Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies. Hello, everybody, it is December we are in winter full on holiday mode is the weekend ed tech from Ed Tech insiders. I'm your co host, Ben Cornell. I'm here with Alex Arlen. We are excited to bring you a potpourri of news and happenings in ad tech. Before we do that, though, Alex, what's going on at Tech insiders this week. So we just put out a terrific episode with Kate Everly Walker from presents that do teletherapy it's really, really interesting. And before the end of the year, we have an episode with Sharon Thomas from Osmo, which is obviously a by Juice Company talking about hands on learning from the perspective of inside the great ad tech behemoth that is by Jews, and terrific episode with Heather Chen and Makayla Castro of Praxis labs, all about how they do diversity training in VR. So some really interesting guests, I definitely recommend all of those episodes. And the other big update this week is Alex and family got COVID So pardon the gravelly voice, Alex, we're so glad you're feeling better and having Yes, please forgive me. I'm going to sound very, very scratchy today, but hanging in there. Well, let's get started with the big headline this week, which is the rise of generative AI in education. We had a chat GPT for release. That's open AIS chat bot where you can play around with games and prompts. Also Dali has opened up so the chat GBT is text and Dali is images. And these previously were kind of waitlisted gated experiences. But now it is exploding and blowing up the questions around. What are the implications for AI in education has been debated for a long, long time, you know, some dating back even 100 years, around machine learning machines and education. But there's been a flurry of op eds from good friends as well as major thinkers around how will this play out in in education. We're going to add a bunch of those links in the show notes as you get up to speed. But Alex, what are some of the articles that grabbed your attention? And then also, you know, what's your take on where AI and you know, this GPT language software will go in terms of long term in education, really exciting and kind of mind boggling time for the AI world. So a couple of weeks back we saw our friend Alberto Larranaga from the Transcend network put out part one of his how AI will change education newsletter, I highly recommend that it does a really nice job of walking through different use cases. And some of the companies that are really breaking into this in last week's ad tech insiders newsletter we linked to Hannah Salinas, what is generative AI, she is an ad tech entrepreneur who has been using generative AI and chat GPT to create educational content, basically asking the computer to write these long essays, which then become educational content. They're checking for accuracy, and they create their own images. They're basically making their own textbooks with no people. It's kind of mind boggling. But there's a lot of cool stuff happening. If you've been on, you know, on LinkedIn or following any kind of tech news over the last week or two. It's hard to avoid this. I think the big take that I've read over and over again, for Ed Tech. And I don't know if this is actually the best takeaway but if AI is this good at writing realistic, you know, human writing, like essays and reports and journal articles, it might mean that students can use it to cheat that you there's no way to know if something was written by a person or an AI. There was an article about how in the future they're going to force students to do all their writing in persons to make sure that they don't have access to any of these chat bots. I don't think that's actually a pretty narrow take this educational plagiarism take it's interesting, but I'd much rather look at the bright side of this, which is content written spoken visual is suddenly incredibly cheap. You can make anything into an image anything into good text out there. You can even do extend out voice like, there's AI, where if you take the first 10 seconds of someone talking, it'll continue them talking in their voice in a logical way. It'll just be like, This is what they would have said next, and I'll start talking in their voice. There's crazy stuff happening. So I'm really more excited, not about the integrity piece. As much as what does this mean for educational content creators? What does it mean for personalization? How might we allow students to be able to learn in like, 1000 different ways they could tell you their favorite baseball player, and it could do the whole Lex lesson using that baseball players voice and image and writing stories about them. I mean, that is insane. And I think you know, as educators, we should really just begin to think about the unbelievable potential for this technology to be able to create education that we've just never imagined before. Yeah, I share your enthusiasm. So for our listeners, what's really exciting is Alex is not really here, that was recording of his voice. And AI has created that entire hot take from Alex using chat GPT. No, I'm totally kidding. But basically, also, I am now experiencing the new trope in AI expos, AES, which is basically every article starts off with like, five paragraphs that then haha, that was created by chat GPT. It's amazing how old that trope has already gotten in these articles. My God, I think the main takeaway headline here is, drop what you're doing, and go to Open AI, and play with chat GPT and play with Dolly. And then let your mind wander to what's possible. There are few moments in technology where you get a visceral experience of what a new paradigm could be the first time you used an iPhone, or the first time you took a cell phone call, or you saw you know, for the first time you logged on to the internet and downloaded pirated music. I mean, whatever the kind of where were you when this thing happened for technology? This? I don't think open AI has like a lock on the potential of this technology. But what they do have is an experience that helps any user access the full potential of how this could be game changing. And what I think this does is actually incredibly positive and important for education. What you know the article from the Atlantic that we linked here, let's see it is the author is in Bogost his paragraph. So it says first and foremost, chat GPT lacks the ability to truly understand the complexity of human language in conversation. It is simply trained to generate words based on a given input, but it does not have the ability to truly comprehend the meaning behind those words. This means that any responses it generates are likely to be shallow and lacking. And I thought, exactly and in education, we are not asking for not depth and insight. And then come to find out in the article, that paragraph was written by Chet GPT. And then his second paragraph authored by the actual author says chat GPT and the technologies that underlie it are less about persuasive writing, and more about superb bullshitting, a bullshitter plays with the truth for bad reasons to get away with something. initial response to chat GPT assumes as much that it is a tool to help people contrive student essays, or news writing or whatever else. It's an easy conclusion. For those who assume that AI is meant to replace human creativity rather than amended. The takeaway I have from this great analysis, and it's just a fun article to read, is that education has to move away from bullshit. And basically, we've created these constructs where we train kids to write five paragraph essays, which require very low cognitive lift, and our schools reward compliance and structured repetitive thinking versus genuine, authentic, critical thinking, creativity, etc, etc. Now, what's my faith in, you know, typical in traditional schools are not in school board, like what's what's my faith in our institutions to be able to make that pivot and effectively discern what is authentic learning and creation? My expectation on the 10 year horizon is pretty low. And what are those institutions do then? Well, they will create these like, you know, monitoring and testing situations where you can access these things. That's, that's the compliance factory model trying to hold on But you definitely, we are in a breakout mode and learners will not be contained, they cannot be contained. I'm like, I'm 42 years old, and I'm playing with chat TPT. And I'm realizing that there's kids that for a year or two years has been fleecing everybody with this stuff. And now the gig is up. And they're the kids are going to be ahead of us. And so I just this is longer rant than I anticipated. But my advice to every listener is drop what you're doing, go play with this. And then rather than protect, defend, hold on to your old models or your territory, lean into how can this unlock the potential of learners? How can this unlock your business? And I think that it's incredibly exciting. I totally agree. I'll give you a funny example of one of those moments like that sort of drop your jaw kind of moments that I've had with generative AI this week. So I've been playing a lot with this Kinu app, which I really like. And a lot of it a lot of the new content is generated with AI. I was doing a little section about the French Revolution, right? And it's a little paragraph about the storming of the Bastille and at the bottom there like, Okay, here's a photograph of people storming the Bastille and you look, you see this photo, black and white, you know, good resolution of French people storming the Bastille on the revolution. And I'm like, wait a second. I mean, all their images are AI. It's a photograph. That is not possible, right. I mean, it was a perfectly realistic photo of the French revolutionary storming the Bastille. And I'm like, there you go. If there's a moment where you're like, oh, wait, talk about making history come alive, right? I mean, you can do really weird stuff with this. With this technology. I was chatting with my wife about some possibilities. And she was like, if you're teaching counting, you can literally ask a kid like, what do you want to count? And that could be I want three, anything three, myself three, Abraham Lincoln riding a donkey, three, whatever, three moose is on a Christmas trees. And it's like, yeah, you could have as many of anything as you want instantly generated. The most memorable thing, your favorite thing interest based, however you want to do it, educators can do it, students can do it. I mean, we're just going to be in this bizarre world, where imagination is just totally boundless. And we're in a world where teaching children and younger learners to discern what is real, what is not real. It's going from vitamin to aspirin. I mean, I think all these like digital citizenship curriculums and so on have been viewed as nice to have, oh, you know, somebody is trying to like, do misinformation. And then all of a sudden, we see the elections are turning on misinformation. And now we have technology that create production of true fiction, actively false content, whether it's visual, or videos coming, you know, videos coming. Yeah, the idea that there's some sort of like deep fake rules of the road or standards, that we just have not seen the technology companies able to impose that. And we certainly haven't seen the legislative ability to really dial that in. And so I think the question is, like, how do you steer this for good for the greatest good, and I hope our listeners are figuring this stuff out. Because as I look at it, it's like incredible power. If there aren't, like 20, new edtech companies in six months, based entirely on this as its core 200, then we're not paying attention. Because you can do so much with this. I mean, I've already heard about startups, to illustrate kids books, using it to personalize anything, I would got an ad on Instagram the other day where you can get a painting of your child on a dinosaur anything made like these are things that used to take human work, they just don't anymore. You know, the thing that gets me excited as a learning designer, which is like, this is like a funny angle on this. But we know from a learning design perspective, that certain things work a lot better than others, right? We know, for example, that we know that assessment, lots of assessment, lots of applied practice, with good feedback is really what people need. And the thing that constrains that is literally that there's just not enough people to write good questions to assess people on it sounds stupid, but it's true or instantaneous feedback. We also know from learning designs in mind that the timeliness of the feedback is a barrier and the educator often cannot process it quickly enough to make it relevant and actionable for the learner. Exactly. So the idea of being able to do infinite questions, instantaneous feedback on anything, we know that our minds are much better at remembering certain things than others. We remember, you know, outrageous things or novel things or places really well, or things that are familiar to us in particular ways or, and it's like, as an educator, I mean, a teacher can say, Okay, I'm going to make my spelling sheet for all of my second graders. And for every kid, I'm going to do a completely different sheet with beautiful full color images to help them remember all the words that are aligned to each kid's individual interests. And all I have to do to make that is type it oh, this kid loves Pokemon this kid loves, loves Roblox, this kid loves, you know, baseball, this kid loves tennis, and it'll just generate it all for me. I mean, it's unreal what you can do. That's what it's capable of today. I will also say you and I know about Chiron learning, which is a video tutor that is using AI. And it is it's not totally beat fake. But it's essentially, you know, once you get enough recording of an educator giving feedback, it allows for a video based tutoring experience driven by AI with a 80% accuracy rate that then can be up leveled into an individual life person. The other company that comes to mind is ello, which has basically been investing in speech recognition for kids. Think of all the work that Alexa and all these organizations have done around voice recognition, voice to text, you know, interactivity around voice, you know, for kids that can't read and write voice is their method of learning and technology. And they're cracking the code on understanding kids voices. So there's a couple other companies too, so box labs comes to mind to there. So if we think about what is our new data capability around AI, then where we get to is, are we training the AI models on quality inputs? What kinds of companies have access to the massive amounts of data that would be required? And how can we make it accessible in a user friendly, like engaging way for kids, educators, and family. So you know, like our paradigm of educators, and I just think that what's clear here is, we're going to be kind of getting to these breakthrough moments. And then we'll struggle, struggle, struggle, and then another breakthrough. And I think we just had one of those this last week, just a slight tangent here. I remember the first time I did use an iPhone, it was my friend, Daniel's iPhone many years ago, and we're standing on the street, and he opened it up. And he's and it was like, okay, it had a map on it. And it was like, Oh, that's nice, you know, you don't have to carry a map. And he's like, oh, and then click here. And it shows you where you are on the map. And I was like, oh, that's definitely really useful. You can do that with a normal map. We teach you can you imagine, right? I'm like, Well, my problem is, I never know which way I'm facing. I'm terrible directions. And he's like, Oh, you click here. And it's a compass. And it shows you which way you're facing. And then of course, you know, you have your web browser. And here you can have anything on the internet. And it was like, it was one of these things where it's like, oh, wait, this is completely going to change the world. Like, you know, each new thing just made it clearer and clearer. And you know, when you look at, we've been playing with mid journey, which is like dolly image creating, you know, generative AI engine, and it is so crazy what you can do with them, you can give it a style, you can give it color palettes, you can give it any you can tell any subject, any era, any artists style. I mean, it's unbelievable how good it is. And it's like, not only is this going to change education, this is going to change, like how we think about knowledge. I think it's such a limited viewpoint to think about cheating as the first issue here. Because in many ways, like kids growing up now where they are going to have access to all of this stuff, you know, in their professional life. Like these technologies, you can write a paragraph, and it'll finish the entire paper is the word or the concept cheating, totally done for what does she mean anymore? If we're essentially saying, hey, child, your challenge is a five paragraph essay that is totally replicable and totally formulaic. The answer is put it in a freaking AI bot, because that's the point in life for now on like, boom, so we've it becomes about the prompt, and it's about the prompt. Your AI output is better by writing better prompts, but we in education have to write better prompts for learners, because it's about data regurgitation, their best solution to that problem should be an AI Chatbot. All of us who have been in educational technology for years have talked about how the Internet chain is the nature of access to knowledge, right? It's like it's a silly thing to ask somebody to go home for homework and find out who was the president in 1862. Because that's not, you know, it doesn't take any research skill, it doesn't take any libraries, you just you ask Siri or whatever this takes it to a new level, because it can actually output the information in any format you want. So it's not just about looking at Wikipedia, or it's not just about googling it and then trying to translate it into the ridiculous, you know, five essay format or filling in the blanks in your worksheet, it will literally do the entire thing for you. It'll it can do things in lab report formats, it can do things in I mean, it's crazy. So I think, yeah, I agree with you, I think it takes the idea that children should be taking knowledge and putting it into very particular formats. And that's the work that that we want from them, it just throws that out the window, because they not only should they not be learning that and probably shouldn't have been learning that for a while. But they'll never need to do that they'll never need to do it completely by scratch. But it also opens new forms of learning. So like I saw, in some of the write ups that we had, the ability to critique, AI generated writing is actually a very higher order cognitive skill. And you can look at, here's one prompt, and here's another prompt, look at the five paragraph essays that it generated you learner, which is the more convincing argument and why? What would a human versus an AI, say here? And where does this mesh with your viewpoint or not? Now all of a sudden, you're doing textual comparison of two texts that essentially never existed in the world, you just invented two texts. And now you're doing synthesis, which is the higher order thinking. So there is a nonprofit out there, I'm struggling to remember the name so we can, but it's a nonprofit around helping people understand AI, and how training educators on how to leverage this for the benefit of kids. And I do think we're just going to need a lot of adult training, and almost new pedagogical theories around how to, you know, we should be thinking about Ed schools differently, and how they train teachers. Because this new system really throws out a lot of the pedagogic go twos for most folks, well, we have spent a good deal of time on this topic about 1213 minutes here. So we want to cover the other topics, we would also love to hear from you about what your experience is, what are your biggest fears? And what are your greatest excitement about chat TPT and AI in education. So put that on our LinkedIn balance. Another big development this week is just interesting acquisitions. Tell us what you're seeing in the space. Yeah, a bunch of intriguing acquisitions and roll ups in ed tech all coming within the last week that I think are worth discussing sort of on their own, rather than holding them all for the end of the show. So you know, one is the British MOOC platform, Future Learn, which is sort of one of the generation with, you know, edX, and Coursera. And Udacity was just sold to global universities systems is that what it stands for G U. S, which basically owns a whole bunch of universities in Europe and Canada. And it's about as they'll now be chaired by Joe Johnson, who is actually I think, the brother of Boris Johnson in England, but it's a Dutch British education network buying out FutureLearn Future Learn has not been making money for quite a while. And I think this is something that's going to sort of, it'll take the sort of Future Learn open MOOCs and use them as probably as a channel for acquisition into these various, you know, higher paid or university property. So I found that interesting. I've been in that MOOC role for a while. We also saw our friend of the podcast active that has revolutionized chemistry learning, get acquired this week by Top Hat education, which is going to you know, really scale it like crazy and I think that is an exciting one for Justin Wattenberg. We saw simply learn by full stack Academy which is one of the bigger boot camps that has been around for a while in New York. That's another boot camp roll up. We saw go student we've talked about them for a while on the pot, the Viennese Austrian based tutoring company acquiring a whole network of in person tutoring centers throughout Europe, following that trend of going, you know, back into in person after the pandemic and we saw Australian ad tech Moodle, which we all know for their LMS they've been around for quite a while acquire a Indian startup called EBS. I have no idea if I'm pronouncing that correctly, as a part of their India acquisition. So like, I mean, I know I'm listing these pretty fast but these are pretty big names as sometimes they're pretty big names on sort of both sides of the acquisition. And, you know, you've been you and I have talked about how, in this sort of slight ed tech winter of funding when, you know, things are sort of getting leaner and more, you know, layoffs and everything, how there's going to be some roll ups. This felt like a lot of roll ups of sorts of companies we follow. I'm curious if any of these stand out to you, in particular, sort of what's your take on the merger, the flurry of mergers. In the big picture, when we talked about the Ed Tech winter descending upon us that was really like March, April? No, because q1, there was still a fair amount of activity going on. And things were riding pretty hot, we said, we're entering a phase where we would expect to see a lot more m&a. And what I think is really clear, I just saw a thing, a news article from the information. That's something like 80% of early stage startups have less than one year of runway. So in the next 12 months, we're just going to see a flurry of closures of layoffs or acquisitions. And there's just no way that the capital, there's still plenty of capital on the sidelines, that it's going to be deployed to these 80% that are struggling, it's going to be deployed now to the winners to win more. And what we're seeing is this double down on winners. Now, the one that I really liked the most was the top hat active one, because it actually projected like a strength of partnership, you have somebody who really owns a vertical, which is chemistry and science education. And one of the things that I really liked about active learning is they said, Throw out the kind of generalist technology and learning platform and build technology that actually supports the unique learning modalities of each given discipline. And the challenge that they always faced was, okay, how will you get enough channel and scale? And how will you layer on new disciplines? Well, this, like marriage makes tons of sense, top hat has been a long term player in the space. And it goes to show that top hat is also not going to raise money and just tried to build and take over others. But they're going to be acquisitive, and rolling up, that seems like a great strategy. And, you know, for top hat, they kind of my impression of them was they're a big winner, they're kind of aggregating some market share. And then things had kind of flattened out, this could be a new era for them to really higher ed space. And it means that for active learning, they can focus on building great products, which in the end, like learners meant, in that that scenario, some of the boot camp roll ups, I think, are less certain how to take it because the boot camp space being so hot, there was a many flowers bloom kind of moment. And now we really have a culling of the herd. And so it's hard to know how much of these moves are out of strategic upside versus desperation and actually feel like this area is going to be even more unstable in the new year. So into you slash of the two you trilogy, book boot camps, and how as they become edX, how will that play out? I think that's a big, big question. Ultimately, for our listeners, I think it is a time where everyone's looking at their own company and saying, Okay, what is our best case scenario? What is our worst case scenario? How do we live in both of those scenarios simultaneously? How do we move forward in this cash constrained environment? So more m&a? I like that analysis? A lot of like, yes, if the funding starts to dry up last spring, you know, the clock starts ticking for all of these small companies that are, you know, just don't have a lot of runway. And I think that's an interesting take on it. It makes a lot of sense. I found this NGO Student One really interesting, just because, you know, there's just this like palpable sense, that post pandemic, whether online or in person, or hybrid or sort of leader, what is the preferred delivery model for education, and it depends on you know, regions and countries and things is just so wildly up in the air and you can almost just like feel these companies, a lot of especially a lot of the tutoring companies that trying to like, put their chips down in different places. And I thought it was just it was interesting to see go student follow some of the big Indian companies in saying, you know, what, we are going to try to get ahead of the backwards curve and go back into in person, really interest. I mean, I think the company they bought was founded in 1974. So, you know, it's just a really different era and they're saying, let's go back really go offline and have you know, hundreds of tutoring centers around Europe. and combine that with what we're doing with our, you know, million online tutoring sessions a month. It's a really, I can't tell if it's a sign of sort of like strategic slickness and confidence or if it's just a sort of like throwing your hands up in the air and saying I will have people want to go back and person won't go there. But either way, I just think it's interesting to watch the pendulum swing sort of faster and faster, mean to like bootcamps tutoring space, a lot of shake up common. And I think the Go student case and paper are particularly interesting to watch, because they've raised significant capital. So they are as likely to face this like 12 year cliff. But given the valuations that they raised, that they do have an urgency from investors to like, keep their growth going, and potentially consolidate. And that is a, that's a tricky dance to do. And when your like, Core Model is all virtual, now you're gonna do decentralized service businesses, it's tough. But ultimately, if they can land it, that hub and spoke model of like anchored physical locations, with like a web of online, really does or could work. And two ways that it works is you can anchor on the in person, and then provide real time engagement over the days when not in person. But also in terms of figuring out which new markets do I want to open physical centers, and you can essentially see demand through online to then open new physical center. So a lot of people you know, this is a very common practice in healthcare, where they do home health, that then precedes an outpatient clinic that precedes a big hospital or things like that. It's a growth model that reduces your upfront investment costs, but executing on that, especially in the education space when your users churn because they age out that's really challenging. Speaking of aging out and turn, let's turn to headline number three, which is really a couple articles one from money control.com, a new entrant into our reading library, around money still moving into upskilling. The contrast between K 12 and higher ed and upskilling, or workforce is quite stark. Right now given that there is a true edtech PRINTER AND gate 12. And upskilling continues to get investment. The article brings a bunch of different companies together, including some that are in India, like up grad, they talk a little bit about simply learn and scalar. So I think there is a little bit of a veer here towards some of the Indian tech sector. But what I will say is the math when you're an investor is what is the total addressable market? How much do you think that you can grab in terms of share, and what is the revenue potential per user of that, and then they look at the CAC versus LTV ratio and say, okay, that there's like an investment hypothesis here for nonlinear growth, what we see in K 12, and in higher ed, is that the b2b models are the most likely to succeed because of the turn in consumer, which means slower sales cycles, which means higher customer acquisition costs, and only those models that figure out high LTV win. And that's very hard to work on a venture capital return timeline, which needs like accelerated up to the right growth, and like an exit path in the like six to eight years timeline. So I will say listeners, don't worry too much, because there's other funding forms besides venture capital. But I do think that it does go to show that this you know, workforce is going to get a disproportionate share of the dollar. The other thing I would just say is in downtimes, you know, having a shorter life cycle to pay off for the buyer is really important. And so we've been talking about this modularization of higher ed and workforce in it, and K 12. But in workforce, it really does create a kind of time to value where my moment of buying and then my moment of getting the promotion or getting the job or like having a positive financial payback. It's just a much clearer, faster value prop. And I think that that's also something that people are responding to in this space in the Indian context. It's still a fast, fast race. And now these questions of who are the quality providers versus who are the quantity providers, I think is getting to be more important. In more are established markets. I think the question is like around credentialing and signals of quality. So there's a little bit I think of nuance as we look at developing markets versus developing markets, you know, this space quite well. Alex, I'm so interested to hear your take, as we see workforce take off while the rest of us freeze in winter. I mean, I think I agree with everything you're saying. I think building off last week's McKinsey report that really went out of its way to say, almost all the companies that are really, really getting funding and sort of continuing to grow have a major b2b component, I think you're seeing that in law, as you say it certainly in India, and a lot of our articles this week are a lot of them are from the Indian ad tech space, which is, you see that divide very starkly of K 12, going down and university even going down and workforce going up. I think people understand b2b better, I don't know how else to put it, I think at your point about time to value is definitely there. But I also think it's like, there's many more people in the world who know how to do b2b sales than to know how to do beat up school sales or be to university sales. It there's many more playbooks, there's many more procurement or, you know, ways to contracts that you can pull off a shelf, it's just like, it's a bigger world. And because every side of a b2b sale is a business, they all are sort of incentivized to move fast with sort of minimal regulation. And I think that, you know, one of the things that, you know, we everybody in ad tech, especially in the K 12 side knows that, you know, when you're doing something that is ostensibly connects to a public good, or a government good, or nonprofits like, like universities in the US, at least, there's just additional complexity to it. I think your point about the lifetime value is really key. There's also the fact that, you know, if you just look at the lifespan of a person, right, they're only in fifth grade for a year, they're only in K six for, you know, six years, but they're at work for, you know, 40 years. And so like the idea of if you're really seeking lifetime value, and having consistent customers, whether they're individuals or businesses, most people spend most of their life as adults in the workforce. So it does, I mean, it sounds so silly, but it makes sense that there's more sort of pure money and pure, you know, pure value to be made there, as well as the outcomes are clear. I mean, there's another interesting thing coming out of the hour and reach reports over the last few weeks is that if you look at the K 12 outcomes for different companies, you know, they're like about standardized test scores or grades at the end of the year, or engagement or usage. You know, they all define outcomes a little bit differently. But if you look at the outcomes for a lot of the workforce companies, it's always the same, it's hiring and promotions, you know, and everybody knows those incredibly well, they're very easy to measure. They're already in systems that are really, you know, tracked. So I just think there are a lot of like, infrastructural advantages to working in b2b. And I think in a time when there's a lot of uncertainty, which there is right now, it's a really easy thing to fall back to, which is I think, what a lot of both the companies and the investors are doing. I don't think I said a whole lot that you hadn't already said. But it is a it is an interesting moment. And I mean, a little depressing. I do hope that we don't stay in a world where workforce continues to rise in K 12. Ed Tech continues to drop, but I think it makes sense as a sort of, like defensive crouch response to this weird moment, you know? Yeah. And I also do think that this question around how do we create b2c learning models that scale effectively? I think that that continues, there certainly is individual examples of that. But we don't have like a well trod path for public consumption, you know, individually making a decision about their own learning as a like scalable, sustainable business. And that continues to be something that I feel like public media, policymakers, etc, need to help consumers understand what should they be looking for in a learning experience? Because as you mentioned, the outcomes are some somewhat opaque. All right, and, you know, as we kind of elevate finally to public markets, big companies, let's talk about the financial market update front. We got a great article from Phil Hill. Yeah, I mean, this will be a brief one, but I definitely recommend people follow the link in the show notes because, you know, longtime education observer, Phil Hill put out a really nice visualization and short article this week, basically trying to track what has happened over the last, you know, year and a half to a lot of the public edtech companies of which there are not that many. And he basically cites it at the beginning of it is Coursera IPO, which is in March of 2021. That's the sort of first moment that he cites and at that moment, and then from there, sort of where did things go and you know, but it's a pretty intense thing to look at. Because you see a couple of companies do pretty well. You see Pearson, we've mentioned on the platform and Instructure, which are two, I mean, Instructure is relatively new, but they're a little bit, you know, traditional companies. And these are also companies that failed mentions started cutting costs and laying people off and streamlining earlier than many of the other companies, they've been around a long time. And they sort of saw maybe some of this coming, and they're up, you know, 25% in terms of stock price, since that time, but everything else in the space is down. And a few you know, darlings are way down. So places like Desire to Learn down 64%. Since then check, we know I've had a bunch of troubles down 66% Coursera 71% To you down 81% Like a whole suite of edtech companies that have just gone down evaluation so much in the last year and a half and and not very many that have even stayed flat. It's just you know, we've talked about it a little on the on the pod before but it is looking at this chart gives you a little bit of the heebie jeebies about the space. What do you think when you follow the financial world? What do you think when you look at a chart like this? Well, first off, I think it just goes to show that some of these older companies that have had a strong history of performance, they're doing better than the new entrants. And if you look at the overall performance of, you know, a Pearson, one wouldn't have predicted that they would outperform typical edtech. The other company that I looked at is Scholastic, Scholastic closed at 39 Point 18. And when we go back to their earlier date, they were at 3121. So they've, they're not on his chart, I don't think they're really considered ad tech per se scholastics up like 25%. And that has to do with the fact that these publishing oriented businesses have omni channel revenue stream and omni channel protects you, because you're able to size up or size down your force, but also from a content generation and acquisition standpoint, you have this nucleus of content that you're able to monetize through many different channels. And so I do feel like So a common investor trope, is when you see a pitch deck and somebody says, I'm gonna monetize in five different ways you say they're distracted. They don't know what their business model is. They haven't figured that out. But actually, and on the mature side, the best businesses are sheltered by the fact that they have a b2b channel, they have a b2c channel, and that those different channels go through lots of different you know, it's advertising its subscriptions. It's like for example, flashcards have been the number one selling education product on Amazon. Now, no head tech investor is investing in physical flashcards. But man, like is that a great way to make a great business and for the Pearson's, and this classics, of course, they're gonna have like 13 different skews of flashcards. So I do think that, you know, as we think about, we kind of started the show, talking about chat, GPT, and all the new seed startups that are going to start there. And then we kind of marched along to like more mature companies trying to figure their way out and m&a. Now, we are here to the end of the lifecycle in publicly traded companies, and it's just going to show that what might have helped you at early stage in terms of your business model and your go to market, you've got to evolve to kind of get to that stability. The last thing I also say is like, public markets are still very skeptical around learning as compared to other industries. So if you look at healthcare and market cap, if you look at market cap around construction and infrastructure industries, education, which has trillions of dollars spent annually, is far undervalued in terms of capital markets. So my view is that there's still significant opportunity. And my my last last comment is, I've been watching the World Cup and these bio Jews ads are everywhere. And I would just recommend people to read that towers article on this. Many of the Baijiu ads were purchased like a year or two in advance of the World Cup and Lionel Messi sponsorship feels like this big breakout moment for Ed Tech, but it's contrasted with all of their layoffs. So I do think that you know, I want to give kudos to the marketing people who said let's be bold, let's be big. We're gonna be sponsoring the World Cup. And you know, things haven't necessarily played out exactly as by Jews would have wanted, but I do feel like as you know, some of these companies do They are holding the flag. They're carrying the torch for many of us. And, you know, kudos for them to being, you know, ambitious and audacious in some of those activities, even if you know they get hammered in the press later for that. Well, it is time for us to do our m&a and investment rundown. Let's jump into it. So in the funding and m&a world, we saw Sapia or sapien.ai, a Melbourne Australia based company raised $17 million to interview frontline workers via chat bot, it puts together two of the themes from this week about AI based learning or AI buys AI based companies and, you know, workforce development and b2b as sort of where things continue to go. We saw Mumbai based prism force raise 14 million as a planning and recruiting platform for it and tech services. Again, b2b workforce, we saw a symbol that's si M Bel, out of Paris raised $4 million, again, for b2b help medium and small businesses create learning and development paths, this l&d workforce world again and again and again, we saw another Australian ed tech called SAS guru. That's you know, SAS as in software as a service raise $4 million for exam preparation for widely used Cloud technology certifications. So that's like AWS certification, Microsoft certification, Salesforce certification, that's so we saw companies like a cloud guru a couple of years ago, and this is going going at a four impact organization sort of a attempt to get people those meaningful certifications that can get career acceleration, they raised 4 million out of Sydney, and then London based vector AI raised 2.5 million for mentoring. And so we are across the board here none of those companies are based in K 12 or university they're all business to business so you can see that you know, how that sort of working in the in the funding side on the m&a side we already mentioned a bunch of big ones with a simply were an acquiring full stack and and go student and whatnot. There were a couple more really right off the presses. So brilliant, acquired Hello Soros. So hello Soros is a interactive programming software and entertainment company that sort of puts together children's media and an app it's like Mr. Rogers for the iPhone generation has been called and it's was just bought by brilliant which does, you know, STEM learning courses in app format we saw Mattel is one of the largest toy makers in the world acquire caribou which is a interactive digital offering the shop out of Miami that mentioned there is that that sort of may be a sign that Mattel is going to follow in Legos footsteps in developing more multimedia and movies. We saw universal Technical Institute which is Phoenix based publicly traded company for automotive repair training by Concord career colleges so that's sort of a merger of two different career and technical education university plays and we saw Eden red capital investing in five min five mins AI the TIC tock style learning platform that's really more of a funding than an acquisition but five mins AI the TIC tock style learning platform. So which you know, we've seen a couple of these sort of tick tock style learning platforms come about and hopefully you know, one or one of them at least will take off and make things easier to digest for this iPhone generation. So a lot of funding and workforce, a couple of big mergers and acquisitions including top hat and active Moodle acquiring MBAs, but students have learned in full stack future FutureLearn being sold to a university conglomerate, and brilliant acquiring Hello, source. That's it for us on this week in edtech. With Ben Cornell, and Alex Sarlin. Keep tuned in. This is probably our last standard weekend Ed Tech of the year. But we're going to do a really exciting year in review episode with a bunch of some of our favorite guests. So stay tuned and watch your podcast directory for that. If it happens in a tech you can hear about it here. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.