Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Guiding Edtech Entrepreneurs Through Big Decisions with Mark Miller of Good Harbor Partners
Mark Miller is the founder and Managing Director of Good Harbor Partners (GHP), a boutique M&A advisory firm specializing in the education technology and publishing sectors. With over 20 years of experience as an edtech entrepreneur and advisor, Miller has a proven track record in guiding Pre-K-12, Higher Education, and Workforce clients through strategic growth, fundraising, and successful exits. A co-founder of LearnLaunch and a dedicated member of Cornell’s Entrepreneurship Advisory Board, Miller is widely respected for his contributions to the edtech ecosystem and frequently shares his insights as a speaker at industry events.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How to decide when to stay and grow or pursue an acquisition.
- The importance of a clear capital strategy in today’s funding landscape.
- Key factors edtech entrepreneurs should consider at major inflection points.
- How AI developments are influencing the edtech M&A landscape.
- Challenges in securing sustainable funding for K-12 and higher ed amid economic uncertainties.
✨ Episode Highlights
[00:03:13] From Cornell to edtech, winning a business plan competition to building companies
[00:10:18] Creating 'Take Note' as an early publishing venture at Cornell
[00:19:51] Transition to M&A, guiding entrepreneurs on growth and exit decisions
[00:26:19] Profitability and sustainability as essentials in today’s edtech
[00:32:17] Common pitfalls in capital strategy and valuation for startups
[00:47:27] AI and M&A, how big edtech views acquisitions in the AI market
[01:03:10] Key resources from top thinkers in edtech policy and strategy
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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] Alex Sarlin: 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.
Mark Miller is the founder and managing director of Good Harbor Partners, a boutique, sell side focused, M& A advisory and outsourced corporate development firm focused on the education technology and education services ecosystem based in Boston and Austin. Miller is a recognized education expert and edtech entrepreneur with a 20 plus year track record of success advising pre k through 12, higher education and workforce clients in the areas of business strategy, corporate development, seed early and mid stage fundraising strategy, Towards and for exits, mergers and acquisitions.
Mark Miller is a former C suite education entrepreneur himself with multiple exits who transitioned to become an entrepreneur focused sell side M& A advisor. He's been focused on the education space ever since winning the Cornell university business plan competition as an undergrad. He was the founder, CEO or chairman of a set of innovative education companies around the world.
Miller was also a co founder of LearnLaunch, which supports the education ecosystem, and he chaired the board. He served on the Cornell University Entrepreneurship Advisory Board, was recognized for his contributions to the Student Finance Commission at Cornell, and was tapped by the Quill Dagger Honorary Society.
As a dedicated member of the education community, He's a frequent speaker and moderator of panels at education and edtech conferences, and serves on several standards and best practices committees. Mark Miller, welcome to edtech insiders.
[00:03:08] Mark Miller: Thank you, Alex. It's great to be here and great to be talking to you and Meeting your audience.
[00:03:13] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And you and I have had a number of conversations over the last few years. You always have so many interesting things to say about the education and education technology world. So I'm really excited for this conversation. Let's kick off by sharing the story of your journey, your background as an entrepreneur in education.
You've been a lot of different places and it all started with a win at a business plan competition at Cornell University, which I am also an alumni of. So tell me about your journey.
[00:03:42] Mark Miller: Well, I appreciate it. And I am glad to talk about the Cornell part. I'll get into that. It's a very important recognition I have is the take note guy.
So I think the thing that's interesting, Alex, is it's, you know, this notion of our entrepreneurs sort of born or can they sort of be created? I definitely come in the former category. I was always an entrepreneur. I was the guy painting. Stencils on people's curbs to sort of have their addresses in new suburbs I grew up in when I was eight.
So I was always an entrepreneur and is to being an education entrepreneur. You know, this principle of sort of having things that you faced yourself and issues you faced and trying to solve those problems, that's the natural place. Particularly when you're younger, that. But, but frankly, where most people sort of start conversation, my problem was on the issue of sitting into class and feeling that it was just ridiculous that you were sort of braided on this notion of, did you capture what happened in the lecture?
And so I'm going to sort of get to that and say, the principal idea of, Being made to feel guilty, barring people's notebooks really was troubling to me. And I saw that there was this concept out there in the world at Berkeley. And I set out to find how I could take a concept that was out there and make it better.
And there was a course in the business school of Cornell for undergrads, the only course for undergrads. And I. One, the business plan competition for take that at the time, there were very few entrepreneurs out there who stayed after college. In fact, I was treated as somewhat of a pariah. People would say, why did you even pay to go to this school?
If you were just going to be an entrepreneur and it was a little bit of a weird place. There was me and the guy who run the student traveler and the student travel service. That was kind of it. You know, the idea that it's so popular to now start a business is it's a little strange to me at some level, because Of what I experienced, which was really, it was out there.
And in fact, it was a little bit strange because people couldn't deal with it. People didn't really get it. I'm going to go a bit further back and talk about that because that business as a publishing company, which was really unique, I had a Mac one 28, which most of your listeners don't even remember and a image writer printer, and I created a publishing company, but the concept was really supporting sort of What happened in the lecture was most important.
This was a structured outline of the lectures, was my theory of action, and we created a publishing company, and a third of the students at Cornell at one point subscribed to Take Note, and it lasted for 30 years. I sold it to a group called Student Agencies that ran the student businesses, and they ran it for a number of years.
That was my first business. But I'm going to go backwards a little bit into sort of my interest in education generally, and part of it's based on the fact where I grew up. I grew up in the neighborhood of the faculty administrators in Notre Dame. I grew up in South Bend, Indiana. Many people won't know what that even means.
Most people don't fully understand the Midwest, but think Midwest like more Cleveland or Rochester than Omaha or Des Moines, South Bend's more like that. And so I spent time among these people, these faculty and administrators and having dinners with them and the sort of conversations we had, it really got me interested in this whole.
kind of concept of this person who was so smart, who was really thought hard about a lot of things, and I really appreciated the academic community and what higher ed meant. And in my own educational experience, I translated it to my own frustration. Being a kid who had ADHD and being a kid who was always in the advanced placement classes, who did really well, And got into Cornell, but I also really struggled as it got to work that took over multiple days and, you know, you had to plan for multiple things.
And, you know, frankly, I got my butt kicked the first year at Cornell because I wasn't quite as ready as kids went to a lot of other schools, but those struggles and the fact that I felt like there was this factory system education really bothered me. And I cared about and thought about what can be done differently in education.
And read some things like Pablo Ferreri's Pedagogy of the Press, which is a fascinating book, and really understood the power of words, the power of being able to express yourself in critical thinking. Those things are really important to me. And I'm quite proud of my liberal arts education. Although people, many of who have gone south on higher ed, particularly in liberal arts specifically, I really think it was transformational for me.
I mean, it was just an unbelievable experience of, of learning. of being with people who engage with things at a different level, and I loved it. But my idea, take note, to go back to it, this lecture note business, was quite controversial at the time. Now I did it in a very stand up way. I went to each professor and told them my intent to cover their class.
I also made the notes available for free for students in the Learning Skills Center, so anyone could go get the notes for free. Particularly kids who couldn't afford them. And so it was a high integrity thing where people were concerned it would cause people to not go to class. But the irony of that at the time is today, there's instant replay of all lectures.
A whole category of companies came out that are videotaping lectures and you can get right to the moment that you missed. So the idea which once was controversial is now just normal. Now, a by product of Take Note that I'm. Interested has also been very successful, much more successful in business. Take note was a kid who went to Cornell, Andrew Grower, who founded a company called Curse Hero, now Lorneo.
And though he doesn't fully acknowledge it, it's sort of ironic, you know, take note was the basis on which he came up with the concept of taking the lecture notes. And then what he did is he went to the faculty, went to the file cabinets and the fraternities and sororities and other places, and got people to give their papers, got people to give old exams.
And he built a database Of that stuff and got a subscription service. Now I wasn't looking to go in that direction and I wouldn't have done it. But the fact is that company is now worth over a billion dollars at its last investment round. In fact, I think, well, a billion and a half, but the point is I'm quite proud of what take note was.
And it's kind of cool to be known as the take note guy. I mean, and over many years or 30 years, it operated at Cornell. So, you know, that was the first thing I did in education, and Cornell turns out to have been a pilot site for a lot of really novel educational ideas. It was the site that the guys wrote the software for blackboards.
Dan Keane and Stephen Gilfuss were students at Cornell, and Professor Ben Daniel, who ran the entrepreneurship class, asked me to see the professor whose class was using blackboard for the first time. And she was an ad guy. I can't remember her name, but Deborah Streeter. So Deborah Streeter was using Blackboard.
So the concept of getting your syllabi online. So I was there for the meeting of Blackboard. David Duffield, who's a graduate at Cornell, was the CEO of PeopleSoft. Cornell was the ERP system. So I was there at a very interesting time. And I was mentored by some awesome people, one of whom was the vice provost at Cornell, a guy named Ken King, who recently passed away, who was the head of Educause at one time and founded BitNet.
He was a brilliant man. And also a guy named Stuart Lin, who was the CIO and Rich McDaniel, who headed the bookstore. I created services for the bookstore. In fact, Take Note was available in the bookstore. You might remember, you bought it as a subscription, you got your books and you picked it up in the bookstore and they got traffic and it was good for everybody for many years.
[00:10:18] Alex Sarlin: So
[00:10:19] Mark Miller: Cornell was a great place to start businesses. Cornell was, and Take Note. Sort of was a great use case for print on demand. You started another business at Cornell as well. Tell us about it. So my second business was also for Cornell and it took the concept of notes and went to course materials and that his professors were creating these sort of taking these piles of journal articles and chapters of books and other things that someone needed to package them together, get permissions and print.
Custom books on demand. So the print on demand use case of custom publishing was actually the example used by Xerox when they came up with the concepts of content management, print on demand, there was this device called the gladiator, it was a digital printer and Kodak had a version of it and Cornell was the pilot site Xerox is.
East Coast Headquarters of Park was in Rochester, Kodak was headquartered in Rochester. So my second business in education was the service of professors to create custom books. And that was also quite successful very quickly. And it was awesome and I supported the bookstore's relationship with Take Note and also ran this through the bookstores.
It was on the shelves next to your books and it was a quite a novel idea. And there's a whole story about that. How that got me to know the publishers. Cause I was this kid who built a business a few million dollars out of nowhere and publishers like, who are you and how do you get to do this? And my response was, look, I'm servicing the customer, the faculty.
And if I don't do this, they're just going to put on a reserve. So you should be my friend. And I built that business up and ultimately struck a deal with the company that ran the bookstores on 350 college campuses, Barnes and Noble. I was negotiating with Barnes Noble and Follett, both of whom ran about three, 400 college bookstores and ended up doing with the old Barnes and Noble.
I got to know those people well. So I got to know the CEOs of all the publishing companies, the other leadership of publishers. And I was this kid doing custom books. And Xerox used it as their case study when they announced the DocuTech. And this gentleman, Stuart Lynn, who was the CI of Cornell had this great British accent.
And I remember his quote, it was called the DocuTech, not the Gladiator. And he said, the DocuTech is the most brilliant creation since the Gutenberg press. And he had that kind of British accent, which gives you 50 IQ points. And I remember that was a huge thing. And it was a big deal because print on demand and content management was a new idea.
So my second business was a business at Cornell that, again, I took that business and expanded it to a number of other schools in partnership with Barnes and Noble college stores, which I did for many years, and then sold that business to the fourth largest printer in America called career corporation.
So those are my two first forays in education about both problems. I understood the next thing that I did was Ken King came to me with an idea that Cornell had championed called the Cupid project. That was a CNI. ARL project, the Coalition for Network Information and Association of Research Libraries had this concept that was kind of like Kazaa for books.
I mean, many people remember Napster, maybe fewer Kazaa, but technically the difference was in Kazaa, you'd basically post your catalog of content to the network and people could see your content in a central catalog, but it would pull from wherever your computer was. And Cornell funded a project with the center of the research universities, including Harvard, Michigan, Stanford.
And some others. And the idea was that you could build a virtual catalog of content where the content reside, wherever it might be in the world. And I licensed that at Ken's request, along with the CIO who replaced Stewart Leningrad, named Dave Lambert, who became quite famous in his own right. And ultimately it was the CIO of Georgetown and I licensed the technology.
And the idea was someone could build a virtual table of contents. The content would then have a royalty fee or not associated with it. It might be fair use and it would grab the objects, package them up, Build a table of contents and then print them on demand securely anywhere in the world at a printer that you chose.
Now, this all sounds today, not so complicated, but at the time it was one of the most advanced distributed computer projects out there. And I had some of the top engineers who ultimately went to companies like Red Hat. And we were building that company and it raised venture capital for that company when September 11th happened and we were raising a private placement.
And very sadly, everyone has their own story. Our lead investor died in the United Airlines flight and no one raising money. And I had 45 people and a significant burn rate. And I spent six months funding the company, thinking it was the right thing to do. One of the dumbest things I've ever done and maintaining my staff and flew around on planes with like, One or two other people, literally a few people and had a chance and opportunity to talk to John Seely Brown, who was the head of Xerox PARC.
A guy named John Warnock, who was the founder and CEO of Adobe. And I will forever be grateful to both of them who told me I needed to stop and that I was never going to get a deal done with their companies. I should say where there's one other gentleman who also was a great man. A guy named David Kearns, who was the CEO of Xerox.
And after that became the undersecretary of education, who also advised me, Mark, look, they love your ideas. They want to learn all the things you have to say, But they're never going to work with you. So stop. And it was an amazing thing because when one door opens or closes, when a window closes, another one opens.
I, on being convinced by John Warnock that I had to stop really was the sort of pinnacle or the coup de gras or whatever it is. The thing that really hit me was he told me his own story of almost losing his role as CEO at Adobe and that Jobs has saved his job by giving him 2 million to embed the Adobe company.
Font set into the Apple printer. And then if he hadn't had that deal, he was going to have the whole postscript PDF world wouldn't be here today. So I closed down, shut the doors after putting significant amount of my money. I'd made into the business and moved on. You also worked at a company that was something like a proto Facebook, also working within universities.
was introduced to a company that was the largest platform for students to go online. It was kind of the online off campus newspaper, and it was called the Daily Jolt. It was founded by some students at Amherst and Brown, and 70 percent of the students of the schools every day went to this site, which was kind of effectively online alternative newspaper.
You know, what are they serving the dining hall? There was a forum that I'm going to talk about a bit was an anonymous forum moderated by the schools. There was a sort of homepage that was kind of like the news of the day by the students for the students, but it was incredibly popular and the daily jolt whose investor put in my hands, the leadership and, and sort of the chairman and CEO of that company.
It was a really widely used a half a million students a day were using the Daily Jolt. The Daily Jolt also was the online advertising representative for Facebook in the beginning for the first year and a half and for Rate My Professor.
[00:16:59] Alex Sarlin: And
[00:17:00] Mark Miller: we literally brought online advertising at its sort of infinite stages and aggregated the traffic of these sites.
We had like 150 million sort of people each day and page views of traffic. So that business Was quite successful until it wasn't. When Facebook opened up from being individual schools to sort of breaking down the velvet rope of your idea of your relationship to your school. And it used to be that sort of Cornell students would talk to Cornell students and Stanford students.
And there was this weird thing that you didn't sort of cross over on a daily conversational base, but can Facebook basically rolled over the whole thing and crushed the daily jolt. Unfortunately, we found a South Korean. company that was the largest artist hagwon provider that wanted to get to know students at elite colleges called Cheongdam Learning and they acquired the Daily Jolt and we were fortunate to sell it.
The other thing along the way was that we realized that in addition to this sort of B2C company that there were a whole bunch of students engaging around the things they were doing outside of the classroom. And we acquired a company that was successful at one school called CollegiateLink. And CollegiateLink was a platform for students to find the groups and organizations they might be interested in, to join groups and organizations, to find out what activities are going on campus, and also to run organizations.
It had the platform to, You know, engage and collect money and have events. And so we actually ran that as a separate B2B company, licensed software to schools and had a B2C version as part of the Daily Jolt. And ultimately split the two and raised money for Collegiate Link. And Collegiate Link actually ran.
And we built it to about a hundred campuses and it was incredibly important. It created the concept of a co curricular transcript, which was to me, a very powerful idea that still isn't fully fulfilled. And that is schools don't get nearly enough credit for all the value you get outside of the classroom.
And so all the things you do outside of the classroom and how to sort of give some validation to those and also put words to them, particularly for kids who don't have family members who've been to college or aren't able to express to them. Instead of saying, Hey, I closed down the dining hall. What if you're able to say I was responsible for a 50 million budget facility.
I had a staff of five and I was preparing the facility for the next day and getting things in order. I mean, Those are powerful word differences and collegiate link led the way on that concept. It's now part of anthology. We sold it to student voice, which became campus labs. And it's a, I think about 300 to 500 campuses today.
I don't know how many, I think it was up to 500 at some time. So as the entrepreneur, those were experiences I had as an entrepreneur. Maybe this is too much in a distraction, but I had a long life as an entrepreneur before shifting along the way, I'd been an advisor to different people and I'd help people.
And I really enjoyed the mentoring of folks along their own life cycles. How did you
[00:19:51] Alex Sarlin: translate this experience into M and a,
[00:19:53] Mark Miller: I have the lived experiences having been an entrepreneur and I've experienced, I mean, just so many different things doing things on my own cashflow. Actually, I didn't mention this, but take note was funded by a Chinese food delivery service with Panhandle restaurant.
Basically we ran a Chinese delivery service outside of the back of Pan Am and delivered Chinese food. There was only pizza delivery in Ithaca at the time. And that's how I started to take note. So, you know, I'd done things on my own money. I'd done things, having raised money, I'd sort of combined and acquired things.
So through all those things, I had a friend whose company was kind of a future version of Blackboard as an LMS called Explana Learning, Hakon Satiraglu. Who's a bon vivant in the education space. And I engaged with him in the sale of his company, which we sold to Barnes and Noble. And through that process, I realized while I might have myself had a little bit of biases to this sort of role called bankers and investment banker, it wasn't really banking.
It was supporting the strategic sale, helping people. Position, describe and reflect what they have and figure out what they want to do. Cause I'd myself been through that. So I really enjoyed that experience. And it was a very successful sale that enabled Hakan to retire for quite some time. And I then said, you know what?
I think this is what I'm going to do. Being the entrepreneur is so intense and singular to one thing. And I created Good Harbor Partners, which is named after a beautiful beach in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which someday I hope to have a place in. Good Harbor Partners. You know, has certain themes. One of them is I really view and, and I think what Goodheart Partners is known as, is we are the entrepreneurs investment banker, we really care about helping entrepreneurs think of what are they trying to accomplish, what are they balancing, what are the actual situations they're in and all of the different kinds of things that when you're sort of in the role of being the CEO, it's very hard to have people that you can talk to, that you can be honest with about what's going on.
You have to tell stories to yourself each day. You have to tell stories to your team. You have to sell stories to your investors, and it can get confusing as to what's real and what you're really trying to do. And so we really. We pride ourselves and are super proud of the testimonials we have about our relationships with CEOs.
There's a video I took with the CEO of Qualified, Jay Coffner, which I am just, it almost makes me cry every time I see it because it was such a intense personal relationship and changed his life. He was able to move forward in his life. He was able to buy a house. He was able to get married. Same with Justin Weinberg of active learning.
So those are just some examples. We have really close relationships, but the creation of good hard partners was to say, the companies that are in the size range that we've traditionally dealt with, which are sub 10 million, AR companies or revenue companies, they're treated as second class citizens. I mean, for the most part, they're not getting the best of the best and it's not just on the servicing of going out to market.
It's on all of this sort of care and feeding of helping people figure out what we're trying to do. So in addition to the fact of not really You know, looking to convince people of anything, but helping them figure out what they're trying to accomplish and then satisfy that we often have a long relationship with companies that we'll talk with and we'll support over years.
We have a practice where we will support someone in an outsource corp dev capacity and ultimately in the end, we'll service them in selling them whenever that happens. And what that means is we help them grow. We help them find investors. We help them find board members. We help them find talent. We help them structure and think about whether they should engage in at all contracts or, or strategic relationships.
Cause so often people engage in these relationships and they don't go anywhere. So doing nothing is sometimes better than doing anything. And that's a role we play. And in the sale of companies, just to use an example, there are these inflection points that, you know, People achieve where we really want to make sure we're engaging with them well ahead of them, sort of thinking they've decisively said they want to sell, you know, one of those is it might be that they're going to run out of money in 12 or 18 months.
Another is that they sort of just have a high run rate and they're not sure what they should do. Should they dial back the run rate and try to become profitable? Should they continue? It might be that they have a valuation that was at a point that's sort of not going to be sustainable and that you need to think what's going to happen.
It. When they go to these investors based on who those investors are and how they think and what should they do about that valuation and to get ahead of how they raise money from whom they raise money. Sometimes people are tired or they really just don't want the job or they're not really meant to be in the role there.
And they might be the CEO, but they might really mean to be the product manager. They might really mean or want to be the head of sales. So helping people through those things and helping me make decisions about what they're trying to accomplish is quite Sort of key part of what I really enjoy doing.
And I wrote a piece called the crossroads to sell or to stay and grow. And that piece is really a call out to say, you know, you need to think about this stuff and we want to well ahead of. This idea that you're going to wake up one day and say, I want to sell, or that someone's approached you and that drives it, their calls every day from people who are just trying to get to know you, they're not necessarily really looking to buy you.
And so too often, what we'll do is we'll sort of find someone triggered by feeling they're approached. It's really someone who calls tons of people and just collects information on them, but they perceive it as, okay, now we have a buyer. What should we do, Mark? It's way better to have a strategy and a plan and having people know about you and sort of.
Over time, having people come to you who are serious about it. So I'm going to stop there and say, I covered a lot of ground and maybe too much ground, but that sort of brings us to this point.
[00:25:16] Alex Sarlin: So I sometimes refer to myself in this podcast as like a little bit of like a forest gump of ed tech and that I've sort of bounced off all of these different big ed tech projects or been in and out of different places, but I don't think I have anything on you.
Uh, You have been in so many different companies, you've started companies, sold companies, had ideas that then grew to become enormous multinational companies. It's a really interesting background. And I think it gives you a wide perspective from which to make sense of what's going on. You know, the ed tech environment as it continues to change and to particular companies.
So once you did start good harbor partners and you're sort of doing mergers and acquisitions and doing outsourced corporate development and sort of building these relationships, you have a real front row seat. to the ed tech world. You've talked to so many different companies in different spaces. tell us a little bit about your perspective of like the current moment in ed tech and what it looks like from your perspective in terms of business, but also just in terms of how ed tech is sort of perceived by the world right now.
[00:26:19] Mark Miller: That's a very interesting question, Alex. I'm going to try to limit this because the world is different than the U S
[00:26:27] Alex Sarlin: and there's
[00:26:27] Mark Miller: a lot of world. I'm happy to do a follow up talk about outside the U S or how people who are from outside the U S are trying to come to the U S all this seems to have a lot of history.
And also I'll just note higher 12, we sort of treat them like it's just education, but they're like different universes. It's kind of like the difference between, We both speak English, but there's sort of differences that are big enough that it's dangerous to sort of act as if there's the same. So let me try to kind of sort of speak about what's going on in edtech today in the context of what companies are facing and how.
Important is and how much effort we're making to try to cause people to make good decisions in the context of today. So I don't know if you know, but we have offered and been invited to give talks to companies about their capital strategy, how they think about the pulse or process of where they're raising money, what they're trying to raise, what they do with the money, the sort of ideas called your capital strategy and AWS invited us to engage with their accelerator.
Learn Launches, which I'm a co founder of, I hadn't mentioned that, maybe for another time, and invited us to their accelerator. We also did something for StartEd. And I think that the really important thing as it relates to the sort of foundational idea of what am I trying to build and how am I going to fund it, and what do I do to get to the point that I might be able to make a decision, that is a critical thing today.
There was a moment in time Where people were raising money and getting a lot of money early on and spending that money and not worried about as much, did they have enough business to sort of show sustainability? And this point, which I would just say is critical is those days right now, right now, it's all a timing thing, maybe back in another year or two, but right now you have to have a path to sustainability, a path to profitability.
You have to have product market fit unless you're super exception. So like Chiron learning, the guy who had done things at Google at a very high level was able to secure a lot of funding and it gets a lot of publicity. But that's so much the exception. So what's critical, I think, is that people have a way of getting into market, having enough of our product that they can actually get sales, but not overbuild, not over focus on efficacy, but prove they have something that has product market fit.
That is super important right now. And it's critical that as people take funding, some people have this idea that it's just really awesome to get grant funding because it's non dilutive. Well, there has been an issue and we're part of trying to solve this problem where grant funding has been able to go to product development, but it hasn't gone towards sales and marketing and market fit.
And so the folks that provide those funding streams, the people who lead those organizations, we actually are invited and part of the discussion is to how they can. open things up to make sure the companies that they're funding also prove they have an evidence of product market fit and a pathway to really kind of scale and be fundable.
Because unfortunately, over a long period of time, there are too many grant funded companies, some of whom have raised tens of millions of dollars, who've never really established a product market. A real product market fed to be independent. So that's critical. Your capital strategy is really important.
Once you've raised money from angels as others. The other thing is that people have had this idea of doing notes and having notes with sort of high levels, at which point there's sort of a discount to some high number, like a 20 million cap in a note or something as if that's the prize. I have been the entrepreneur.
I care most about the entrepreneur and their families and their lives and their teams. But it is a sort of led to a fallacy of people sort of having things that have high numbers than just trying to wait until they achieve that valuation. So they convert it to equity. People are finding themselves in real trouble where they have a whole bunch of people have an expectation of value when it would have been much cleaner to have a more kind of, I guess, Reasonable valuation that early on allowed for different sources of funding to let companies grow into their valuation and receive funding.
So too many people are in a situation where they've created a hurdle for themselves. They thought it was a good idea, but now it's going to be hard to have to explain to people. Oh, by the way, we're worth 30 million and we're doing a million and a half in revenue. We don't think it should, we were 30, but the question is, what is it?
Is it 10? Is it 15? Is it 20? And so those companies, many of them aren't getting, People are just saying, I'm just going to leave that one alone. It's too complicated. There's too many people who have to cooperate. And by the way, it's not untrue. There are often boards that aren't cooperating because they have a perception.
They invested at a 30 million valuation. They don't want it to be recapped at 10. A recap by definition is of an experience that's going to be painful. And so capitalization, capitalization strategy, important. I can go on, I would be pleased the future. I'm just talking about the first money. There's also strategies around from seed to potentially institutional funding and whether institutional funding that is from VCs or private equity firms is even appropriate.
One of the things I'll just sort of say on this front is it's really important to know. That many times people are talking to investors who literally are unable to invest with them and they think in them and they think that they have a shot because that person is giving them attention. The reality is everyone in this market's trying to learn, but if you're talking to a private equity firm, you can learn that that private equity firm's minimum revenue is 10 million, and minimum EBITDA is 2 million, and if you're a million dollar revenue company with negative EBITDA, they're not going to invest in you, but I will say, too many companies, and we're very diligent and protective of our clients, have conversations with a lot of people who are just, they're way far away from investing, and they don't realize it's just a learning experience on the other side.
[00:32:17] Alex Sarlin: So tell us about, you've mentioned a couple of them. You mentioned qualified and Justin Weinberg from active learning who we've had on the podcast, but tell us a little bit about some of the deals you've closed. Cause you know, it's such a complicated time. And I think entrepreneurs are getting these mixed messages or they are, you know, maybe getting false hope from certain types of investors or certain types of acquirers, but there are still.
acquisitions happening. Tell us a little bit about some of the recent acquisitions and deals you've closed and challenges you face during those processes.
[00:32:47] Mark Miller: Sure. Happy to do it. So this year we've closed four transactions. We have three companies in market and we have a set of others that will be coming to market in the late fall, if not early next year.
It's a wide range of companies. I need to be conscious of the confidentiality of the companies that We're selling or that we're going to be selling because there is a privacy to this. And I want to just, you know, for your audience, make it clear it's not to be sort of cagey. It's just when you quietly go out and see whether there's a buyer and or bring a company to market.
It's sort of like you need to do it in a very specific way in a specific window of time. And we have a very unique process, which I want to highlight and answer your questions. And it's different to what anyone can do. Since we've been operators, we have the credibility to go to companies and help determine with them whether something is strategic to what they want and or whether they might want to go.
Is it aligned to the roadmap? Do they have a competitive reason for wanting it? Is it something that's a priority? So we're able to speak to leadership. We don't just work through corp dev groups and pass memos and sims. We actually have real conversations to help people figure out whether they want to buy.
And I'm going to describe that in the context of Justin's company, because it's a good example. The part of that that's important is when things are bought that are bigger, that have multiple years of revenue growth in EBITDA, it's a much more financial and mathematical decision that people come to valuations.
When a company's still growing, it may or may not be profitable or on a path to break even. And It has to be that they're strategic value. We understand the market. We know what people are doing and we have the credibility having been operators to talk to companies and be treated like it. So the CEO of all of the different companies out there, they want to sit with us and talk, and it's helpful to our clients that we're able to reflect certain companies that want to be exposed.
And there are certain companies you don't want to be talked about, but most of them are wanting to give us ability. So. You know, just as an example, I had dinner with Jack Lynch, the CEO of Houghton Mifflin, and a conversation with him about certain categories of companies or companies we represent. It's sort of the, the example is they're saying, tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them what you told them.
Okay. So telling people what you're going to tell them, telling them what's coming, helps get someone interested and decide themselves to spend time or have someone on their team spend time. And if we're confident, our client's confident about where it is, it's less about, are they going to copy our thing?
Okay. Then are they going to track it and decide they're interested? That's the way we roll. That's what people understand is really different about what we do. We have a relationship with the investors and with the companies and their leadership to talk that way. So Justin's a great example. Justin was a first time CEO is a brilliant guy.
And just got engaged yesterday. He sent me a note, super psyched, fantastic guy. We changed Justin's life because we were able to let him move forward with his life. But when he was growing his company, he was on a pathway to either in the next year, raises some additional capital and sell, or find a buyer at the point at which we sort of didn't raise additional capital.
And the balancing act was, do we look out two more years and see where we can get to with a few million dollars more money? Or is there a strategic value today that's worth considering? People can talk all they want. It's a theoretical conversation, but what GHP did and does is we actually, with the support of the board and Justin, did a real exploration with a real letter of intent.
Not a, Hey, we're interested. It took a lot of work and very selectively reached out to a set of companies, a small set that we knew because we had gone through the, tell them what you're going to tell them phase. And then the, tell them what you told them phase, which we kept them up on the company. And those few companies that were interested.
It was very clear that there was one above all others that really wanted to see if a deal could get done. And that was Toppat, who needed Toppat for STEM, and Active was Toppat for STEM. We went through the exercise of negotiating across the parties and Top Hat put forth what they hoped to be a preemptive offer.
That is, they tried to say, here's an offer. We would like you to consider this offer without going out to others. And that offer clearly needed to be high enough and needed to be compelling enough in its terms to not go out to other people. And we were able to sort of move that offer around to the point that it was compelling and the board had to make a very difficult decision.
Which is the board had to now decide, do we invest or not? Whereas previously they were theoretically talking, uh, do we put money in and wait two years? They now had to decide and walking the board and walking Justin through our process, ultimately realized he's really best suited to lead product. And that's really what he loves.
And Igor, his co founder was really best suited to build an organization. But not have as much administrative oversight. The conclusion was ultimately made to accept the offer. And we got that deal done and it was a fabulous outcome for everybody. But the principle point is there's a whole bunch of work to get to the point.
Someone makes an offer and then you get to the hairy issues of things like networking, capital, you know, And issues like, is there any earn out and what would it be based on? And we nailed down those things at the term sheet level. So you don't have them come up later. So Justin is a great example of a company that was poised to either raise money.
Or sell and through the exploration, the conclusion was sell. Now there's another company that I want to say the opposite conclusion. I can't tell you the company's name, but what I can say is it's another one of the companies. It's actually on the pull on IQ top 50. I think it's called list, but they had been approached and we explored.
And determined through that exploration that there was an offer. And this is what's super helpful to the CEOs. They really appreciate it. We got their investors to have to make a decision. And that is the decision of the investors. Are you prepared to step up? Are you prepared to support this company against its plan?
Cause waiting, which is what you, which is investors love to do. They love to continue wait and then see was not going to work. The company was going to cut back its burn and it was going to remove its possibility of really achieving its goals. And so we were able to get the CEO ultimately to have the board commit resources and a strategic to commit resources.
So instead of selling, there was a strategic on their cap table as a minority investor that came in. They're executing it's their plan. That strategic may in the future want to make an offer, but they have no particular rights and they're executing on their plan and they're growing at a good clip and they may stay independent or they may sell, but the alternative is fine.
And we remain totally ambivalent. We are objective and are very proud that we'll never push people to try to do one thing or another. We support that CEO. We support the company and we actually, right now they have been approached and we two years later are looking at whether now might be the time to sell.
So we have this long time relationship with companies that's different than most people. Most people get in, they send letters out to CorpDev, they see who responds and then try to just get a deal done. We really take it much more personally and dig in much more.
[00:39:48] Alex Sarlin: You mentioned an article you've written recently about the crossroads.
You call it the crossroads to sell or to stay and grow. And it feels like, you know, a lot of the points you're making here are about this pivotal moment and how you really have to lay the groundwork. Before that pivotal moment, companies don't want to have to suddenly make a decision whether to sell because they either have an offer or think they have an offer.
They want to actually lay the groundwork, understand their own strategy, and understand what potential buyers are thinking. So, in this article, you list a couple of key factors that edtech companies should consider when they're trying to decide whether to sell. whether to sell or to stay and grow. Tell us about some of these factors and what you would recommend, you know, earlier stage entrepreneurs do as they're laying the groundwork for a potential sale.
[00:40:36] Mark Miller: So the first part of your question, and I did speak a bit earlier, maybe something woven into this. The first part really is It's about what you're trying to achieve for yourself, for your family, for your life and where you really are and what you really have in you. And when I say that, I mean it quite deeply.
I have been that person. I know what it's like to hit the wall or be burned out or just realize that something that you really thought to be true, Isn't as true as you thought, and now you have to really think it. So being able to be honest, it's kind of being a coach slash therapist is a deep part of this.
So what I guess I am saying in the article about should I stay or should I go? And the, and the sort of inflection points, all that's true, Alex, I think there's a deeper and principle thing. There's a guy named Pete Whalen. He's a good friend of mine. He ran inside track and has a coaching business. He's a fantastic guy.
And he and I spent a bunch of time on this and he's helped me express a concept that I'll. put out there that may seem a little bit wooey, but it's the idea that the teacher will show when the student is ready. The teacher will show when the student is ready. I want to be there for people who are ready to be students.
And so there's a part of this which is sort of just informational independently, okay? Here's some things to think about. Think about how much cash you have in the bank. Think about that the decision about whether you survive, Or you keep the pedal down and you depend on other people giving you money.
That's one thing. Think about valuation and the implications of valuation as to what you're really worth. And, and I think understanding that that will have bigger impact than you imagine, because your valuation is too high, it's going to impact how your current investors come in and whether you feel like they're being mean to you because they want to adjust the valuation or whether everyone pretends to kick their hand can down the road.
Um, Or it may even be that other people don't give you money because they perceive it's just too stressful socially. To suggest that you're worth half of what you're worth before really understanding that and then the other things about yourself. Do you have what it takes? Do you, are you in the right role?
Are you able to commit to the timeframe? I mean, look, a number of people who are really good entrepreneurs, really, I would call thoughtful, committed people have gotten burned out over the last few years and have stepped away from leading, leading their companies who are good people. They didn't just punt.
So, All of those inflection points, I think our objective is we want to talk to good entrepreneurs who are ready to be students. We want to help people think through what they're facing. Our sweet spot is companies that have product market fit that are minimum, a few million dollars in revenue. We also work with sometimes larger companies.
We brought to market a 75 million company, a bunch of companies, the 10 to 15 range. And then a bunch that are in the You know, three to 10 range. So there's a wide range and they're very different situations they're facing, but we every day spend time talking to entrepreneurs and sort of doing a therapy session through the concepts of the crossroads that I've written.
Fundamentally, the biggest problem, and I think you sort of said it is people have this idea, it's sort of a binary thing. I've decided I'm ready to sell. Or they think that they've been driven to sell because someone has talked to them. The reality is, it's not really. It should be much more way ahead of when you think you should do it, you should do it.
So it's the idea, people think the temperature is 85 and it's actually 102. And so too often what we're really trying to express out there to the world is we want to be talking with people a year ahead of when they might even imagine they were thinking of selling, sometimes even longer. We want to get to know people.
We're happy for free, for goodwill, for just karma, to be supportive of people. And that's how a lot of our business comes. Most of it's from referral and our people reaching out to us. But I'd say the part that we're trying to figure out how to do in a wider way that we're going to be working on with the transcend network is how to have more entrepreneurs getting this message sooner.
So they have inside of them something, which is, I should be seeking some support and guidance on all these things. What am I trying to do for myself, for my family? What I think this can be, what are these other issues? And so we want to, in a one to many way. More get out there to people because we too often are meeting people who are six months from running out of money, or who've been approached by someone and done a negotiation.
They think they've negotiated, but what they don't understand is they've only covered two of the 25 key topics. They're focused on what they're going to pay. And the idea is. What someone says they might pay, it's sort of a non binding LOI, one, and how much of it is contingent. That is, what's paid at closing versus what's on an earn out.
So people get ahead of themselves, and it makes it very hard for us. We want to talk to people before they have conversations, and help them from, in advance of having discussions, figure out, do you even talk to these people? And as often as not, and I'll give you an example. We know what companies and how, how companies behave.
There are many companies who literally are just building free consulting databases of themselves, of everyone who's in a space and they have no intention of buying, I won't call them bad people. It's somehow they've convinced themselves. It's okay. There are many people who operate in some version of that.
Who never really do deals. Then there are people who really appreciate and respect what they're able to do organically and what they do organically. And those companies, we also have a great relationship. So I hope I've answered the question.
[00:46:14] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. One of the things that Ben and I talk about on the podcast a lot is in this strange new age of AI.
Where, you know, rapid advancements in the core technology, but also this huge, what we call the Cambrian explosion of AI ed tech companies, at least four or 500 in the last few years, you have this wide range of different potential, you know, outcomes. I'm sure already many of these companies fit your description of, you know, six months from running out of money because they're competitive and they're small and they're just starting.
Others have reached some version of product market fit and maybe starting to think about, you know, growth or what to do next. And then you have all of these, you know, bigger companies, bigger, more established ed tech companies, including publishers, including, you know, LMS is all sorts of folks who potentially could be acquirers for any of these sort of fast moving AI startups.
But, you know, you and I've talked about this a little, and it feels like that has not happened nearly. You know, the sort of acquisition of the smaller AI fast moving companies by the bigger has really not happened much so far. I'm curious whether you think it's going to happen and if, in general, how you think AI is going to change the ed tech mergers and acquisitions space.
[00:47:27] Mark Miller: So, I have a point of view on this, Alex, and I'm going to separate the point of view as to sort of the funding of companies, how the response has been to larger companies, to AI companies. The fact of the matter is, AI and the dollars going to AI, I think Bill Gates recently said it, it pales into comparison to the sort of, early days of the internet.
And I think that because there's so many massive bets, many larger companies are not as impressed to get to buy early things that may themselves be wiped away with the next generation of AI that comes out from these really large players. So I think there's a little bit of a confusion and distraction around, you know, smart people who were solving a problem who may themselves be wiped away.
By something that becomes just a feature in the future. So I think that people are overestimating companies that are doing things that are novel with AI and bigger people are going to wait. Now, that being said, there's also talent. You know, we sold a company called the Telus learnings. Macmillan was substantially.
Macmillan realizing they would never be able to get the quality of talent, the language, you know, the PhDs in linguistics and machine learning that Intellis had were a big part of the acquisition. So there can be acquisitions that are done for talent because, you know, the best talent hasn't historically gone to large education companies, but Macmillan got incredible talent children.
You know, it was a great acquisition. It was one of the top exits of that year. I think it was a 12x multiple. But the fact of the matter is, I would just say there are some people who are doing really novel things and applying AI in novel ways. And there's some sort of just principled core AI things. And the AI area that a lot of attention has gone to is sort of into tutoring and into coaching.
And one of our clients is a company called Mainstay that plays in that space. You know, Mainstay is a company that has a bot messaging and an AI that plays in that space. Enhanced coach that is sort of a coach that supports people to figure out what it is they're looking for and then connects them to the resources and I use them as an example because AI is one of the ways that this thing facilitates identifying you, understanding who you are, engaging with you to connect you to the right resources, but AI is a feature in supporting the broader value proposition.
And so, I guess, in my view, as I've looked at a number of companies, AI is being implemented into companies to do things to make it better. It's huge around the notion of how you support people to take actions, or to in some cases not take actions, and Mainstay is a fantastic example. You know, the personal coach concept of supporting education is a fabulous idea, and its day has come.
There are other AI Technologies out there. And some of them, you know, we saw the CEO of one of the leading ones when we were together. I think there will be successes, but there's too much, too many people with, with money, I don't want to say it's a solution to serve in search of a problem because there's so many problems, but I think it's more about how you're applying it.
And I think, again, there's going to be acquisitions of talent for sure. But the thing about the education market, and you and I've discussed this also, it takes much longer than people think to actually achieve a level of success. You can throw more money into sales and marketing and often just piss away a lot of money because things don't grow.
And in a B2B world at the rate people would like great companies exist in the category of this, you know, Three to 10 million range. There's some really solid companies just haven't grown. And the number of a hundred million dollar companies you can count on your hand. So it's not a market that has. The kinds of things in like in the BDC world.
And I think again, AI is incredible and it's going to be super impactful and it's going to make a lot of things better that already exist. And there's going to be some really good companies, but I do worry that there's so many bigger issues and the challenges. are going to be not just the companies and what capabilities they have, but their committees getting together in higher ed to understand AI.
And it's obviously one of those things that the technology is going to be held back by people trying to put up guardrails who have no, who don't really understand. School boards are getting together to create policies. We're really involved in how AI is. being used to support grading in the future and assessment generally and assessment theory, we know a ton about.
I think it's unbelievable. I met with one of my favorite professors at Cornell. I don't know if you took Peter Katzenstein's international relations, but he was an amazing professor. And what he told me is he is already. using people's prompts as a basis for grading their papers. He requires the students show all of the prompts they've created to do their research and to write their paper.
And that is one of the criterion that he's building his own rubric because he is one just wicked smart, but he realizes there's nothing that's going to stop students from using this. So I think, you know, I'm super excited about the potential. I also think. Sometimes you fight about or spend a bunch of time talking about something.
And there's another thing that's so much more important. And the more important thing today is the fact that schools are letting go of really good products that have had great outcomes for them, but they're saying that they're concerned about funding. And I think that's a way bigger issue in K 12 and higher ed right now than these other things.
I am quite concerned of the fact that we've got to enable the K 12 schools to spend the rest of their money and believe that more funding is going to come in as opposed to holding back and being worried about jobs, which is the K 12 problem. And in higher ed, I worry that the large SIS LMS companies end up having Mediocre products that do things like the really great innovative companies we support, but they ended up being the winners because schools can say, well, we already spent a bunch of money for that.
So we'd rather they had that feature. I care about the innovation layer. That's why I founded learn launch to support innovation, which was an accelerator and a coworking space and a conference that I'm super proud of. And I continue to want to support innovation. But I think that's the bigger issue today for the market than spending a bunch of time talking about what it could have, should have been on AI.
[00:53:39] Alex Sarlin: Really interesting points. I think, you know, what I'm hearing is there's a sort of squeeze from both sides is the regulatory side, which could slow things down and create all sorts of hurdles to Purchasing for these AI companies. And then there's the other side, the tech companies, the frontier models moving so quickly and having so much money, not just the frontier models, you know, all sorts of AI companies that have this huge investments and they can move so quickly that that can, pace, you know, they can lap some of these AI education companies and sort of wipe them out from a features perspective or, or incorporate their entire company as a feature in, in something they do.
And so you sort of have one side slowing you down and one side, you know, going so fast that they could sort of leave it behind. That's, it's a really interesting point. And so your point about the funding and the ESSER funding and sort of both K 12 and higher ed sort of nervousness about ed tech is really well found.
And I think it brings us pretty naturally to what we usually And our conversation on because I know we're almost at time here, which is that, you know, you've seen so much in the ed tech space, you know, you've started companies and seen them grow and sell. You've started companies and seen them get wiped out by, you know, black swan events like September 11th.
You've worked with many different companies and entrepreneurs as they've been investigating sales or actually getting sold. You have such a wide view of this space right now. You just mentioned this funding cliff or sort of people's nervousness about funding is a really important trend. I'd like to hear you expand on that because I think that's really important for our audience to think about it.
You know, we shouldn't miss the, the forest for the trees. And if you feel like AI is a, is a tree, but the forest is the whole B2B school buying sector. Tell us a little bit more about that and what you see coming.
[00:55:21] Mark Miller: So we were just asked to co sponsor and what the other groups I didn't mention, we did the capital market session for was ISTE.
So we were asked to co sponsor an ISTE event at the main conference and Tal and Joseph South and Richard, great, great folks. I think some people, uh, were there from medium sized companies and a bunch of larger companies were there. There were a whole bunch of announcements about standards and efficacy.
And there were also, the Undersecretary of Education was there. So it was a really good group, and it was sort of administered by Whiteboard Advisors, who did a great job of getting out these points. So, the message that I will say that, That sort of corroborated my point is, a lot of schools are saying these days to companies we work with, I'd say K 12, they're saying, we don't have enough money, we really appreciate what you did, your work was great, but right now we need to slow down or stop.
It is the kith of death. There's this expression. Once you lose momentum to regain, it takes a lot more energy. You don't often regain momentum. So when people slow down, it's often the kiss of death. And it hurts your story, it hurts your net revenue retention, it hurts your funding. That is happening. Why is that happening?
Perception can be reality about spending money. So it may be that there really are tight budgets. It may be that people aren't accessing funding that they could have access to. That often happens in K 12. It sounds insane, but it's true. So, entrepreneurial people may spend before they actually even know the next money's coming in because they sort of have the confidence that it's going to come in or they have a belief, they have faith.
Many people in schools, if the money's not there, until someone says it's there, they may act like it's not there. And the reality is, it just may not be that it was announced yet that there's going to be more money there. Mm hmm. And so they're suggesting poverty, or they're suggesting that they're in a state of inability to spend, when in reality it soon might be announced.
And so that was part of the message. We need to get these schools to have confidence there's money behind ESSER, because now many of them are acting and being told there may not be more money, and there was this giant pocket of money. But in reality, it's going to come. And so the, the, the audience was conveying government, please make these schools feel confident.
You're going to have more funding. This isn't going away because their behavior has huge implications. That's K 12. And unfortunately, you get no benefit for taking risk of spending money if the money doesn't come out. There's also fear and concern about what happens in the election. There's fear and concern about the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decision on a sort of against the Chevron case may take away a whole bunch of the latitude of the Department of Education to do things that it's been able to do before. So look, there's a bunch of stuff going on. In higher ed, similarly, There's this battle to kill for profit education.
There's a whole bunch of issues that have been sort of been trying to be pushed through about what the business models can be to do things and whether foreign entities can be, there's a whole bunch of stuff legislatively that's up in the air when there's uncertainty, it really harms the flow of money.
And the flow of money to these companies is the one I really care about. To the big companies, you know, they can get sources of debt and other things, but smaller companies, people are waiting to see what happens on all these rules and regulations
[00:58:46] Alex Sarlin: that
[00:58:47] Mark Miller: are threatened to be put out there that have implications for companies.
And in higher ed, you know, some of the best companies out there that we work with are seeing a slowdown and the slowdown is often, we need to wait and see, we need to make sure our core things are funded. So is that real? Again, K 12 is more about funding streams. Higher ed is more about budgets. But this whole thing that happened with FAFSA, and if fewer kids go to college, the colleges have less money.
There's no benefit to taking risks. I like to say something about higher ed, and by the way, I love the academy. So I say this with someone who has love for it. The expression is this. You get 65 to 70 percent of the benefit for bringing forth an interesting and novel idea to a meeting and saying we should keep our eye on it.
You take 70 percent of the risk for actually doing something. And saying we should do this. So if you can get 70 percent of the benefit, just saying there's something super interesting. I think we should all keep our eye on this. Why take the risk?
[00:59:45] Alex Sarlin: That's really interesting. And there are a handful of higher ed institutions that are sort of have built that muscle of just jumping, of just saying, okay, this thing may be coming.
Let's just try it. Let's make a partnership. Let's bring somebody. Arizona state has dreamscape learn coming to campus and building, you know, immersive movie theaters. And it's like most of the rest of the universities are saying, like you say, Oh, maybe there's something to virtual reality and immersive learning.
We should keep an eye on it. We're not going to put any money towards it. We're not going to make any decisions, not going to make any plans even. It's a really interesting point.
[01:00:20] Mark Miller: Josh is a friend and GreenState's a fascinating idea, but there's so few. So, when I started, Ken King, Stuart Lin, Steve Hall, who was a CIO of Harvard, CIOs did things and didn't have to tell everybody what they were doing.
They would be years away of what the market wanted. Because let's be clear, faculty aren't Ever, rarely the ones to sort of push for new innovation. So CIOs would do things like the concept of what is now the LMS, which people can sort of complain about what it's become. But initially it had some really novel ideas.
So those people were able to do stuff ahead of having to talk to everybody. It's kind of death by a thousand cuts where the CIOs now have to explain to everyone where they're going. There were a few CIOs like Lev Gannik, who's at ASU, who are of that old school. Ken King, Stuart Lynn, Steve Hall, these people who were my mentors, who were at Cornell, Harvard, UC, Dave Lambert, they don't exist anymore.
CIOs have to explain to people what they're doing, and it's death by a thousand cuts, because they're thinking years ahead, and too many people are sitting around saying, hmm, maybe the demand isn't there for that, maybe, So that's another big part of the problem is the nature and structure of universities has been that the people who actually were able to think ahead have lost the power and budget to pursue things.
And they were smart about this stuff. There were technologists and they're just one voice now.
[01:01:43] Alex Sarlin: It feels like a through line of this whole conversation is sort of the push and pull of, you know, optimism or, you know, innovation or sort of adventurousness and, and people, you know, some types of companies, some types of entrepreneurs, some types of schools, you know, all wanting to sort of be at the forefront and rush forward.
And that's the sort of tech side of ed tech. And then the Somewhat more conservative, you know, concerned about budgets concerned about, you know, wanting to make sure they're the school board is happy or that their board of investors is happy. And they want to make sure that they're, you know, there's a sort of conservative stance that I would say goes a little bit more with the sort of education side because it has to be regulated.
It has to be, people have to be careful, you know, budgets can run out and this tension of, of the sort of forward moving feeling of technology and the, you know, Inherent sort of inertia of education feels like it affects everything in this space. It's interesting to hear it sort of come up in all of these different ways throughout this conversation.
I know you have a million of these, but can you give us, you know, one or two resources that you would recommend for people listening to this episode of the podcast, and they want to know more about some of the many things we've discussed. It could be about mergers and acquisitions, capital strategy. And, you know, confidence, what would you recommend that somebody look into?
It can be a newsletter, a book, it can be, you know, a blog or a podcast. Where should people go if they really want to have that sort of inside track on this side of ed tech? So I have a
[01:03:10] Mark Miller: few things that I read that I'll tell you, I really appreciate. And some of them are not novel at all, and some of them may be, but so I really.
For my purposes in terms of understanding the, some of the smartest people who are looking ahead at problems and have their own opinions. Someone I've gotten to know quite well and who became an investor in Academ was a guy named Wally Boston. He ran American Public University for many, many years. He was the CEO of American Public University, which after SNHU and WGU is like the next one on the list, a hundred plus thousand students.
Very stark guy, smart guy with a doctorate in education for University of Pennsylvania. He writes stuff and he's willing to put out there things that I think are. Like way beyond what a PowerPoint, like for me, I hate reading stuff that I could just reading stuff that it could just been a PowerPoint. So things about like what the government's actually thinking in its decisions about the new regulations or what's going on in North Carolina as it relates to building a statewide.
System wide online program and how does history help us think about that and look at that based on what happened in Texas and Massachusetts and other places and are they like to be a success? I love what Wally writes. Fantastic. Phil Hill, I think as it relates to things that are out there, the systems that are out there, particularly technologies are being used and the data and the representation of data, I love it.
And I think he's a crazy smart guy and he's been there. So he really speaks authentically. He's not out there to sell anything. I really also think on the policy and legislative side, there's some people who work with whiteboard, David DeShiver and Alison Griffin, who are just brilliant people. Alison was the person who worked for the Congressman who was responsible writing the higher education act.
She's in Colorado, is incredibly smart. And understands this sort of connection between sort of policy funding streams, which is a word that people who play this game at a high level understand. And also she's particularly involved. She was the chairman of a community college, the bridge between education and workforce and jobs, just one of the smartest people out there.
David DeShiver is behind the scenes at Whiteboard. I think they hide him and he hides himself. Cause I don't know that he likes to talk to many people. David, if you read this, I'm sure you're laughing or hear this, but he asked it related to policy. So for example, the implications of this Supreme court ruling, he can make simple things that are very complicated.
[01:05:39] Alex Sarlin: So
[01:05:39] Mark Miller: those are some individuals. There's a whole bunch of other stuff. I do read a lot of the things out there that are written different sites. I will say that, you know, But those are ones that sort of, for me, stand out. I think they're really helpful for people to get more than just the opinions that are kind of represented by everybody.
[01:05:58] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. As always, we will put links to all of those resources in the show notes for this episode. That was Wally Boston, who writes about the future of higher education from a really interesting standpoint. Phil Hill, one I absolutely love as well. And David DeShriver and Alison Griffin, who are associated with Whiteboard Advisors.
Find the links in the show notes for the episode. This has been a really interesting conversation and, you know, I feel like, Mark, you are one of the true EdTech insiders. You've been in the space for decades and you've seen so many different, you know, rises and falls and trends. Your pattern matching is really unprecedented.
So, for being here. I appreciate you being here and sharing just a sliver of it with us and the EdTech Insiders audience. Mark Miller is the founder and managing director of Good Harbor Partners, boutique sell side focused M& A advisory and outsourced corporate development firm focused on the education technology EdTech industry.
Thank you so much, Mark, for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[01:06:58] Mark Miller: Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you for your guidance, coaching. This was a great experience. You're a great guy, Alex. Thank you. Thanks
[01:07:05] Alex Sarlin: for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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