't think about a lot because we we take modern technology for granted. But the truth is most tools that are available to families and that school district use are a bit outdated and aren't as mobile friendly, you know, aren't accessible aren't available in their preferred language. And so being sort of a new company we've built from the ground up to be mobile, first, highly accessible, and multilingual. And so you're welcome to check out actually near New Orleans Public Schools uses our school finder, New York is using it Seattle, Hartford, a number of districts, open it up on your mobile phone, it is just it's built for a mobile device. First, it's built to support pretty much every language, we use Google Translate for machine translation. So you can pick any language you want. And it's built to be highly accessible. And this actually turns out to be one of the biggest selling points, I'm continually surprised at how mobile driven families are these days, about 70% of families applied to school for their kid entirely on their mobile device, they're filling out the application. And so that's why we actually designed for mobile first,

Alexander Sarlin: 18:01

it's really smart. And it makes a lot of sense. You mentioned earlier, the idea of you know, being able to apply for a school with a child in one hand or you know, during a commute or anything like that. And it sounds like the mobile strategy is really designed for exactly that kind of use case, you know, busy parents who have all sorts of restrictions on their ability to actually sit down in front of a, you know, a big home computer and scroll around a map and double click on things. And I think that's Hampshire, that's a real game changer in terms of people's access to a tool like this.

Greg Bybee: 18:30

Yeah. And actually Chalkbeat called it the Zillow for schools. And I think it's similar it's designed to be you can go through and you can actually bookmark schools that are interesting for you. And we have sort of a shopping cart type experience or shortlist of bookmarks. And you can actually email that list yourself or texted yourself or a partner. So you can even have kind of a collaboration with other guardians to look through schools.

Alexander Sarlin: 18:52

Do you see a lot of students using themselves? You

Greg Bybee: 18:55

know, we don't see as many No, we don't do. As I mentioned, we're sort of a b2b strategy. So we don't do any kind of parent or family acquisition ourselves. And that's actually part of our strategy is that, you know, ultimately, you know, we care a lot about the family and the student. But our strategy is to start with the large districts, in order to apply to a school in New Orleans, you'll need to have an account on ELA. And New Orleans Public Schools is pushing out this tool to families, we actually save all of that kind of cost of customer acquisition on the end user side, which is why we start with the large districts but so far we haven't seen as many in although that said we I don't know that we would necessarily know you know, the accounts are always created by the parents. So when it comes to actually applying a parent has to create that account. But I suppose it could be children actually browsing on explore, we wouldn't actually know.

Alexander Sarlin: 19:45

Yeah, it's just interesting to think about, it's a different dynamic for a student to be able to use a zillo like interface to look at the schools in their in their district. It's just feels like a whole new world.

Greg Bybee: 19:56

I like how you're thinking too because I think imagine if a kid you know especially if In high school, like, imagine if a student could pick their own high school that the agency that would give them and saying I want it, you know, I didn't get assigned to the school, I didn't get stuck with the school like I picked the school. And, you know, you kind of involve them in those trade offs, like the school offers this athletic program, but doesn't offer a band or an offer is this extracurricular, or this art class. And to actually, I think the earlier you can bring a kid into kind of self determining their own educational path. You know, as we start thinking about some of the lifelong learning that we both been working on earlier, you can start to build that scene and get kids involved, I think the better

Alexander Sarlin: 20:35

exactly help determine your own criteria of what a successful education looks like for you. I think it could just strike some really interesting conversation, I wanted to dig into something you said earlier, which is, you know, you mentioned that Avella is starting with big public districts. And you know, when you think about this sort of enrollment suite, where you have an Explorer tool and application capture and management, matching, where you can think about admissions and lotteries, and you know how to get a student body, you can think of a whole lot of different possible use cases for some of these tools. I'm curious, I know that you're a startup and you don't want to, you know, bite off more will be too. But I'm curious how these conversations have happened internally about what are some adjacent use cases that might be interesting for Ebola?

Greg Bybee: 21:16

You're exactly right. And I think it's one of the things I'm so excited about, is that there is huge opportunity. And that you're right, this is probably one of the most passionate debates we have internally across the whole company. And the board is like, how quickly should we go into higher education, how quickly we go into scholarships, and we've met with a number of scholarship organizations and common application platforms and universities. For now, we've decided to pause on kind of post secondary and higher well, even that's not entirely true, you actually already have expanded, you know, Teach For America uses our platform to help match incoming corps members, which are essentially, you know, recent college graduates to schools as teachers. So we're that matching that system. We also work with the US Army in the military, to match ROTC ROTC graduates and West Point graduates into their units. And, you know, working with other nonprofits, in Ecuador, and Peru, we do teacher matching, they have a national teacher match. So we are already getting kind of pulled in different directions. But all of these, what they have in common is, you know, is ultimately matching students or recent graduates with opportunities. And so I mentioned when we started the organization, we thought of it as we're matching, you know, we thought we were going to be kind of talent matching, it's all about matching people to opportunities, that's still something that's very much on our radar. But for now, we've said, of all the different matching we could do the thing we're most passionate about, and where we just saw the most need, was helping families find the right school for their kids. Now, to kind of the like, starting with big urban schools, the strategy there is that we want to create a network effect to help us grow. And so we're selling to the big districts, you know, these are, these are often long sales cycles with RFPs. Because they have the biggest need, right? They have 10s of 1000s of families that are applying, they often have some level of choice, they have magnet school programs with admission criteria. So there's the highest need there. But from there, we're going to move. I don't know what they're not downmarket, but you know, just smaller educational organizations within that community. Could be the charter schools could be a CMO could be an after school program could be nourishment program or summer camp or CTE programs, say, hey, you know, why don't we be your application system as well. In addition, all the other benefits mobile first and accessible and localized and easy to use and delightful. By the way, 100% of your students or prospects are already using our system and have an account on our system, because they just applied to the public school. So by using our system, they can now apply to your program with one click. And so I'm certainly we're not the first ones that have this idea of creating kind of a single application. I mean, there's the common app for college, of course, but I think what a lot of those systems, they approached it either by trying to agree on a single application structure, like we're gonna all use the same application, or they tried to start with their parents or kind of the end users and say, We want to aggregate as many of you on the platform as possible, and then connect you to systems. Our strategy is to actually sell directly to the mission driven organization of the the school, the educational organization, get them on our platform, that gives us the families and then from there, we can expand to, you know, other players in the community and say, Well, why don't use the same platform. And eventually we can go to the YMCA and say, Hey, why don't we platform and we're already getting pulled, you know, back kind of to your question as well. In Louisiana. They're asking, why don't we use you for our statewide scholarship program. So that's something that we're going to be doing and then one of our clients just asked, well, golly, why don't we use this for our snaps program or food stamps? And finally, why don't we have all of our government services on this platform and you know, this is one of those exciting things where like, I hadn't even thought of that. Like maybe Avella is it It's more than just, you know, school enrollment and education. Maybe it's like all government services, like maybe it's everything that a parent or family might sign up for, for their kid or even for themselves, because it's a lot of the same questions. You know, it's the same demographic and biographic information. A lot of these programs have income eligibility requirements for voucher programs, or Headstart funding, or other funding programs for food stamps. So we're already collecting a lot of that information. A lot of these programs have residency requirements, you've got to submit a bank statement or copy of your utility bill to prove that you live where you say you live in, you're eligible. A lot of them require immunization records or health records, a lot of them require a birth certificate. And so actually, if we already have all this information, and we've helped the family, collate it, anyone we work with now they can apply with that sort of one click. So I see a lot of opportunity. And so it's constantly a discussion of how quickly do we expand. But right now we're focusing all of our sort of outbound effort on education organizations, school districts, but we definitely are opportunistically pursuing kind of things that come to us.

Alexander Sarlin: 26:06

So interesting. So just I mean, just to synopsize for a moment, because you went, there were so many different interesting adjacent opportunities there. You're already working with Teach For America for teacher matching, you're thinking about higher ed, you're thinking about scholarships, internships, I'll put in apprenticeships, even though I don't think you said that. Oh, no, absolutely. You're there's all these government programs that require the same information. And you're sort of looking I love this idea of the strategy of I mean, it's a strategy, but it's also hugely beneficial to the end user of, hey, if you're gonna put together all of this information into a platform to apply to your public schools, well, here's all these other opportunities that are available to you scholarship opportunities, vouchers, you know, all sorts of things. And with one click, like you mentioned, an Apple Pay or a sort of LinkedIn, apply style, you can watch them and then give them access to the same information and put yourself on their list. It's very compelling. And I pretty exciting. I can imagine why some of your current clients are sort of letting their mind but you know, letting go brainstorming flags up and saying, Oh, we could use it for this. We can use it for that ROTC is a use case. I definitely did not expect you to say that is a really interesting one. But sure, why not?

Greg Bybee: 27:14

Yeah, exactly. I think that's well said. I think the LinkedIn example is exactly right. It's this idea of you can apply to many different things with the same information.

Alexander Sarlin: 27:22

Sure. So you really have an enrollment mindset. And one of the things that we've seen, you know, come out of the news recently is this idea that public school enrollments have been down in a lot of states, there was a report just last week that said, I think there's a 2% total decrease in total, you know, public K 12 enrollments over the pandemic year, a lot of people whose kids were pulled out of school for various reasons are not going back. That's even more true in states that had more remote learning. And, you know, we're in a little bit of a strange moment for enrollment. I'd love to hear you talk about a Velez advantage, you know, what you're offering to districts or schools in terms of helping ensure that they enroll the kids they need?

Greg Bybee: 28:04

You've hit on a very important trend that I just want to pause on that. And then I'll answer your question. There is a huge trend happening, which is education is moving from a local monopoly to a competitive market, right. It used to be that a school was guaranteed a certain number of students based on where it was located, and they cared a lot about population forecasting, and population forecasting was enrollment forecasting. But there's been a huge rise in alternatives. A lot of this before the pandemic with the growth of online opportunities, and charter schools and private schools. And then the pandemic really accelerated that lot of people move to online to homeschooling, we also saw a rise in pod schooling and micro schooling and Montessori programs. And so schools now need to compete. And so as you mentioned, the result is that the public school system is seeing an decline, especially in the large urban districts in the large cities like LA Chicago and New York, it's as much as 7% across the board. And it's even more pronounced in kindergarten, where it can be up to 20%. And early indications are that a lot of those kids that they lost in kindergarten aren't coming back. So this is a burning fire it actually it also gets to why we decided to start in this area, because when you sell the education, you know, you can't be a nice to have, you know, there's that trope about, you know, you want to be a painkiller, and not a vitamin that is super true. In education, there's a lot of challenges, and they're under resourced. And so you need to solve a problem that has a hair on fire problem. And right now, declining enrollment is a hair on fire problem. And part of that is because that is, you know, existential that drives the unit economics. It's the way every school in the country makes money is, you know, a certain amount of money per pupil times enrollment. Private schools call that tuition, tuition times enrollment, but public schools get a per pupil funding from state, local and federal sources times enrollment and sometimes Just based on attendance as well. And so as enrollment declines, that means less money is going to school, which means they can't pay for teachers and can't expand facilities and so forth. And so that's a problem that we really help them solve as we help public school districts. But really everyone, I mean, we don't currently work with private schools, but we will very shortly. But we help everyone put their best foot forward, we want all families to be able to pick the right school for their children. And I think in some degrees, public schools will benefit the most, because they're the ones that probably haven't had these marketing resources. I mean, private schools have been used to having to compete for kids, and they've, they've had marketing teams and enrollment teams, but public schools haven't necessarily had that. And so we're providing them some of those same tools that the private schools have had for a while. And I think this also gets to, you know, one of our strengths as a business. And what helped us in our recent fundraise as well, is that, you know, in ed tech, so much of the per pupil funding, and it varies a lot by state, but it's gone up from about $15,000 per student to about $20,000 per student per year, that's spent in public education, the vast majority of that goes to teacher salaries and administrative personnel, a little bit to facilities and a little bit to instructional materials. And so there's actually a very small sliver that's leftover for edtech. And so all of attack, you know, whether it's a classroom behavioral management tool, or curriculum, or supplemental education is all competing for the same sliver of funding. Well, we actually sort of sell not to the cost center, we're not trying to take a sliver of that we're selling to sort of the revenues enter the enrollments and are the people that are responsible for growing the total revenue by increasing the number of students. And so that has really helped us continue to thrive during the pandemic, and grow even during this sort of period of economic uncertainty, because we're selling to the revenue center and solving that hair on fire problem,

Alexander Sarlin: 31:47

really, really thorough and informative explanation there, I really appreciate it, I'm sure listeners do as well. And, you know, that idea of a competitive landscape for public schooling that, you know, a public school may have to go out and convince a family that the public school is more effective or fun or interesting or affordable option, then micro school or then online schooling or then the charter school is really not something they've had to do historically, that is so far out of the wheelhouse in my understanding of how public schools tend to think about their role. So it's really interesting to sort of look forward and think about a landscape in which that it's really almost like a, you know, a marketplace, which really haven't had historically in the US.

Greg Bybee: 32:33

Yeah, I think that's well said it is creating an marketplace of education opportunities. And I think there's a lot of great schools out there that will benefit from this. I think that, you know, to kind of our previous discussion, a lot of the marketplaces that have existed have really been weighted toward accountability metrics and test scores, which really just tell you the socio economic status of student population, it doesn't tell you anything about what makes that school special. And so I'm hoping this movement toward a more competitive landscape and an open market means that schools can show off what makes them special, whether it's their academic programs, or their after school programs, or their sports or their music programs, or their arts programs, the type of instruction that they do. And so I think public schools will do quite well, because they do have a lot to offer. And this will actually help them demonstrate that.

Alexander Sarlin: 33:19

Yeah. So I want to shift gears, we have a few minutes left. And you know, you've been in a really interesting moment you just mentioned sort of in passing that you've been doing a fundraise of Ella is a new venture, but it partners with Nobel Prizes, which is very unusual. I'd love to just hear we have a lot of ad tech entrepreneurs as listeners to the podcast, and I'd love to hear you just talk a little bit about what it's like to be a you know, really interesting, amazing idea, ed tech startup in, you know, 2022 Right now, what's it like to fundraise? How did you think about your branding? How do you think about, you know, getting Avella to a place where you can actually really get the funds and the springboard you need to grow?

Greg Bybee: 33:57

Yeah, you know, we're fortunate to have wrapped up the round, I think we was a tough fundraising environment. So I think we're fortunate to do well, you know, I will say the fundraising process, entrepreneurs often fear it, but it was incredibly valuable. If we had had this interview six months ago, or, you know, definitely a year ago, but even six months, I think my answers have been very different, because I thought of ourselves a lot more narrow. And when you speak to investors, investors aren't interested in enrollment platform, they want something much bigger. And they really help you tease out like, you know, what's really the insight in your idea? What's your bigger picture? Like? What is the, you know, the billion dollar opportunity here, but what's the like change the world, and especially at the venture scale? I think a lot of education entrepreneurs have to grapple with this question of like, Am I really a venture scale business? Or should I go for alternative capital revenue based financing private equity capital, but venture capital really has very specific return expectations and needs a very fast growth? And so you know, my first several dozen pitches and luckily, I think I started with kind of friends and family and people like trusted people that I could embarrass myself with. But they asked me hard questions that I didn't have good answers to. And they, you know, kept challenging me on the market size. And how big can this get? How's this gonna change the world? And it pushed me to think a lot bigger. And I'm still working on this. I actually think the process of fundraising was invaluable to our company. And to me as an entrepreneur, to be able to really tap into those ideas and the long term vision, you know, so we were fortunate to raise about five and a half million in this round, we'd already raised a million kind of precede from a lot of fantastic entrepreneurs, including Gulu and truebill, urban innovation fund learn capital, and a lot of fantastic angels, plus Schmidt futures, who was our original investor, I think two things that really made the round of success for us, well, three, I'll say one is the fact that we were finally able to really figure out that like big picture, that we're competing for being a universal application for everything. And there's also an opportunity to really expand and displace the power schools in the world. Because once we get in there, we can become the sort of back office operation system for schools and districts. So Power School and frontline and Blackbaud like to actually show that there are multibillion dollar publicly traded companies out there in this space that actually gave investors a lot of confidence. The second thing is, I think the I don't quite know what to call it the period of economic uncertainty, the fundraising winter, which I think we're sort of getting out of it, but there was certainly a several month period in there where people were nervous and tightening up. I think that affected the startups that had the highest multiples, right? The things that were sort of the quote, unquote, sexiest, so like crypto web three, AR VR Metaverse, and then a lot of like tech enabled services, I think got hit the hardest because they probably had the most lofty valuations. And Tech has never been sexy to investors. And unfortunately, you know, maybe some areas of the course areas of the world some of the more consumer, almost edutainment, those have been interesting, but sort of traditional of in K 12. Education Technology software has never been sexy, and I think had always been like it doesn't quite have the same, you know, 100 billion dollar upside like, okay, it could be a billion dollar business, but could it be 100 billion? I think that mindset shifted and actually like, oh, wait, you're bringing in like real revenue, like you're cashflow positive at a year old, you're competing for multimillion dollar RFPs and five year contracts. So I think the things that had made at Tech feel slightly less sexy, and a very frothy market, actually in a potential downturn became quite attractive. The fact that we were, you know, profitable or cashflow positive at the time we were fundraising, and had a very clear path to revenue and very clear unit economics and very clear go to market strategy and cost of customer acquisition and could show these RFPs of school districts asking for what we were selling. In some ways, we were a lot less risky. And so I think more capitals are to flow to these, you know, maybe less sexy, but you know, stronger business model. And I think the pandemic and this kind of fundraising winter has shown the rise of solid business models and

Alexander Sarlin: 37:58

business plans. Fantastic answer really, really interesting. You know, I think you're lying earlier, you know, Zillow for schools sort of covers a lot of it, right? I mean, that's an idea that is both sort of infrastructural and a little bit sexy and consumer II at the same time, and I can see why it's sort of really interesting for investors and why. And I will say, you know, I actually did speak to about six months ago. And I can say, from experience, this idea has gotten a whole lot more bigger picture and tighter and thought it's really impressive to see the shaping of it. And you know, it's exciting. You know, Greg, I wish you had more time we're coming on the end of our time, I wanted to ask you the questions. I know, you'll have great answers to them. Questions we end every podcast with, what do you see as one of the most exciting trends in the EdTech landscape that everybody should keep an eye on? And I know we already talked a little bit about, you know, the rise of alternative schooling, you can still go there if you'd like. But what do you think is right around the next corner? On the counter, not

Greg Bybee: 38:54

repeat the same answer again?

Alexander Sarlin: 38:56

I know. Sorry. I sort of painted you in the corner there on that one.

Greg Bybee: 39:01

I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, the biggest trend I see is the increase in alternative schooling, a competitive marketplace, more options for families. You know, another one that I'll point to that I think is important is that there's an increased focus on parental rights, curriculum transparency, and really parent engagement. And I think this can be challenging. I think, unfortunately, schools and districts are at the forefront of a lot of cultural wars, certainly around masking and vaccine mandates and critical race theory. So there's a lot we have to work out there. But I think this is also an opportunity. I mean, educators have been hoping for parents to get more involved to come to school board meetings or school board meetings used to be a very kind of dry meeting, and we wanted parents to get involved and now they are and unfortunately, there's a lot of you know, social media bias and influence and the media, of course, is trying to make everything kind of extreme. And so I think are some education we have to do. But I think this is also a big opportunity to engage parents who are taking a renewed interest in like asking about the curriculum, like, when Has this happened before? And so yeah, we're, it's harder because we now need to actually explain the curriculum and why we're using the books we're using, and why we have these policies we do. But I think this is also opens up a huge opportunity to become closer to the parents engage the parents in their child's education, and connect with the community more.

Alexander Sarlin: 40:26

super interesting. Yeah. I mean, you talk on our weekend ed tech podcast pretty frequently about the culture wars and the sort of political polarization that is starting to show up at school board meetings and, you know, demands to see curriculum, and they've been, you know, there's a big banning of a Tony Morrison book this week, and it's becoming a really fraught environment. But I like your take on that it's sort of positive, and at least people are paying attention to what happens in school is something good about that. And lastly, what is one resource that you would recommend to our listeners, it can be a book or blog newsletter report. For anyone who wants to go deeper into some of the topics we talked about today.

Greg Bybee: 41:03

I'll give a couple quick ones. One is a fantastic article by the Center for American Progress by Ulrich balsa and Meg Brenner, and actually progress interviewed in that it's a nerdy article about student assignment algorithms. And so if that's of interest, I highly recommend that all Roth who I mentioned was Prague's advisor who won the Nobel Prize, he wrote a fantastic book called who gets what and why, really, actually fairly easy read for such a complex topic, but describes how economists think about allocating scarce resources when money can't be used. So things like kidneys, or seats in public schools, even things like parking permits and hunting permits. So really interesting. And one other one that I would offer more to the entrepreneurs in the group is one of the beauties of selling to large governments, public schools districts, is that large purchases have to go to RFP or request for proposal. And while this is the bane of many of our existence and elongate sales cycles, it can increase cost of customer acquisition. But it's also a fantastic source of information about school districts needs. And so obviously, you should go interview hundreds of administrators or teachers, whoever your your audience is, but in addition, you can go back and there's archives of all these RFPs and basically, school districts are telling you exactly what they want. Now, I think this sort of famous Henry Ford analogy is very applicable here. You know, they're all asking for faster horses. And so you have to read between the lines and the call. That doesn't mean what they need is a faster horse. They need the car, but at least it's people telling you in their own words, what their problems are and what they think they need.

Alexander Sarlin: 42:36

Fantastic. We will put links to the Center for American Progress article, the Al Roth book, who gets what and why. And to an archive of district RFPs. Sounds like some fun reading would have a very useful for entrepreneurs and those interested in schools in the show notes for this episode. Greg Bybee from Avella. Thank you so much and best of luck with all your, you know, amazing, adjacent ideas, you're gonna be the matchmaker of the world.

Greg Bybee: 43:05

Thank you, Alex. I appreciate it. It's great chatting.

Alexander Sarlin: 43:08

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