Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Defending Schools Against Cyber Attacks and Ransomware with Oliver Page of CyberNut
Oliver Page is the Co-founder & CEO at CyberNut. Starting his journey as a teenage founder of NutKase Accessories, Oliver scaled the business to 60 countries before transitioning to cybersecurity. Now, with CyberNut, he focuses on providing schools with gamified, easy-to-use cybersecurity training. He is also an Angel Investor, and Startup Advisor.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why schools are increasingly targeted by cyberattacks.
- The real cost of ransomware attacks on schools.
- How phishing emails are exploiting vulnerabilities in education.
- Key strategies for implementing cybersecurity training in schools.
- The role of AI in the future of school cybersecurity.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:00:00] Introduction and Oliver Page’s journey from EdTech to Cybersecurity
[00:02:45] Shocking statistics: phishing and ransomware attacks in schools
[00:07:12] Why traditional cybersecurity solutions aren’t working for schools
[00:10:50] How CyberNut’s training helps schools avoid cyberattacks
[00:16:20] The role of AI and evolving cyber threats
[00:20:00] What makes an effective cybersecurity solution for schools
[00:27:30] Best practices for protecting schools from ransomware
[00:33:15] How phishing training can improve school cybersecurity
[00:39:00] The future of personalized cybersecurity training in education
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Oliver Page: Every single day, there are 3.5 billion phishing emails sent. The average click rate in education, that includes HigherEd, K-12, education as a sector, there's an average click rate of 27% on these phishing emails. In the last year alone, over 60% of K-12 schools experienced some form of ransomware and data breach. The average cost for a school to recover from a ransomware or a data breach in 2024is approximately $3.7 million.
[00:00:41] Alex Sarlin: Oh my God.
Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K 12, higher ed, and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.
And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content access. to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
Today we're talking to Oliver Page, who has founded not one, but two EdTech companies, both in spaces that we don't often cover on this show. Oliver's first company he founded as a teenager. It was called Nutcase Accessories. It still is called Nutcase Accessories.
And it's a leading provider of protective cases. For iPads and other devices in the education sector. It's in 60 countries and Oliver went from founder to the VP of sales, where he did a lot of founder led sales. Recently Oliver founded his second ed tech company. CyberNut, CyberNut is at the forefront of addressing the urgent cybersecurity training needs in K 12 education globally.
CyberNut's on a mission to empower schools with engaging, gamified cybersecurity training, making online safety accessible and actionable. Oliver's also a, angel investor and a startup advisor. He's focused on many innovators and really helps support the ed tech founder ecosystem. And you'll hear in this conversation, he has lots of great advice for other ed tech founders.
He's been a keynote speaker on stages worldwide. Oliver is passionate about making a difference in the education and tech. communities. He's leveraging his experience to inspire and guide fellow entrepreneurs. Connect with him on LinkedIn to explore how he and you might drive positive change together.
[00:02:52] Alex Sarlin: Oliver Page, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:02:57] Oliver Page: Thanks for having me, Alex.
[00:02:59] Alex Sarlin: Uh, so, you know, we always start each conversation with a little bit of a discussion of how you got into the EdTech field, and you have a particularly interesting story. You founded your first EdTech company as a teenager, uh, and has seen it to great success. Uh, you, now you're doing incredible work with, uh, CyberNut with cybersecurity, but let's start from the beginning.
Tell us about how you got into the EdTech field.
[00:03:22] Oliver Page: Absolutely. So I wasn't, uh, a super studious or academic student growing up. I'm originally Italian American. I was born in Italy. Spent 20 years over there and, uh, had the good fortune to have amazing parents that put me in a an in, in a American international school in Rome. And, um, right from the get go, uh, like a lot of young teenage boys, I was a huge Apple fan, a big Apple nerd.
And when the iPad 1 first got released, back when I was a junior in high school, I was obsessed. I was absolutely obsessed, and I pestered my parents for months. To get an iPad, I finally was able to ask one of my fellow students to ask their parent that lived in the United States to ship one over because you couldn't even buy them in Italy at the time.
And as soon as I got the iPad, I loved it, but I immediately discovered that it was impossible to hold onto. It was so slippery. And so through my creative, you know, process, I discovered this idea of why not developing a hand strap of sorts. Uh, and attaching a hand strap to an iPad case, which in this day and age, you know, it's a, it's a no brainer.
Everyone knows about cases that have hand straps, but back in 2011, it was cutting edge. And, um, I started looking for factories on Alibaba. I just started going down the rabbit hole and, um, thankfully I was able to prototype a pretty cool iPad case that had a hand strap and that's what got me into the world of entrepreneurship from a very young age.
Um, The cool thing, though, is that my very first order was from my elementary school, which was another international school in Rome that had just bought a hundred iPads. And so, right from the get go, my first client was a school, and that's what gave me, and by selling them these cases, it gave me the inspiration of saying, Wait a second, instead of trying to build a consumer brand for iPad cases, Why not build an education brand targeting schools?
And I got to kind of milk the whole, I'm a student in a high school. I started this in my bedroom. So that kind of emotional, interesting appeal to the education sector and no one had that story, you know, we had a very unique story. Um, and so at the end of the day, that was how, uh, nutcase is, was the name of the brand is the name of the brand.
That's how it got started out of my bedroom in high school. And, um, it was, uh, it was a small operation at first, but then it grew into a family run business that my business partners who are my father and my cousin got involved. And now it's become a pretty established brand in the K 12 space. I'm happy to
[00:06:18] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, you're in 60 countries. It was quite a success. And you know, this is a part of the edtech world. We almost never talk about is the hardware, the physical, uh, the physical pieces of, of, uh, of the edtech world that, that we, We know are incredibly important that that insight of, uh, Hey, this is going to fall out of my hands.
That's probably gonna fall out of a lot of people's hands is an important one. You ended up as a VP of sales, um, for nut case, which means you were working directly with schools. And we'll, we'll get into later what it's like to sell to schools. Cause I, this is something that's a specialty of yours, but I'd love to get into the transition to your new company.
Cyber nut. How did you come up with that idea? And what do they do?
[00:06:57] Oliver Page: Yeah. So, you know, I think hardware. Is hard there's no doubt about it that's kind of like the tagline in the space hardware is hard and you know the big difference obviously with your hardware and software is when you ship a product out of your factory in china wherever you're making this stuff it's on a boat you can't change it.
It's done. And unfortunately, you know, in the early days of nutcase, we had a lot of lessons learned with quality control, the wrong partners in China, um, deep down as an entrepreneur, I'd always had this dream of being a tech entrepreneur. In fact, um, I started three tech companies that all failed. Um, I, that was after nutcase. CyberNut is my fourth tech company, which is now thankfully taking off, but it's really been this kind of 14 year long journey of getting to CyberNut. And I think that's really a good thing to, to, to double click on because a lot of people, I feel like think that it's all about coming up with the idea.
It's all about, you know, you wake up one day, you've got this idea. It's incredible. It's gonna be huge. You know, I've had hundreds of ideas over the past decade. I mean, thousands. I mean, you ask any of my friends or family members. It's like every every other week. I'm coming up with some new widget or idea for a business.
But I think the important message that I want to share. Is that Cybernut, our new cybersecurity training platform for schools, was a byproduct of 14 years in the making. That's really how I see it. And, you know, from a more philosophical perspective, you know, I could never have been more I would not have been ready to build the CyberNut business had I come up with the idea five years ago, ten years ago, maybe even three years ago.
I wasn't ready for it. I had to go through, as an entrepreneur, the process of Of failure and learning and building other smaller businesses in different sectors. I had to have those experiences and they weren't all failures by any stretch of an imagination. I did have some success and you know, I've had an incredible adventure as an entrepreneur, uh, over the past, uh, you know, over the past decade.
But I, I want to just say that the, the idea for CyberNut. Really, um, came from this compounding effect over the past decade of experiences. And so I think one of the first, you know, if you're, if I, if there, if there's someone in the audience that is an entrepreneur or wants to become an entrepreneur, you know, I think the best way to get involved in entrepreneurship is to just try a lot of things, get a lot of exposure, fry.
Fail, do some experimentation. If you have an idea, build a website for it, share it with your friends. If you have, if you're, if you have an idea for a hardware project, download AutoCAD and one of these Adobe free products and mess around with it. Try and prototype it, try and 3d print it. I mean, just kick, start, you know, start building some momentum and getting feedback is so important.
Um, at any stage of the entrepreneurial journey, but even more so, of course, if you're just getting started. And so with that being said, you know, over the past several years, like I shared, you know, hardware is hard. I'd always had this itching feeling that there was something. Out there. That was bigger and don't get me wrong.
Protective cases for devices is critically important. Nutcase is a phenomenal company. I'm extremely proud of it. What the team and I have been able to build over the past several years. We've got a great brand that people trust and we deliver high quality cases. The schools who are in desperate need of a high quality case to protect the investment that, you know, that the, that the, that their state and local government are making into all these expensive devices, but I always knew.
That there was going to be something else out there for me. And, um, you know, I'll be honest, cybersecurity has been on my radar for a very long time, all the way back to going to, you know, FTC or ISTE over the past several years and seeing these cyber companies. And I always had this feeling like, gosh, just cyber is the future, like our ability to protect our data.
To protect ourselves online, that is going to be the most important thing in the next, you know, 100 years to come. And so, you know, timing was, timing is everything in life, and eventually, I was in the right place at the right time. I was at a conference, actually. I was at a conference, talking to IT directors, talking to CTOs.
And everyone was complaining about cyber security training and how the software and the products they were using to actually train their faculty and their staff on how to report and spot phishing emails was very, uh, mediocre. It wasn't easy. It was, it wasn't K 12 friendly. And that, you know, whenever I hear people complaining.
About something that's another important note. If you're listening when you hear someone complaining about software or a product or a service. There's an opportunity. There's another business opportunity for you to explore. Um, and so, yeah, I started discovering that there was this whole industry, which I wasn't even aware of, that's called Security Awareness Training.
And it's this massive, multi billion dollar industry of companies that build software, uh, designed to train the employees of usually companies on how To not click on phishing emails. Now, when I first heard that, I was like This is ridiculous. Like I don't click on phishing emails. Like I'm Oliver. I don't click on phishing emails.
I know better than do I know better than that. And, you know, obviously that's not true. I had to, you know, obviously not everyone is as tech savvy as myself. And probably you, we know not to click on some of these weird emails that come into our inboxes. But unfortunately, most people are not that well, uh, trained in this space.
And they, um, and they don't know what to click on and what not to click on. Um, and so I went down the rabbit hole. I started learning about cybersecurity training. I started researching the market. I started looking at all the competitors and all the companies. There were a few big companies, one in particular called know before, which is a multi billion dollar company.
That's been around for a decade. They've built a great product. For cybersecurity training, and they've been selling these products to the enterprise market. So primarily cybersecurity training was targeted at corporations and businesses, but you know, in recent years, as we'll talk about in a moment, it's become unbelievably important for schools to also have very sophisticated, uh, cybersecurity training for their staff and faculty.
And, um, The reason for that, and I'm just going to pull up some of my, my cheat sheet here, because I do have some stats that I do think are worth sharing just to kind of help the audience understand just the magnitude of what we're talking about here. So this is data that I found through Sophos and a few other, uh, Um, cybersecurity companies that publish reports, uh, you know, Verizon and others.
Um, so from, from when I read on the internet and through this, through this data that I found, there are every day, three and a half billion phishing emails sent. Okay, every single day, there are three and a half billion phishing emails sent. education, the average click rate in education, that includes higher ed, K 12, you know, education as a sector, there's an average click rate of 27 percent on these phishing emails.
In the last year alone, over 60 percent of K 12 schools experienced some form of ransomware and data breach. Okay, so over 60 percent of educational institutions experienced some sort of ransomware and data breach. average cost for a school to recover from a ransomware or a data breach in 2024 is 1, 000, 000.
Is approximately 3. 7 million,
[00:15:46] Alex Sarlin: Oh my God.
[00:15:48] Oliver Page: right? And the, um, and then this is based off of a smaller subset of data points. So there was a data, there was a study or research done on a hundred schools that suffered ransomware, and they said the median, the median payment. Of, uh, ransomware, uh, extortion, like the actual, the money that schools had to pay these hackers to unlock their systems was 6.
6 million.
[00:16:16] Alex Sarlin: Oh my God.
[00:16:17] Oliver Page: just across a hundred schools. So I don't know, across all the districts, all the schools, but, and then, um, and then here's the, the, the, the crystallization of all this. And the reason I started this company really is because 90 percent of all these breaches, And ransomware are caused by faculty, staff, administrators in schools, clicking on phishing links.
And so that my friend is, you know, if I'm looking for a problem to solve as an entrepreneur, there is a massive problem here. And so that was really what inspired me to roll up my sleeves and be like, There has to be a better way. There has to be a better way to protect these schools. There has to be a way to inform teachers and faculty and students on fishing.
And this is unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg. And the reason I say that is because There are so many new types of attack vectors coming online with AI, which is a 10, 000 pound gorilla, the elephants in the room, um, you know, AI taking a huge role in the next wave, the next.
Um, the next form of sophisticated cyber attacks. Um, so anyhow, I don't want to, I've been going on a bit of a rant here. So I want to pass it over to you again, if you have any follow ups, but this is why, this is why I started CyberNuts because there's a huge problem that needs solving and it's not being done effectively in K 12 right now.
[00:18:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I would imagine that many of our listeners may be as wide eyed as I am right now hearing some of those statistics. I mean, just the numbers you named, the median payment for a hundred schools is 6 million. We're talking about 600 million. for 100 schools, then, you know, the 27 percent is, you know, that's, that's such an enormous amount of.
Um, infiltration. We could call it right of cyber security attacks, and schools are very porous in this way, partially for all the reasons you you've just named. You know that cyber security training, cyber security companies have tended to focus on corporations in the private sector for quite a long time, and, uh, and now I think, you know, government entities and schools are such a frequent attack of cyber security Uh, you know, bad actors that this has gone sort of under the radar.
And one of the reasons I'm so excited to talk to you and, you know, you work in two areas of edtech that we really don't cover much on this show. And that's partially from my own, you know, personal, personal biases. There are two areas I've never worked in. We've talked about the hardware, And cybersecurity.
And these are very big areas. They're important areas of event tech, but areas that we very frequently do not cover at all. So I'm so excited to hear that. You know, I mean, these stats are horrific, but I'm really it's so interesting. I think very eye opening to hear how, um, how big this problem really is.
So, you know, you're mentioning how you How the, a lot of the existing solutions are not K 12 friendly. That's the, the original complaint that you are hearing from some of these CTOs and, and IT directors. Tell us a little bit about how you are making Cyber Nut K 12 friendly. This is focused specifically on schools and K 12 schools in particular, at least for now.
What about Cyber Nut makes it. More school friendly and more, uh, adjusted to the needs of faculty and staff and IT in schools than, uh, existing products. Um,
[00:20:04] Oliver Page: so just to kind of broadly define kind of what cybernet is, is we are cybernet is a security awareness training solution built exclusively for schools. Our products include three. Macro categories we have three primary products underneath the cyber to umbrella we have an AI powered phishing simulator a compliance training platform and a threat reporting solution and the really clever, um, I mean, the clever thing that we did when we started the business.
Is we designed the entire product from day one with the consistent and constant support of an advisory committee of IT directors and CTOs and CISOs in schools. So from day one, I really tried to bring this project to life. With continuous support and feedback from our customer. Side note for all the entrepreneurs sitting out there listening, that is a very good thing to do.
If there's any way that you can get feedback and involve your ideal customer in the building of your solution or your MVP, your minimum viable product, which is kind of like your prototype software or product, definitely do that. It's so much better. It's, I can't even describe to you how much better it is to get feedback during the development cycle versus think to yourself, Oh, I know how to solve this problem, I have the idea.
I can go and lock myself in an office for six months and build something and then show it to a customer. As an entrepreneur, you're always looking for ways to get feedback. Put it out in the market, get, you know, have people punch holes through it. So you can learn quickly, amend and update your prototypes and then try it again.
So that's a bit of a sidebar. Cause I am passionate about trying to share with people how to start businesses as, as, as something on the side, but. Back to your original question. Why is cybernet so k 12 focused and so k 12 oriented well Well, first of all, you know my entire kind of career and background has been in k 12 And so I have this kind of like unfair advantage of understanding the complexities of working in k 12 As you know, you know a lot of investors And businesses shy away from K 12 for the most part, because it's a black box to them.
They don't know the sophistic the intricacies of the decision making process, the budgets, the seasonality, the buying cycles, the resellers and the channel partners that you have to go through as well, the contracts. The, you know, the procurement processes, it's a very complex beast and animal. And so, you know, as an entrepreneur, I've already learned how to navigate that through my experience at nutcase.
And so that positioned me very well to start a business like this and to sell and focus on K 12. The product itself. Really kind of boils down into a couple of key buckets around the K 12 personalization. The first one is going to be that traditional cyber security training as it stands today is very reliant on watching videos.
And taking quizzes and there are a dime, a dozen of companies out there in the market today with all sorts of content and videos, some people make videos based off of Anna, you know, animated videos, some hire professional actors to create a story, it's all kind of video based content. And then you watch these videos.
And then you take a quiz, and that's how traditional cyber security companies are doing training right now. Guess what?
[00:24:12] Alex Sarlin: I know. I know. Yes.
[00:24:16] Oliver Page: No one has the attention span anymore to sit through videos and actually learn something. They're going to be on Facebook, they're going to be on TikTok, they're going to be on Instagram, they're going to stand up and walk away, and it's not like you're in like a, You know, a competitive university exam environment where your webcam is on and they're staring at you and watching you do your training or compliance training.
Like that's not happening. Like the, the only, the only thing they do is they prohibit you from like skipping ahead or like skipping the videos. Like you have to forcefully. Hit play and wait for the video to finish before you can take the quiz. So my girlfriend was just doing some sort of compliance training recently for her program.
And she had a similar situation where she was like, just sat there for five hours, watching the most boring content and having to take these quizzes. And so the first point is traditional training is boring. It's stagnant. It doesn't stimulate. And there's data that shows that people just stand up and walk away and come back.
And so that was the first big problem, in my view, for traditional security training, and I needed to disrupt that. I needed to come up with a new, fresh approach to doing cyber security training. The second big piece to our K 12 focus is a lot of the tools in the market We're like I said, built for the enterprise. They're hard to use. Not sorry. And I just want to frame this. My previous, uh, that first piece that I was sharing was really oriented towards the end users. So the people that actually have to take the training.
So the method, the delivery method of the training is antiquated and out of date and old school number one. Now flipping to the it management side of things. So for the actual. IT staff in a school district, the user experience, the interface, the way they actually manage the software with these traditional cyber security training products, it's very scary.
Uh, manual. It's very enterprising. It's, it's not, um, easy and automated. And what I mean by that is I, having worked with schools, know that these IT teams are always Understaffed, under budget, you know, have very limited budgets, they're understaffed and they're wearing a hundred hats doing a million things at the same time.
There's never a situation where they are just like at peace and have everything, you know, it's just hectic. It's mayhem for these IT departments. I mean, think about it. They're managing hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of devices. They have the cyber piece. They have all the data, you know, it's insane.
So what I'm trying to say here is that traditional security training products are very manual and require a lot of intervention to actually use the tool, deploy the training, track the results, and so on and so forth. And so with CyberNut, we set out from day one. From day one, we set out to build a solution that is going to allow an IT team of one or of many to set and forget CyberNut.
You set it up at the beginning of the year, it runs the training campaigns, On autopilot all year round, produces the results, produces the reports to show the continuity to show the data of progress and, um, and make it very easily manageable. So it's really, you know, we've designed cybernetics for, for the lazy person, for someone that wants to just have an easy solution that's built for the case that's built for them, built for their use case and it's set and forget.
So I think that's the next, the big one, the second big one. And then the third piece. Is that we discovered through the conversation that schools have a growing need for security awareness training for students. And none of the products in the market today have a student component that's appropriate for students to use that's, that's designed with students in mind that has a user experience that's friendly and, you know, game and so on and so forth.
And so we are the first. Company that I know of at least that's built a phishing and cyber security training experience also tailored to the students in schools and so for schools that are on the cutting edge that are aware that teaching a child teaching a student of any age how to spot a phishing email from the ages of 10 to 18.
That's gonna be like learning how to read and write that's like the equivalent of learning how to read and write in this day and age. And we've built a solution that does just that. And so in, in, in an overview, uh, statement, CyberNut has developed a advanced phishing training product that has gamification elements that takes less than 30 seconds to complete.
It's fast. It's simple. It's automated for the IT department, and it drives far better engagement for the actual faculty and staff and students. Who are participating in the training? It's not a long, tedious experience that no one likes to do. And I'm proud to say we've, we've gotten to a point where a lot of our schools that we partner with, uh, they have situations where, where teachers and staff members are requesting more cyber nut training because they want to earn more rewards gamification element that they're used to, you know, Playing on on mobile apps and stuff like that.
So it's hard to verbally describe how the product works and exactly how it's built for K 12. But hopefully that that helps you get a better picture.
[00:30:20] Alex Sarlin: I think that I think that covers a lot of it. I mean, I think what one one through line I'm hearing in a lot of your, your, your answers here. And I think it's really important is when we think of cybersecurity, especially people who are not in that field. The first thing that comes to mind is these sort of, um.
You know, attacks these like denial of service attacks or these, you know, you actors in different countries trying to sort of, uh, you know, hack into systems. And I think that's that's one sort of version of cyber security that that is out there. Maybe it's from movies, but it's 11 area, but the type of cyber security that is actually causing havoc in schools and these millions of dollars of ransomware is very human.
It's it's about it. Yeah. Tricking an individual, a teacher, a student, perhaps a staff member into letting, you know, something into the system that shouldn't be in there often through a phishing link. And because it's so human, it actually is a psychological issue. It's psychological. It's not, Purely technical.
So when you talk about gamification, that's a psychological, you know, issue when you talk about, um, the, the difficulty of making it through videos and the, the non transfer, the instructional design term, right. Is transfer. If you're doing quizzes and videos and then you get a real cyber, you know, phishing email, you might not transfer the training to that situation.
And that, you know,
[00:31:42] Oliver Page: very
[00:31:48] Alex Sarlin: know from, you know, other sides of ed tech that you don't always apply to cyber security, but you are applying them. And I think you're applying them in a very, very clever way, videos and quizzes, especially five hours of videos, right?
And quizzes are that kind of compliance training. You know, nobody likes, but not only is this shorter, it's actually. Applied. You're doing it in the exact same situation you'd be getting. So, so I mean, just to fill in the gap here, in case this wasn't clear, you know, staff and faculty and staff receive emails to their actual email addresses that are generated by cyber nuts.
A. I. Phishing creation. And they're basically, you know, bait they're, they're, they're tempted. You know, they're, they're trying to see if a teacher will click on a phishing link and they're doing it, but they're doing it in a safe space. And if you do click on that phishing link, it triggers a certain kind of training and says, Oh, you, you fell for this one.
Remember, this is why you have to avoid this kind of email. And if it's a, if it, you know, all the kind of training comes that. So by making it, I mean, it just, it tickles me from an instructional design standpoint, because By making the experience more and more authentic to what the actual attack would look like, it makes it much more transferable and much stickier as learning.
I'm just, I'm filling in some of the gaps here, but I think you said all of this,
[00:33:06] Oliver Page: No, you summarized that beautifully and I, and that was, that was exactly, uh, that is exactly how it works. We are really trying to lean into these preexisting social behaviors and not, you know, not trying to change behavior in such an abrupt manner. But really trying to gradually help people learn how to spot and report phishing emails in their inbox.
Exactly.
[00:33:52] Alex Sarlin: facing training, and that is so important. And, you know, that that actually sort of blurs the line between cybersecurity and digital literacy, right, as you're saying, you know, knowing how to spot a phishing email is going to be as important as reading or writing, or I think of almost like looking both ways before you cross the street.
It's like a basic safety tactic for the digital age, right? Yeah. So, I mean, so much exciting. There's so much exciting, um, thought and innovation in what you're doing. Again, I am not a cybersecurity expert. So, you know, the guardians of the world, the, uh, so many of the companies that, that, uh, Palo Alto networks, right?
Like, There are companies that are trying to do the white, you know, the white lists and the firewalls and all the technical pieces of, uh, of, of this world. And there are obviously companies that try to do the phishing training, but I think you're doing something so unique and original. So it's led to some great growth.
Tell us about the growth of CyberNut. And you've only started it, I think, a year ago, right?
[00:34:51] Oliver Page: Yeah, just over a year ago. We've been growing faster than I could have imagined. Honestly, we've got, um, you know, We haven't shared publicly, but I'm happy to share that this, this school year, we're going to be onboarding over 60, 000 users onto the CyberNet platform. We have now over, uh, I think we're getting close to 60 districts.
They're going to be, uh, setting up with us this year. The, the momentum has been incredible and it's because like, like I shared, we're the first to have really tackled the problem in this unique manner. And positioned a solution specifically for the K 12 sector. Um, you know, schools want to buy products that were built for schools.
That's it's, that's kind of a simple way of putting it. And I think, you know, tying it back into my broader narrative of the entrepreneurial listener, who's listening to this right now, you know, it's really about quartering a niche, you know, don't fall for the, don't fall for the, you know, the trap. Of trying to build something for everybody.
You know, there are very few Instagrams. There are very few tech talks that are, you know, built for everybody. You know, those, those platforms really are pretty much built for everybody. It's a far safer bet if you are in the, um, you know, You know, interested in getting into entrepreneurship to find a very specific market, a very specific audience or customer segment and building a solution for them because it's a lot easier to then expand your market and grow into other categories and expand your audience once you've dominated a specific niche.
And as a founder and CEO, I am going to dominate the K 12 space. That is my laser focus. We've got an incredible product growing rapidly. And, um, yeah, we couldn't be more excited about working in K 12 because we know that, you know, all of us on our team goes to sleep every night knowing, you know, there's, thanks to cyber, that there's perhaps one less person out there that's going to fall for a horrible phishing attack that could jeopardize the safety of the entire community, the entire district.
Um, you know, it's, It's sad. There are costs. There are schools that we're talking to right now that we're evaluating our product earlier this year. And then between the time they started evaluating us, they haven't implemented us. They were evaluating whether they wanted to move forward with us. And today they've been under ransom.
Like literally we got this call this week that a school has been ransomed and they were, you know, and obviously now they're going to be moving forward with us, but it can happen to anybody. And it only takes one click. That's the, the sad reality is that only one person has to make a careless mistake or not be as vigilant, you know, or, or they are very vigilant, but the sophistication is becoming so more advanced.
We're absolutely obsessed with building the most advanced AI solutions to help kind of keep up with this AR arms race that is currently taking place all over the world. And we know that we need to develop. AI training products and experiences for our schools so that they can learn how to protect themselves from these AI attacks that are going to be coming out, whether that's deep fake videos, deep fake images.
Deepfake, voicemails, uh, all these sorts of attack vectors that are still, you know, just getting started. And, um, yeah, the team and I, we're, we're, we're extremely passionate about the problem we're solving. And we wake up every day fired up about it, so it feels really good to work on this.
[00:38:56] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, you know, you mentioned a couple of really, I think, insightful lessons for other ed tech entrepreneurs. And I know that you do a lot of advising. You've done keynote speaking around, you know, entrepreneurship. You started being an ed tech entrepreneur as a teenager. So you have many years of experience with this.
I wanted to double click on one aspect of it that you mentioned earlier that I think is really important. This idea of co designing the product with the users and having this advisory board. Um, this is something that has come up a lot in, in, in my work. It's come up a lot recently. We, we, we put out a newsletter a few weeks ago about inclusive innovation, which is sort of another name for co design from, from Katie, uh, booty Adorno from lean lab.
And this is, I think, a, a really hot, uh, Topic in ed tech right now. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about how you've brought the customer into the discussion and co designed with them early because it's clearly core to your philosophy. But let's talk tactics. How do you actually do that? How do you recruit that type of user who wants to give you that feedback and poke holes?
How do you work with them in a in an ongoing basis? I'd love to hear you talk a little about that. And I think other entrepreneurs would love that as well.
[00:40:06] Oliver Page: The first thing you should ask yourself is why would somebody want to help me build this product? Or advise me? Put yourself in the shoes of somebody because obviously isn't free. I mean, time it's people's time. It's people's bandwidth. So I think the best way to first go about it is like, you know, tap into your niche.
Like, let's just use an example. Let's say you're a school teacher and you've got an idea for a product or a software or an entrepreneurial creative project of sorts, right? You know, you've been a school teacher for years. You know, school teachers, chances are you would be the perfect person to come up with some sort of idea for school teachers or maybe another department in the school or maybe your students.
And so, you know, I think the first lesson learned is like, you know, my advantage is that because I was working. On nutcase for so long, I've developed friendships with CTOs and IT directors over the past decade that I was able to leverage to get feedback. I didn't have to like beg or convince or, you know, incentivize someone to get on a call with me to give me feedback for five minutes.
These are people that I've already known. So I think the first piece is to tap into your personal network. Tap into your personal community of professionals in whatever industry you're in and begin asking people for their thoughts and suggestions on an idea as informally as texting or as formally as meeting for coffee or having a zoom call.
I think another really good best practice is if you really are trying to go down the rabbit hole of building something, start a small email newsletter or a small, you know, A newsletter is almost too, it too formal. Just come up with a, um, you know, you know, just, just start getting into the habit of sending your small community of people an email with updates on the product or the project that you're working on, on a somewhat consistent basis, because that, that shows the person that you're actually a serious person.
Like, Oh, Oliver's actually. Sending me emails every two weeks with updates on that weird idea he had, like, okay, well, maybe I should pay attention. Maybe he is a serious, he is actually serious about this, you know? So, I think from a tactics perspective, the hardest part, in my opinion, is having the relationships to begin with.
Like, you have to be already in an environment where you have access to your customer and, um, and you have trust built to some extent. You know, it's a lot easier for me to get the CTO of the school district on a call who knows me than the CTO of a small business or a enterprise or a hospital or a so on and so forth, because I'm a known entity in the K 12 space. So I, I think the suggestion is, you know, starting today, you know, if you are, if you are entrepreneurially inclined and you're like, yeah, I'd like the idea of doing a business someday in the future. What you should be doing now is thinking, how can I start nurturing relationships and keeping, you know, a small email list or database of friends in the industry who maybe a year or two from now, I can tap into and ask for feedback.
And so even if you're not set on an idea or a product or project, it's good to start getting into the habit of really paying attention to your network and And nurturing those relationships because when lightning strikes and you're like, and that's what happened for me, lightning strikes, it was like, go now.
And I was like, okay, perfect. I know who to call. Raj, Kevin, Doug, you know, Doug, boom, boom, boom. And I was able to immediately kind of kick things into gear. But had I not been in the industry, had I not already been working on projects and businesses in the space, it would have taken a lot longer to build the trust.
And I think that's really what it comes down to is, you know, building that trust with people so that they take you seriously. And they can give you a real feedback. Um, so that's really, I think the best way of, of sharing my two cents on how to do
[00:44:50] Alex Sarlin: And how frequently do you try to reconnect with your, your, that, that sort of, uh, brain trust of close advisors, your advisory committee.
[00:45:00] Oliver Page: Yeah, I think we're trying to do it relatively frequently, you know, every month or so just to check in, you know, we don't have like a, you know, a full sort of like zoom call where everyone jumps on, but it's more me individually connecting with folks, giving updates, getting feedback. Um, you know, we've also added some of our customer advisors to Slack and they're talking to us in Slack now.
Um, so that's another area that we, that we leverage, another tool that we leverage, but you could do that in WhatsApp or, you know, even iMessage. Um, but yeah, no, there's, it's, it's always a good idea to, to nurture your network and, you know, curate your LinkedIn, be very intentional about it because, um, one day when you do have that idea and you want to move quickly, you want to have those relationships in place.
[00:45:48] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It makes sense. Um, So we're actually already coming on the end of our time, which is amazing. And this is conversation has gone very quickly. Uh, but I think what you're doing is so interesting in your approach to entrepreneurship. You are clearly a sort of entrepreneur to the bone and, uh, your approach I think is really admirable.
Uh, the idea of, you know, having hundreds of ideas to get the right idea. Bringing the customer into the conversation early, understanding the, the, the, the network and the, uh, the sales cycles and all the complexities of K 12, which as you said, a lot of people steer away from or are afraid of. Um, there's really a lot in here, but one thing I want to ask you is, uh, is about sort of zooming out and you pay a lot of attention to the ed tech space and have for, for a long time.
What do you see as the most. Exciting trend happening right now. And I'm going to, I'm going to go ahead and take, you know, AI and cybersecurity as, as, as big topics, you know, you can get, you can talk about specific areas, but let's not just go there because we've already talked about those, but like, what do you see as something that, that you particularly from your vantage point as the CEO and co founder of CyberNut and of Nutcase.
See coming in the next few years that others listening to this may not have noticed yet.
[00:47:07] Oliver Page: I would say what excites me the most personally, and this is almost from like, you know, stemming from my childhood and my experience as a student is personalized learning. You know, I think the most exciting thing from an A. I. Perspective is being able to meet students where they're at at their exact skill, um, maturity level and giving a Every student a personalized learning experience because, you know, some of the most traumatic experiences for me as a child growing up and I kind of, you know, you know, said earlier, I wasn't super academic one is was this feeling of being left behind in the classroom?
You know, I didn't understand something at the beginning of my math class. And then I was just left out. I just didn't understand that I was too shy or embarrassed to raise my hand because I felt stupid or people would think I was stupid if I asked the question from like 30 minutes ago. And I would be surprised if I was the only one feeling like that.
And so
[00:48:13] Alex Sarlin: not.
[00:48:13] Oliver Page: I feel personally excited about the, the idea that AI is going to be able to deliver this personalized. Experience of learning for students and I know a couple entrepreneurs, you know, I think a shout out to Ursula
[00:48:30] Alex Sarlin: Mm
[00:48:30] Oliver Page: Buddy of mine based out of Brazil, who's,
[00:48:34] Alex Sarlin: He's great. Yeah
[00:48:36] Oliver Page: he's doing some cool stuff with that, and I know there's a lot of other people tackling this problem because everyone knows that someone is going to, someone's going to crack the nut, no pun intended, um, but we are, someone is going to get that right.
And I think it's going to unleash. Just an incredible amount of productivity and growth for students. You know, I wish I had a chance to have a more personalized learning approach. And I think this whole, this whole AI and personalization is not just applicable to students. I hear a lot of stuff about personalized medicine and going into healthcare, the ability to have personalized treatments that leverage AI.
So I think that's what's really exciting to me. And I would, I would like to encourage others out there in the world. To, uh, to explore personalized learning and see what, what twist and spin you could put on it. Um, I also think, you know, at CyberNut, we're all about personalized learning, too. In fact, one of our key, key differentiators that we didn't share in the earlier discussion is we're treating every faculty, staff, and student as an individual during our phishing training.
And we're delivering a personalized phishing training experience to every user. which is far more effective than treating everyone like sheep and thinking everyone's going to learn the same way, uh, because that's obviously not the case. So I think that definitely extends into our world as well over on the cyber side.
[00:50:07] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's a terrific answer. And I think, you know, that, that, that personalized, individualized sort of precision learning is, has been a dream, has been a sort of a, a, a holy grail, you know, a, a, a Xanadu of ed tech for, for decades, this idea, like, you know, someday we will be able to get away from the one size fits all.
And people have been saying that for decades. And it feels like with AI, we are right on the cusp of it. So I am, I'm very much, uh, in line with you about, you know, I think we may finally be able to crack the, uh, the individualized personalized education that, and it's fantastic to hear that you're already practicing what you, uh, preach, you know, and, and doing it at CyberKnight.
Um, thank you so much for being here. This is Oliver Page. The co founder and CEO of CyberNut, uh, formerly the co founder and VP of sales at Nutcase Accessories. Uh, where can people find CyberNut online?
[00:51:02] Oliver Page: Yeah. So proud to say we, we got the killer domain. Cyber nut. com wasn't easy, but we, we, we nabbed that. So cyber nut. com is definitely a good place to learn more about what we're building and what we're doing for education. Um, I'm also going to do. A preemptive announcement, we are launching a podcast.
It's called the Zero Breach Zone powered by Cyberna. It's going to be a podcast all about cyber security and K 12. Coming out, I believe, in September. We're just lining up a few more things on that. But zerobreachzone. com is going to be the domain that you can find us there. And then, of course, we'll be on all podcasting platforms.
So that's coming out soon. And then personally, Oliver page cybernet on LinkedIn, post a lot of content there. That's really the platform that I use the most to, uh, to spread the word and to share interesting, uh, you know, at least I hope relatively interesting posts every now and then. Um, so yeah, I would say LinkedIn.
Oliver page and, uh, and of course on, um, on, uh, on our website, cybernet. com where if you are in, if you are in it or if you're working in a school, we do offer a very, uh, nice free. Security phishing assessment to all schools. So if you are interested in trying us out at no cost, we have a nice free phishing assessment that allows you to get your feet wet, get some data, understand your security posture at your school district.
So I'd highly encourage you if you are curious about what we're building to give us a try, reach out through our website. And, um, and you can register for a demo there to see the whole product in action.
[00:52:50] Alex Sarlin: It's, it's important to get your feet wet when you're fishing. So I think that works well. Um, and in case this wasn't obvious to anybody listening, if there are, uh, it directors, uh, CISO is, you know, chief information security officers or CTOs in your life, uh, this would be probably a really good episode of edtech insiders to forward to them.
We've never covered cybersecurity before in almost any way. So I think this is a, A new, a new world for us. And I think, you know, CyberNut is doing something very, very interesting in this space. Thanks for being here. Oliver Page, co founder and CEO of CyberNut.
[00:53:26] Oliver Page: Thank you for having me, Alex, excited to chat again soon.
[00:53:29] Alex Sarlin: 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 Ed Tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free Ed Tech Insiders newsletter on Substack.
