Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Week in Edtech 2/19/2025: BrainPop’s Leadership Shake-Up, EdTech’s Job Market Crunch, The Decline of Gamification, AI-Powered Learning Companions Rise, Deep Reasoning Models Reshape AI, and More!
This week in EdTech, Alex and Ben break down the latest trends in AI and EdTech.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:27] Key takeaways from the Bay Area EdTech Summit.
[00:04:55] BrainPop’s CEO change and what it signals for edtech.
[00:06:29] The decline of gamification and shifting user engagement.
[00:10:37] BrainPop’s business model and Lego’s long-term vision.
[00:13:50] AI’s next leap—deep reasoning and memory-driven models.
[00:17:56] Where edtech companies can still create real AI value.
[00:19:14] The rise of AI-powered learning companions.
[00:22:36] The edtech job market squeeze and hiring slowdowns.
[00:23:45] ASU GSV, AI in game development, and upcoming events.
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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: One thing that, that stands out to me as I think about this moment is that, you know, we talked about how in American politics, the education has really disappeared as an issue as a real issue for, for quite a while. There have not been meaningful discussions about. teacher pay or class sizes or, you know, sort of any of the things, you know, NAEP scores or sort of any of the things that you might expect education policy to be about.
It's been all culture war. It's been all talks of, of parent control and brainwashing and D E I and, and transgender bathrooms and just all of these crazy culture war hot button issues, which are totally peripheral to anything related to actual education.
Welcome to ed tech insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry and funding rounds to impact AI development across early childhood, K 12, higher ed and work. You'll find it all here
[00:01:01] Ben Kornell: at ed tech insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and. Off to 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.
Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. It's another week in EdTech and we've got our co host, co founder and new dad, Alex Arlen back in the seat. Welcome back, Alex.
[00:01:40] Alex Sarlin: Hey, thank you, Ben. It's so great to be back. I'm tired. I'm sleepy. I'm not going to lie. I've been waking up multiple times a night for over a month now, but I am really excited to be back in this chair and to connect with all things EdTech and back with our, our amazing community.
So. Tell us what's been happening. I've been out of the loop. Tell me, tell us what's been happening. You've done all these amazing episodes over the last few weeks with all of these different guests hosts catch me up.
[00:02:07] Ben Kornell: Well, I mean, in some ways, nothing has changed Alex. And in other ways, everything has changed.
Yeah. Shout out to, to Myra, to Matt tower. We also had Libby Hills. It's been great to have our rotating guests, but it's also. Great to have you back home here, and I'm excited for the sleep deprived Alex because there's the sleep deprived Alex expits the truth. So I'm very excited to hear our conversation today.
Also, on the event side, it's been a really great month. We had just last week we had our Bay Area Ed Tech Summit. With around 200 great entrepreneurs, leaders, investors, policy leaders, and the topic was really deep diving on what is the policy environment at the state, federal and local level for K 12, higher ed and workforce.
It was a real, real tour de force meeting. And then we also had. A great webinar where we got to hear from some advanced AI entrepreneurs. You were on that with Ben Caulfield and with Bethany from perplexity from atypical, sorry, Bethany from atypical and a deal from magic school. So it's just been a really.
We started the year off strong, Alex, but I can say no joke. It's great to have you back.
[00:03:27] Alex Sarlin: Thanks. That webinar was really a lot of fun. And I recommend if people hadn't, weren't there live, or if you didn't register yet, you can still get in and you can still listen to the recording and, you know, a deal. Has they have over 4 million educators now on magic school, Bethany knows AI really, really well.
And then of course, Ben Caulfield, who I'd never met, Edie is doing fascinating work with student misconceptions with open data sets. There's a lot going on in this space. And it was a really, that was a webinar to sort of kick off our new map delivery, which has been such a cool project. We now have. We've done our gen AI market map for 2025, and we're sort of breaking it down into categories bit by bit.
So it's been so, so much fun and we're getting really good feedback. One other thing I wanted to mention is that we are planning, of course, our big happy hour for ASU GSB. I know it's still a couple months out at this point, but we are really excited. I know you've been all over that. We have some great, great spaces, great attendees, great sponsors.
And at the end of March, we're also planning on doing a webinar all about game development, educational game development, and how that is going to be changing very, very rapidly in the age of AI. And we've got incredible guests lined up for that as well. So keep an eye on that space. The registration will be.
Pretty soon for that one, too. So yeah, starting strong, lots of stuff going on. I think we have a scoop today, Ben, right? We have some, some really cutting, fast cutting bleeding edge news. Do you want to break
[00:04:55] Ben Kornell: it? Yeah, sure. And I don't know how, uh, how fast the news will spread. So we'll see by the time you listen to this, maybe this is old news, but Brain pop, which is really one of the.
Most successful gamified, quizzing and engagement maps just replaced their CEO. Scott Fitzgerald, who was on our pod. We huge fans of him. It seems like he has stepped down in a very low key way. The CFO has stepped in and you know, this is the new CFO or the new CEO. Her name is Kathleen Danaher. She was the CFO.
She's stepping up. They've hired a new CFO and these are the kinds of moves that look like. A corporate restructure for financial reasons, and we've just been hearing whispers about the kind of growth of these gamified apps from a user growth standpoint have stalled, but also from a revenue standpoint, have been struggling and in an age of AI, where the interactivity layer on top of everything has ramped up really quickly, how do things like Kahoot and BrainPop and similar programs like the Class Dojo Or, uh, quizzes or Quizlet, how do they continue to drive value?
Interestingly, the quizzes and Quizlets, they're taming to go deeper and the academics and assessment side and flexing that muscle, whereas the gamification seems to be, you know, not as much of a differentiating factor. So I think it's a really, it's big news. And then there's also like sub stories on it before we got into that.
Like, what was your take when you heard the news?
[00:06:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I mean, my, my first immediate reaction was a little bit of disappointment because I really, really enjoyed talking to Scott Fitzpatrick from BrainPop. That was a fascinating interview. He is all in on AI, really thoughtful about it. And it was interesting.
One of the things that he called out was that, that BrainPop has actually sort of moved away from the game space. I don't know, probably gamification and the sort of engagement of the interface is obviously still important, but. They had moved sort of away from the games back more into the video and really more into the sort of engagement world, like providing safe contained, really high quality content.
And of course they have this parent company. They were bought by Kirkby, which is the owner of Lego and that. In and of itself is fascinating because it's Lego. It's one of the biggest, you know, gaming technology, toy, you know, movie brands in the world. I'm sad to hear that he is going, I don't know anything other than the story there.
I think that you're right, that there's something. A little bit scary about a business. That's really about sort of engaging content in an age where not only is AI content so easy to make, including animations are coming really soon. Video is, you know, all sorts of video content is coming and all the different video brands are just competing for, for amazing content, but also you have.
the YouTubes of the world. Remember, we talked to Jonathan Katzmann from, who's the head of YouTube for education. And it's just unbelievable how many students use YouTube as a way to learn it at all ages. So if you're sort of a video library and you're sort of trying to engage students with, with more interesting ways to learn the things that are in their curriculum, you have a lot of competition.
So I can imagine there's. I can imagine why there might be some stress internally around strategy. That said more power to the new, to the new CEO, Kathleen Danaher coming from the finance side. And I'm really curious about what Lego specifically wants to do with this. I've never quite seen the synergy.
Between what's happening in brain pop and what's happening with Lego. I remember cahoots made all the deals with Marvel and Disney and some really interesting licensed content brands, but I haven't seen that with brain pop yet. So I wonder if that's coming. It's could be that when people listen to this, this is like old news.
I just heard about it minutes ago. So just digesting it as well. And it's really interesting. Brain pop is just one of the absolute. Stall works in the ed tech space. Been around a long time. It's in many, many, many, many, many schools. So yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll see the fallout from it and see how it affects others in the space.
[00:08:59] Ben Kornell: Yeah. One thing that's really interesting is that this is a company that never took venture money. The founder, I believe it was an Israeli founder who started it years ago. Sold it for 875 million. So a full 100 percent equity sale. And with the Lego Kirby. Folks owning it, there's not the same kind of venture pressures or even private equity pressures that, that I would be aware of because this is a balance sheet investment.
So it does make you wonder about what the overall trends are because so many of the other moves that we've seen, like the. Collapse of FEV Tutor or some of the drama that we've been covering for years now about BYJUICE have to do with massive amounts of debt, rising interest rates, private equity dynamics.
This one seems to be of a different sort. And I think it's a, you know, any like movement at the top where you're looking at CFO and financial people taking On leadership, it just raises more questions than answers, and we have been hearing some rumblings about the difficulty of converting the kind of premium.
The free is going well, but the medium is hard. We've heard that actually many of these apps have reached kind of a saturation point that makes it really hard for them to grow the user base and from a product conversion rate to purchase it, it hasn't been working. So, you know, something that everyone in the space should be paying attention to because Bearing Pops has been a stalwart for the last decade.
[00:10:37] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And you would think that, you know, even with ESSER funding changing and people trying to sort of stream slim down their, their ed tech budgets, BrainPop has been around so long, I would imagine it's exactly the kind of tool that should be embedded in curriculum. It should be that teachers have used the same BrainPop videos for Five years.
And they put all the pieces together from brain pop. So the, it should feel painful to get rid of it. You know, it should feel something like, like the type of tool that shouldn't be on a chopping block. So I, I wonder if that's true. I guess the, the double edged sword, the other side of that, it could be that, you know, maybe being Bob has been in schools for so long that they don't think of it as.
cutting edge anymore. And they want to do, they're looking to sort of different sets of tools and consider it almost like take it for granted. So I don't know, but yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll keep following up on it. And I, you know, we know a few really great people at brain pop, maybe we'll be able to get some more inside scoop about what is happening there and what the next plans are going to be.
So should we talk about some of the things happening around the world in the AI world and how they may have some effect on the ed tech world, it's always fun to talk about. The big AI moves.
[00:11:45] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I think this week we are digesting a lot of what's been happening in AI, and that specifically has to do with these deep research models.
So, you know, we've gone through the kind of lightweight generative AI chat kind of. And now the industry is really moving to deeper analysis, deeper analytics that that's been led by the reasoning models from OpenAI and then also DeepSeek. And we've got reasoning models from Anthropic and, and Google coming out.
But the kind of use cases where. You know, open AI initially kind of hit with having just a fun, like, let's write a poem or something like that have actually moved into analyst type roles. And I think what we're seeing is actually an alignment of AI companies, value props to specific jobs or tasks.
Anthropic actually just announced that they expect 27 billion in revenue for the year 2027. That's their projection, which suggests that they found kind of their pocket of gold here. They've struck gold and they're going to be selling this B2B. Solution that really has direct impact on jobs and careers.
So we may be entering the age of AI where it's like, okay, I'm the American population is concerned about, is this going to take my job? And it reminds me a lot of Ryan Ryan's work on. Apprenticeship, and he had an article, this Ryan from achieve, he had an article about basically AI creating a gap in terms of entry level jobs, making it really hard for entry level people to get in.
I think that's what's really playing out here. So check out Ryan Craig's article. We can include that in the show notes, but that's really the story of this first quarter. I think, what are you seeing as you come back to it with fresh eyes?
[00:13:50] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I mean, I was out during the whole deep seek freak out and I was following it from afar, you know, reading the, all the different takes and news.
And I was really not as impressed or flabbergasted by the deep seek moment as, as a lot of others were. It just didn't, I don't know. I still, and I still am not, I don't, it doesn't strike me as a meaningful competition to the big companies. You just mentioned the Anthropix and OpenAI's and Google's of the world.
I just. I don't see it yet. And then I know open source is really powerful. I know that Chinese AI is extremely, it is good and fast moving. I still don't think it has not changed my personal view of the narrative that, that these models are still going to dominate. I might be wrong, of course, as always, but that's my feeling.
And I think the news you're talking about here, I think it makes it even clearer, right? Because. While DeepSeek is trying to sort of compete with ChatGPT and be able to do some of the, the core functionality, all of these companies are going deeper and deeper and deeper. I mean, Claude 4. 0 is expected to be just weeks from now, and they say it's going to be incredibly good at coding.
It's going to have much, much better, deeper reasoning, be just as fast, if not faster, but also be able to deep. The reason and critically analyze huge data sets and all sorts of things. There's this whole idea, I'm just getting my head around this, but Google has just put out this concept of Titans, which is the gist of it, as far as I can tell, is that it's really about giving the AI a much deeper and more complex memory.
I mean, you can, you know, anybody who's used any of these chatbots knows it has sort of the memory of a goldfish within, within any chat, it forgets things earlier on, and if you start a new chat, it just starts from fresh, it's basically saying. The scuttlebutt I'm hearing is that this is a major innovation, maybe even sort of the next generation of transformers, which is what enabled all of this to happen in the first place.
And it could be a really big deal. And, and of course that is really important for education because in the education use case, you really need memory. You need your, if you're going to have a persistent partner, a language partner or a tutor or a chat bot that's coaching you for your entire. High school experience.
You need it to remember everything and be able to answer very quickly with everything you've ever done at, at his fingertips. And technically that hasn't been easy at all to do yet. And it's, it might be right on the horizon. So I think what Google and the topic are doing are amazing. OpenAI has been teasing their GPT 5 and everybody's trying to figure out when that's going to come out.
They rejected a, you know, a hundred billion dollar sort of hostile takeover bid from Elon Musk. I'm probably using the word hostile takeover wrong, but it's certainly hostile. And Musk of course has his own company XAI, which is just put out its own chat by Grok3. We also saw Mira Murati, another ex OpenAI executive.
Announce her new startup, which is called thinking machines lab. And we'll see where that goes. Many of the open AI early folks have now started their own company. So I think from an ed tech perspective, my take would be these frontier models are getting really, really, really powerful in. Even more new ways than we've expected.
They're going to be able to do a lot of work. And to your, to your point about early stage careers, I mean, Ryan Craig is one of my favorite people in all of, all of education and technology and workforce. I definitely think there's, there's a lot to that. I also think that there will be a new set of entry level jobs that probably will be pretty.
Complex. And you know, they'll just, it may just raise the bar for what an entry level job is. It might be running a virtual team of really amazing agents and just sort of making sure they're getting everything right and making sure that they're headed in the right direction and they're talking to each other.
That might be what an entry level job looks like in, in five years. It might not be, you know, doing a Google sheet. It might not be doing PowerPoints. It might not be learning the ropes. It might be sort of working within a team. Mostly virtual team, and we'll see how that all goes. But it's, uh, I'm still very bullish on these sort of frontier model companies defining the space, and I think they're still outpacing open source for now, even if open source is getting more and more interesting.
[00:17:56] Ben Kornell: Yeah, totally. The question on the value chain here is like, what's getting commoditized? And where is the value capture? And as we look at different open source models, what everyone's doing, instead of adopting a singular open source model or a singular paid model, is they're building interoperability from the get go so that they can easily switch from model to model.
And I think that that's what's driving this commoditization of the AI layer. So then the question is Is the value layer, the value on top is the value layer, the value underneath. And, you know, so far you can see there's just brute force building of more compute and companies like Nvidia continue, whether their stock is up or down, like.
They're meaningfully growing. And so I guess for us, especially in the ed tech space, the real question is like, how do you engineer value on the app layer on top of this stuff? And time and again, I just see that creating specific user interface and experience that tunes it so that it's specific to a job task or industry specific niche, a convention, that's where the value engineering happens.
[00:19:14] Alex Sarlin: I agree. I mean, and that's sort of what I mean by like, if you're an ed tech company, a startup or an incumbent, and you're thinking about, okay, this concept of a learning companion of a sort of available support system, that could be it could be a mental health support system, it could be a tutoring support system, it could be a support system for educator, the underlying models are developing In these really meaningful ways and the capacity for that kind of character and or persona to do unbelievable things is just going to grow.
That doesn't mean that it will outpace anything you tune it to do. You can still be like, I'm going to define what a learning companion looks like, and I'm going to build a whole system around that. And then as these frontier models. Get richer and you can have more and more history and more and more memory, more and more deep reasoning.
You just have to stay on top of it. That's, that's my read on how do you sort of really make it work, even though as the capacity gets richer and richer and richer, you sort of have to stay above and say, okay, but how do we actually tailor this so that it works, that it it's accessible, it works in. A school context.
If you're going there, it works in a student context. If you're going there, it matches all the privacy issues. It matches all the pedagogy that you actually want to happen. It's usable. It's, it retains users. It converts. Those are all things that are not in the core technology.
[00:20:36] Ben Kornell: Yeah. So I guess, you know, as we wrap the around the world, I think the analogy we've used before is like, we're just in the first ending of this.
Maybe we've reached the second inning.
[00:20:47] Alex Sarlin: That's what this feels like.
[00:20:48] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it does feel like we now know who the major players are. There's unlikely to be major entrants. That's probably why the deep seek one was a shocker. It's like, whoa, there's going to be a Chinese entrant here. But, you know, that didn't really surprise me.
I think there's a lot of folks who look at some, the global landscape and just, Can can see that many countries are going to need to have their own LLM from their country and that that's just like table stakes for global powers going forward. So now we're actually seeing it mature into like, we've got to have real revenue.
We've got to have real use cases, and I think that that's probably a good thing for AI. Where we're going to see real friction is in the societal impact, a related one, not in the news today, but I'm just the other kind of the second headline I would add, or I guess we're on story number three, is that there's just a, a lot of people looking for jobs right now in ed tech.
And not a lot of openings. And I would say we've kind of come out of an ed tech winner where companies seem to have found their footing. And those who were reliant on growth from school or federal funding customers, they are, they have already pivoted strong to a. Breakeven or a cashflow positive model, but we're just seeing with the uncertainty around AI and then the uncertainty around policy, everyone is just being really, really careful about hiring that next FTE.
And then when they post, they're getting like 2000, 3000 applicants. So what I'd love to hear, you know, you're coming back fresh. Again, like, how do you see this spring playing out with the state of edtech in terms of the jobs market and, you know, how are companies navigating this uncertainty?
[00:22:36] Alex Sarlin: It really is a terrible mess out there and, you know, we'll be covering this consistently over the next few weeks, obviously, because there's just so much happening in the federal policy department.
States are starting to get involved. Such chaos and unpredictability coming from the government right now. It's sort of amazing, but you know I mean one thing that that stands out to me as I think about this moment in is that you know We talked about how in American politics the education has really Disappeared as an issue as a real issue for, for quite a while.
There have not been meaningful discussions about teacher pay or class sizes or, you know, sort of any of the things, you know, NAEP scores or sort of any of the things that you might expect education policy to be about. It's been all culture war. It's been all, you know, Talks of, of parent control and brainwashing and DEI and, and transgender bathrooms and just all of these crazy culture war hot button issues, which are totally peripheral to anything related to actual education.
So, I think, you know, now we have an administration in place and the only education policy to speak of is, Is, is that is exactly those culture war issues and sort of making all of these broad brush decisions based entirely on them. Um, and I think what it, you know, not only does it throw everything into disarray and confusion, there's just no positive vision of what education should look like.
Uh, I have heard nothing about that from. The new, you know, secretary of education, a candidate from anybody in politics recently, sort of at all. It's just pure, both sides in a lot of ways are just sort of focused on these hot button issues. And I'm hoping that, you know, maybe the chaos of this moment will serve as some kind of opportunity for people to, to rethink and make some broader changes.
I always try to stay optimistic about it, but. We'll have to see. It's a, it's a pretty rough time. So with that, I think we can end this episode for today. There is a ton more to cover in upcoming weeks, and I'm really excited to be back. So remember everybody we're so. Honored to have you listening to us.
We are really excited about upcoming events at ASU GSV and our game development. It's AI and educational game development webinar, which is coming in late March. Um, we're really, really excited to, uh, to be back in action. And if you're, if it happens at edtech, it's been so long. I don't remember if it happens in edtech, you'll hear about it here on edtech insiders.
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