Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Week in Edtech 4/16/2025: ASU+GSV Recap, GPT-4.1 Launch, Harvard vs. DEI Mandates, Linda McMahon’s Edtech Debut, Claude’s Study Mode, Yuanfudao’s AI Tutor, Brisk Wins GSV Cup, and More! Feat. Collin Earnst of the EdTech Leadership Collective
Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they explore the latest developments in education technology, from ASU+GSV insights to AI model releases, international edtech innovations, and federal policy shake-ups.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:01:45] ASU+GSV recap and post-conference energy
[00:04:48] Strategic AI integration gains traction
[00:05:56] Edtech market braces for consolidation
[00:08:45] Linda McMahon engages at ASU+GSV
[00:10:18] Challenges merging CS and AI in schools
[00:13:16] Harvard pushes back on federal DEI demands signals sector shift
[00:23:21] Yuanfudao launches next-gen AI tutor
[00:28:20] OpenAI releases GPT-4.1 with huge upgrades
[00:30:25] Google and Claude enhance AI tools
[00:33:56] Brisk wins GSV Cup and raises $15M
[00:35:20] Big funding rounds hit across edtech
[00:37:56] Global expansion and tutor startup funding
Plus, special guest:
[00:38:27] Collin Earnst of the Ed-tech Leadership Collective on building edtech leadership
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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: Harvard's been around. A very long time and for them to see this moment, it's been a couple of months of this administration being in office and saying, oh, I guess this is the new norm. That's, it is very shortsighted, let's say that way. I think this is a play to say, yes, you punch the bully in the nose and you see where they're made of and that's what they're doing, and I think we're all gonna see what they're made of.
With this higher ed fight. There will be consequences. They're gonna try to pull funding, but at the same time, I'm not sure that there's that much behind some of this. I think a lot of this has been really performative from the federal government. It's been bullying on purpose.
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
[00:00:54] Ben Kornell: work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and offer 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 family. We are back. Ben and Alex back from A-S-U-G-S-V. We're drinking as much coffee as we can, trying to catch up on our inboxes, trying to stay married to our favorite people in the world, because there is so much that went on last week and continues to go on in the EdTech world.
And we'll be talking about it a little bit today.
[00:01:45] Alex Sarlin: Alex, how are you feeling? How are you recovering? I'm recovering. I am recovering now. It took a little while. It takes so much energy to talk to that many people in a row in one day, and be in a space where you're constantly scanning for faces, you know, and having people come up to you.
And of course, our happy hour event was a blast as always, but it's just like social explosion of reconnecting with all of these different people. So I'm recovering. I'm on baby duty with both my kids this weekend. My wife is taking her time away to make up for a SU, so ask me again on Monday. I might be under the table.
[00:02:17] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I do think it's really a hangover that all of us have, and it's also A-S-U-G-S-V is probably not the place where people get the deal done. It's the place where they're sparking that new idea or they're continuing on the relationship. And so there is a lot of follow up activity that happens.
Outside of it. Before we dive into our debrief, let's talk about what's going on with EdTech insiders. So on Monday during A-S-U-G-S-V, we had an awesome gathering. It's our annual A-S-U-G-S-V happy hour. Thank you so much to all of our sponsors. Thank you to everybody who came. This year was a little bit crazy with our whole event selling out in 12 minutes, so we really tried to accommodate as many people as we could, and it's a good reminder for all of you listening.
Please sign up to be an EdTech Insiders Plus member so that you get first access to all of those events. That was really great. And then we have our date for our final Bay Area, EdTech Happy Hour. It's gonna be on Thursday, May 15th. We're gonna be at the Salesforce park in San Francisco, so we can't wait to see you all there.
Great weather and good people, good vibes. So excited to see you there. How about on the pod? What do we have?
[00:03:33] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so we talked to Rob Barnett from the Modern Classrooms Project, who has been doing incredibly interesting work. I. In connecting up classrooms in a more social way for many years that he just put out a book and I thought that was a really great conversation.
Next week we talk to Levi Belnap, who's the CEO of Merlin Mind, the new CEO of Merlin mind. We had talked to the founder of Merlin Mind a couple of years ago and they have evolved their product a lot since then. So they have a really interesting, basically AI assistant. It's really cool. It's a cool product with that can do a lot of interesting things that teachers are really excited about.
And then we have two of our favorite people, Betsy Corcoran and Jeremy Rochelle, who have recently started their own podcast about ed tech and education research called Future Fluent. And we talked to the two of them about starting that and about all the things they've been learning, talking to amazing people there.
So next three weeks are tons of fun and we have a incredible lineup of people coming up, especially after a SU, have just an amazing set of interviews. We did 10 to 12 interviews on the floor at A-S-U-G-S-V and the AI show that are coming out very soon as well, including with Open ai. With Google Education, with Air Diff, all sorts of really, really interesting people.
So keep an eye out for that one and look for our newsletter, which where we're gonna do our follow up about A-S-U-G-S-V as well.
[00:04:48] Ben Kornell: Awesome. Well let's dive into the recap. What were your major takeaways from A-S-U-G-S-V? You
[00:04:53] Alex Sarlin: know, it's my read, I got to chat with Mike Yates when I was there, and Mike Yates is always such a keen observer of the sort of trends and how things change over time.
And one thing that I think came up for both of us is that it feels like, especially from the AI show, that we always talk about what inning we're in when it comes to ai. I think we're moving to a place where people are really thinking much more deeply about how AI can work in their products in a way that's safe, private confidence building for educators also that has integrity built in and doesn't sort of just open Pandora's box and thinking about interoperability between all the different ed tech tools, all the standards.
Just like it feels like the thinking has leveled up to AI is incredible. Let's just use it for whatever we can think of to, AI is incredible. There's pros and cons. Let's put it together and let's think really carefully about how to use it in a product that's gonna have surefire wins and where you can sort of put the pieces together to make more than the, the whole of its parts.
And so many conversations I had, there were about variations on that in both higher ed and K 12, so I felt like it was progress.
[00:05:56] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I think I tend to look at things more from a business trend standpoint, and when you walk the floor of the AI show, you start concluding. All of these companies collectively cannot survive.
And so there's an inevitable whittling down of what the offerings are going to be. And so to me, a theme of this was preparing for consolidation. There were, now we've started to see some of the big native ed tech players consolidating, so I'd yes, call that the brisk magic ed tech school ai. There's starting to be a gravitational force around those where the opting into that platform versus a new entrant.
It becomes a no-brainer decision for a lot of districts. And then on the point solutions side too, you've got people really staking out solid pedagogical ground and good user growth. Some highlights would be a lot of people were talking about diffit, a lot of people were talking about snorkel. Yep. A math program.
So I just think that there's a moment we were in this Cambrian explosion. Yep. And those are your words from the very beginning And now I think we're starting to see some whittling down. And the question in EdTech always is, we're like cockroaches, all of our companies, you can't kill us. How many of these folks are gonna hang on and keep plowing forward versus start consolidating behind?
Especially given that the larger ecosystem is now under real constraints, right? And so that would be Esser Cliff, but also federal government funding being uncertain to cut. And so big highlight was Linda McMahon, the new Secretary of Education speaking, she had a gaff where she was calling AI a one.
Right? Like the steak sauce. But overall, I think there's a lot of opinions depending on where you are on the political spectrum. But what I was surprised by is how deeply it seemed she engaged with this ed tech business community. She was there all day. She was meeting with Michael Crow, she was having a on the stage with Phyllis Lockett.
I mean, I think there's some real risk that she took and I think the organizers really, I. Are trying to do their best for EdTech to say, regardless of what your views are of the administration, we need to be in dialogue with them. So I've had a bunch of like WhatsApp chats afterwards with people who feel excited by some of the things, some that feel infuriated by some of the things, but the fact that we're able to actually have that dialogue in our conference on our terms.
I thought that was really an important moment. And you know, we'll talk a little bit about some of the other things going on in the space, but if you're in a moment of consolidation and a moment of like financial and fiduciary pressure. The best thing an event organizer like Debra Qua and the A-S-U-G-S-V people can do is put us in direct dialogue with the decision makers.
So I came away really uplifted by that. Two other sub-bullets, computer science. Holy crap. Like what does it mean to teach computer science today? Now that there's, like Alex Cochran had this great article out this week around vibe coding and the growth of vibe coding and it's just, it's not all AI and it's not all computer science, but this blend of tools and kids and their facility to foot back and forth.
Yeah, I saw somebody. Who had a Rept account go to Claude, ask Claude how to do the best. Rept prompting it. Gave the prompting, they put it into Rept and immediately had a video game that was playable. Right? It's like it is next level. And then I think the second area that people are really grappling with is.
Core curriculum versus supplemental.
[00:09:54] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:09:54] Ben Kornell: And there's like an expansion of the core companies into the supplemental spaces where they're providing additional interventions and so on. And that also felt like, oh man, this might be a winner. Take most moment where Amplify and Curriculum Associates and others are picking up a couple companies and you don't wanna be the one.
Who, when the music stops, doesn't have a chair.
[00:10:18] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Terrific points. I mean, on the computer science front. Yeah. I had some really interesting conversations with a number of different people from startups that are doing computer science, AI based computer science tools for the classroom to large nonprofits and companies that care enormously about the entire computer science landscape.
And I think everybody is in the same. In that they're trying to figure out exactly what you said, what is the relationship between computer science and AI such that we can actually teach them in unison to prepare students for a world in which computer science and AI are literally the same tools, which they increasingly are.
I mean, there's rep lit, this co-pilot, all the big tech companies are saying how much of their code is being written by AI or with supportive ai, so it would be negligent to keep teaching baseline coding without ai. At the same time, it's unclear how to put AI in, so everybody's trying to figure it out.
But I think it's a huge opportunity for us in ed tech because as that becomes clearer, we can take all the successes of the computer science. In education movement of which there are plenty, even though it took a while and start to bake AI literacy and AI coding and vibe coding or whatever the name of it is gonna be.
I spent a lot of time trying to think about what is the name of AI creation? We don't have a word for it. We don't have a noun for it yet, but how are we gonna put it together? And then, yeah, the Linda McMahon thing, I did not see the Linda McMahon speech. I did see some of the coverage with some of the A one memes and things like that.
And that obviously is, should not be the headline at the same time. It feels to me like there's a really interesting moment in education in the US where technology and education, technology, I think is leveling up. Its thinking, thinking more strategically and tactically about how this can actually work to improve education.
And meanwhile, just this week, Congress is putting forward a whole bunch of bills that basically are saying, here's what we think should happen to completely dismantle the Department of Ed and take all the functions and spread them out. Whether or not that goes through that is the pitch. And there is a huge war between the federal government and higher education at the same time.
So, and those are really based around very vague. Culture, war, hand wavy ideas like you have to scrub DEI out of everything you do. And people are like, what does that mean? I saw a quote this week from a principal at a school that had 95% Native American students saying everything we do is would be what they consider DEI, because all of our students are Native American.
Like how are we possibly supposed to do this? So it is a weird moment. I'm hoping that the EdTech community, by playing to the top of our intelligence, can actually raise the stake, can raise the thinking of people like Linda McMahon and raise the thinking of people who are thinking about where does this all go next?
We are in obviously a moment of huge disruption and chaos, but it will settle down in one way or another. And when it does, I think either way it settles down. The ed tech world has a lot of power in helping to find where education goes. That's exciting. Even if it's also disconcerting.
[00:13:10] Ben Kornell: Yeah. And I think it's a good point that people are left with more questions than answers.
[00:13:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:13:16] Ben Kornell: And there's a degree to which people were also skeptical about whatever was said. Is that gonna be what's followed through on or not? It's really shifting sands. And so I think the more we're in dialogue as a community with what's going on, I mean. Matthew Soff was saying there's a new social contract that's being developed here between education and communities and society, and that can feel really discouraging or disconcerting, but it's also an opportunity to make that contract better or stronger or deliver on the things that we, we've been talking about on the pod.
With that in mind, let's talk a little bit about what's going on in higher ed. Yeah. My alma mater, Harvard, I have a mixed relationship with Harvard, but they decided to not take the federal money and a seed to the Trump administration demands the university president basically. Sent a short letter saying, we are not giving up our independence, and it feels like a big shot.
But I guess the question I'd have, Alex, is, is this really a big deal for higher ed or is this a one-off because Harvard has this credible endowment, and what are the implications for this space of Harvard's move here? I
[00:14:35] Alex Sarlin: think it is a big deal and from everything I've been reading about, for one thing, Stanford and Yale have already come out in support of Harvard.
So it's not just Harvard by itself. Now. Yes, Stanford and Yale are one of a handful of colleges in the us another one of your Alma Maers, Stanford, right? One of the handful of colleges in the US that have endowments and traction and brand recognition that makes them be able to withstand whatever happens right now.
But courage is contagious, as everybody likes to say. I do think this was given what Columbia did a few weeks ago where they basically just rolled over and said, we don't want to be completely really hurt by this and we don't want to have to pass on costs to students. We don't have to shut departments.
We don't wanna lose all this grant money. We don't have to, certainly don't wanna close our teaching hospital. Right? Like they sort of made a calculus and said, let's just seed for now. And I think Harvard saying, Nope. We're not gonna do. This is a big, big deal. You're right. Harvard is very unusual among colleges, but this is a lot of the federal playbook.
They try to take the top people out to scare everybody down the line. And Harvard, by being pretty much the top of the top, along with places like MIT and Stanford, the very, very top of the top by them pushing back, I think it creates what they call it, politics, a permission structure for other colleges to start saying, well, maybe the order of the day is not just rolling over.
So I think it's big. You are right, of course, that Harvard, there are not very many schools that have the ability to say no to billions of dollars in federal funding and maybe take it outta their endowment or figure out a way to sue or whatever they're gonna do. But it's a big deal because I think it's a bet on waiting.
Trump. Out or waiting this administration out and saying that we may be even just till the midterms, right? And starting to say, rather than letting them bully us into submission, let's take a moment and just try to explain who we are and take a stand and we'll see what happens. Obviously Trump immediately personally threatened to take the tax exempt status away from Harvard.
If that went from Harvard and other colleges, that would be devastating to them. They've already done things around the percentage of grand money that can be used for sustaining costs. I forgot the exact term. So like they're in attack mode. I think it's a big deal. I think when the history is written on this, this moment is going to be the one where they say, and this is where, you know, the higher ed fight escalated, but also it stopped being one sided.
[00:16:56] Ben Kornell: And so is your read that this is a turn in the battle where higher ed is headed for victory, or is this actually just an escalation where the like end result is still. Undetermined.
[00:17:11] Alex Sarlin: I mean, I read a terrific editorial this week about how Harvard was founded before the United States, significantly before the United States, right.
Harvard's been around. A very long time and for them to see this moment, it's been a couple of months of this administration being in office and saying, oh, I guess this is the new norm. That's, it is very shortsighted, let's say that way. I think this is a play to say I. Yes, you punch the bully in the nose and you see what they're made of, and that's what they're doing, and I think we're all gonna see what they're made of.
With this higher ed fight. There will be consequences. They're gonna try to pull funding, but at the same time, I'm not sure that there's that much behind some of this. I think a lot of this has been really performative from the federal government. It's been bullying on purpose. So I don't think the administration's gonna try to shut down higher ed in general.
I don't think they're gonna do anything that's going to significantly hurt community college. I don't think they're gonna do things that significantly hurt other private institutions that are not a Harvard, just because what Harvard did. I may be wrong in that, but I think even if they do two years from now, it'll be reversed or four years from now.
So some schools might close. I hope not, but I think they're betting that this is not the actual existential threat to higher ed as they want it to look like. There are other existential threats to higher ed. Don't get me wrong, there was a great report this week about how certificate programs are surging while bachelor's and associate's degrees are declining.
That I think we've talked a lot on this show about demographics and ROI concerns and tuition concerns, and I think there are existential risks to higher education out there. But I don't think the federal government just pulling the plug is actually one of them. And I think Harvard sort of called their bluff there.
[00:18:49] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I wondered whether this actually plays into the administration's strategy of making it political, because Harvard is emblematic of what you would stereotype as an elite university. So what are we talking about here? Really it's around research dollars and the US federal government has had. Deep partnerships with the university system, which includes Harvard, but includes a bunch of other places too in many state universities where our kind of r and d capability has been largely federally subsidized and things like health and science, which have led to real breakthroughs that the vehicle that the US government has decided is best to pursue those innovations is through universities.
So it leads then to a question, does that mean that the government is no longer gonna fund those things, or are they gonna choose a different avenue for r and d, like private enterprise? And you could see either one, Elon is getting a lot of federal government money for SpaceX. At the same time they're trying to cut costs all over the place.
So I think what will it be like in four years? That's really hard to speculate, but it does seem like there's a bigger. Concern and trend around the overall long-term funding and whether that's just gonna absolutely go away. And I think that it's likely that that's gonna go away and it's gonna be more than just, I mean, Harvard will be able to withstand it, but I think a lot of the other universities won't.
[00:20:30] Alex Sarlin: I don't think it's gonna go away because I think this move is not really a policy move, even if there's policy sort of around it. This is a culture war, cultural revolution, anti intelligentsia, political move, and as soon as the optics wear thin on it. I won't say nobody. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would say, Hey, yeah, let's do basic research through private enterprise rather than universities.
But I don't think there are that many of them. I don't think that's like a popular opinion, especially because who would that benefit? That would benefit huge companies, right? I mean, what are you doing? You're giving Northrop Grumman money to research. I mean, have you been watching or government
[00:21:06] Ben Kornell: for the last couple years benefiting big companies has been like a theme.
[00:21:10] Alex Sarlin: Oh, I know. I mean, I think there's been a long slide away from government and more towards private enterprise for a while. This is the apotheosis of this. That doesn't mean that this is that tipping point. I don't think it is. I think this is, the pendulum is all the way on one side and people are just like very, I don't know.
I think these are very unpopular moves and unpopular opinions. They're trying to, like you say, make Harvard into the symbol of, they're betting that Harvard. Is a place that people hate and that regular Americans quote unquote hate. Yeah. I can't count how many people I've met in my career where you say, where did you go to college?
And they say, yeah, Boston. Boston. Because they know there's a reaction to Harvard. I'm curious if you've ever done that ever, but like it is a cultural touch point that matters. That said, I don't think most people want the future you're saying and certainly don't want it from SpaceX and the kind of research that these universities do.
Very few people in private enterprise do Some Silicon Valley companies do like genetic research or basic research, but I don't know. I think we're gonna see a major snapback whenever the next president is around because I don't think this makes any sense for almost anybody except Elon Musk, which is why he's there trying to benefit himself there.
[00:22:22] Ben Kornell: I mean, this is one where there's people with much higher pay levels that are gonna read the tea leaves here, but we're gonna be covering it from the EdTech angle. Every step along the way Related to this, here we are debating esoteric questions around the relationship between higher education, our government, and then you go across the Pacific to China where I feel like there's incredible acceleration around education as an investment area.
Just to catch our listeners up, you know, in 2019 there was a huge pullback from private education and led to a kind of refactoring of the entire EdTech ecosystem there. And so it's been a slow climb for. This intersection of education and technology and in the rebuild, the government has had a much bigger hand, but there are now new organizations and companies that are leaning in.
So tell us a little bit about what you're following in China. Well, a lot of what the
[00:23:21] Alex Sarlin: Chinese government was really pushing for is closing off the Chinese education ecosystem to outside players. So trying to be like Chinese ed tech can survive, but it only if it really does certain things. And we don't want foreign ed tech to really be a player in this 'cause we.
For a variety of reasons. And so we saw this week, we've seen trying to put some policies out around ai, basically saying, we wanna lead the world in ai. We want all of our students to learn ai. They've talked about putting it into the curriculum for at least some time per week for to down as low as I believe it was second graders.
So like they're in a nationalist, like we want a, a national advantage by ai. What we saw this week was Yuan dao, I'm probably mispronouncing that, but Yuan Dao, which is a large Chinese ed tech firm that is now focused almost entirely on the Chinese ed tech market, right? Isolation is still a little bit by, because it has to be because of the government.
They put out a machine last year, basically an AI teaching machine. It sold over a million units two years ago, and they just put their newer one out after investing a hundred million dollars in development at the end of last year. And they're basically saying, okay, our Ian AI learning machine is an interactive study companion.
It's a integrates data models, logic, learning scenarios, all of these layers. It can do step-by-step grading, it can conceptual misunderstandings, it can do large scale diagnostics. This is sort of how we see Chinese tech tend to happen. There's a lot of these companies that do everything at once. That's a big part of Chinese technology in general.
And you know, I think Ben, you and I both. We don't talk about China that much because it's been isolated. It's been sort of outside of the global system for a while. But the Chinese government has so much control in this space that some of the regulations or the privacy concerns or the, you know, outsourcing thinking concerns or some of the things that we always, that the American system worries about are just steamrolled in China.
And I think something like this is going to be used broadly and what that means is TBD, but whether it's all positive for them or all negative for them, or somewhere in between, probably somewhere in between. But it's interesting to now see China start rolling out, just like we saw with deep seek. Other powerful age agentic models that have been coming out.
We're starting to see Chinese AI enter education in China. Whether or not it's gonna make the transfer over the, you know, over the ocean, probably not for a while in this environment, but we may see some really purity sci-fi versions of AI learning in China from Chinese companies. That's my read on this.
[00:25:48] Ben Kornell: Yeah, interesting. Your point about Chinese companies being broad and doing everything as kind of a, you know, a cultural norm. Because AI as a technology is uniquely a good fit for that model. So in the US the innovator path is usually like big company owns the space. You find this one thing that they're overlooking, you disrupt from that, and then you grow from there.
AI disruption is coming in a much more horizontal way. So basically the way it's playing out right now is it's the big companies that are the most likely candidates to be bringing AI to your day-to-day life in China. Like mentioned the kind of data advantage that they have. I
[00:26:37] Alex Sarlin: do. Alibaba. Alibaba, Tencent.
Yeah. I mean these are huge, huge companies that do many things.
[00:26:42] Ben Kornell: I will also say we are so dependent on private capital here and the, here in, in the Silicon Valley right now, investor. Excitement is cooling a little bit around these like mega rounds and you know, when are we gonna see the returns and what do the cash flows look like?
And will the OpenAI latest round investors get their money back? We don't know. Are they likely here to stay? Likely? They're kind of doing a good job of embedding themselves in the things, but I'm hearing people are having a lot harder time raising rounds. Whereas in China, like, you know, basically in ed tech space and education space, government is your funder, and government is your distributor, and there's a way in which ed tech isn't so removed from tech tech.
For them. So I think we're in a real arms race here around AI technology, but also capability of our populations. And it does seem, we're hearing a lot in the news about the trade wars, but I think there's like a talent war that is starting to play out and we are trending down on that one relative.
[00:27:52] Alex Sarlin: And it's interesting because I think it's splitting very much on a sort of like state run versus capitalist style line.
I mean, you know, we should do our, around the world in US ed tech because there's always so much news because all of these big companies, the open ais, the Googles, the Anthropics, the Microsofts, the Metas are indirect competition with each other. They've gotten this huge amounts of investment to go as fast as possible so that you just see things launching every week.
That is the advantage of competitive marketplace.
[00:28:20] Ben Kornell: Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that. Around the world in us, OpenAI has a new model. Have you tried it out? No,
[00:28:26] Alex Sarlin: I did try their enhanced memory piece of it, which I don't think is 4.1, but 4.1 is, is coming out right now
[00:28:32] Ben Kornell: I'm doing the pro paying 200 bucks a month and I'm having a hard time seeing the advantage or differentiation, like when I have it do research and develop reports.
It's still a little bit too generic. I'm researching EdTech stuff, so it just may not be like the best use of a large language model. So I'm having a hard time differentiating these new releases with what we've had for the last six months.
[00:28:58] Alex Sarlin: The stated benefits of this are that it's multimodal, it's even more multimodal.
It's got a really large context window up to a million tokens of context. That means you can give it a huge amount of context. So, so that's probably, you know, to your, like Ben, we can do things like put all the hours of transcripts of all the interviews we've ever done or all these conversations in and then say, now give me a report.
And it can actually understand that now because the context window is so big. So that's probably more likely it's also cheaper. 4.1 is 26% cheaper than 4.0, which is definitely interesting. And, and you know, some of the side effects of this, you've, Sam Altman reported this week, OpenAI has almost 800 million users.
That's very big. And they announced, and I don't even want to get into this 'cause it's just too weird, but they're developing a social media platform to compete with. X OpenAI founder, Elon Musk's supporter. He wasn't a founder, but Elon Musk was one of the big donators to OpenAI when it started to compete with X.
So OpenAI is doing a social network that feels like dystopian to me. I don't like that headline that I, not enjoying hearing that, but that's true too. They have a lot of money. They have a lot of engineers. They're going in every direction they can. I have actually personally found OpenAI to be better recently.
I think that memory is amazing. The images are amazing. You know, I wasn't always an OpenAI power user, even though I do. Use it. But recently I've started to go to it more reliably and I've been, I feel like it's getting better. They also said it's better at creative writing, which is just very strange, but, you know.
Interesting. Any other thoughts?
[00:30:25] Ben Kornell: I'm doing more Google these days. They launched a new video editor, a video generation, and comes with 15 to 30 videos free per month. And if you're a a Google one user, there're quite a bit of memory here and the outputs are really, really good. And when we're talking about multimodal, I think video is really the peak of the mountain today.
And there's some really great clips and like short videos you can do. Still very hard to go back in and edit a video rather than regenerate the whole thing. You know, on Claude, we've covered it. With our newsletter, but they've launched kind of a study mode for Claude and so I would say where Anthropic seems to be behind is on multimodal, but where they seem to be strong for me is like the utility, the use cases, the using it within your work.
You know, at work I use Claude and it is connected with my Google Drive, so I can actually ask it to look at stuff in my Google Drive and come up with questions or analysis. It is really interesting on the Google Front because the Google AI and everything where you press a button and it creates a Google Doc, it's becoming so convenient and like a a no-brainer to use that.
I could almost see them living in parallel with Anthropic or OpenAI, which seemed more directly competitive.
[00:31:49] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, philanthropic launch, its education unit. Just a couple weeks ago they put out a report about how people use it and basically saying that over a third of students are using it for stem, they launched a voice ai.
So you're right, they are behind in multimodal, but I think they're trying to head that way, at least in terms of, you know, voice back and forth. They do seem behind in sort of image creation and video creation from the other two. So OpenAI now has Sora built into its pro and, and Google has its vo, but like, I mean, just the fact they're all moving so fast.
We saw the Amazon CEO come out this week with basically a shareholder letter saying that generative AI is going to redefine coding, search, shopping, personal assistance, primary care, drug research, biology space, everything you can think of, which is interesting to hear from him. And we saw Nvidia hit an interesting moment because Nvidia supplies the whole world with their chips.
They were hit by export rules. They're taking a $5 billion hit. They can't. Export chips to China without special permissions. But they're also gonna put $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the us and Nvidia sort of plays a very mysterious role in terms of education. But they have a startup accelerator that might be worth looking into.
And we'll put links to all of these in the show notes because we're good doing a real fast. But the philanthropic report they put out, they put out their first education report about how university students use Claude. It's definitely worth looking at. They talk about Bloom's taxonomy, they talk about, you know, the use cases and, and it's, it's definitely worth a look.
Ben, we're almost at time here, but one thing we haven't done is congratulated Brisk teaching, which had a quite a week because they won the GSV cup at A-S-U-G-S-V that's out of, you know, 2000 companies. All these rounds. They won first place there. They also, in the last few weeks, announced $15 million funding round, and they've just following them on LinkedIn, they are just launching things at a furious pace.
They've launched podcasts, the ability of teachers to make their own podcasts. They've launched the ability for the tool to be able to read student handwriting or read, you know, written material, basically like student material in almost any format. And teacher writing risk is doing some really interesting things.
I, I think they're, they're definitely one to watch, but there were some other investments and even a couple of acquisitions I thought might be interesting to cover, should.
[00:33:56] Ben Kornell: Yeah, a couple that came to the forefront for me. School AI secured 25 million. So in the race of who the AI everything platform is going to be, it seems like it's Magic School Brisk and School ai.
As the front runners, of course, we are also seeing new features with Google Classroom and we're seeing new features from Canvas. So, you know, there is a debate around is this heading for an LMS replacement that is native ai and what will that look like? We also saw campus raising $46 million to scale modern community colleges.
We've. Covered campus before, but this round really is about access to community college for lots of people. It's kind of like a Guild 2.0. And then there's a bunch of celebrity investors behind this one, including Shaquille O'Neal, who are still trying to get scheduled onto the pod. And then on the m and a front, Seesaw made an acquisition and it's called Little Thinking Minds, and they're going internationally.
And I think there's a big tendency now with the US market potentially contracting a lot of companies looking at going abroad, either organically or through investment. And so there was a bunch of conversation at A-S-U-G-S-V about this and, and other ones. What were some that came up for you?
[00:35:20] Alex Sarlin: I mean, I think the campus one is really interesting.
We should definitely have to talk to the campus founders when we can because they just do really interesting work in the community college space and we, it's so interesting, but I don't think we cover it nearly enough. I mean, LEAP raised $65 million for sort of an international student platform out of the UK that was from APIs partners.
I think I'm pronouncing that right with Al as an investor. This is a series E, so that's a big one. We saw a Saudi Arabian company called ULA raised 28 million. I mean, these are pretty big rounds. I, we should just say like, I can't think of the last time we've been able to announce this is over the last three weeks or so that they've all been announced.
Partially probably 'cause of A-S-U-G-S-V, but I see like seven or eight. Two figure or higher in the millions, you know, 28 million, 25 million for pacify for a higher ed digital engagement hub, school ai, 25 million. There's some money starting to flow back into the space in this way. So that, that is just really exciting to see.
And I agree with you. I mean, you mentioned this right at the outset, places like Magic School, brisk and School AI are definitely starting to sort of consolidate as real. Almost like incumbents in the native AI space that others are, are seeing, you know, race ahead, both in terms of investment and in terms of user bases.
Congratulations to Armand Jaffer at Brisk and to the school AI team, uh, Caleb Hicks and their founders. It's an exciting time. I think that things are starting to level up. That's my word of the day. I, I think that we're getting smarter about not just throwing spaghetti at the wall when it comes to AI and thinking a little more about where are the use cases, how do we put them together?
How do we make the, the ecosystem actually work? By the way, Seesaw, we talked to the Seesaw, CEO, they're super international. They, I didn't realize this, but they're, I forgot what he said, but some huge percentage of their users are not in the us, which I had not realized.
[00:37:01] Ben Kornell: Yeah. This is also a feature of AI is that you can internationalize way easier because of language adaptation and so on.
Cultural adaptation. So yeah, I think it feels a lot like I. 17, 20 18 where there's some big rounds around some big winners, but the kind of party rounds or where everybody's kind of getting. Funded. That seems like that's drying up a little bit. Yeah, that might be a really healthy natural thing. Like you said, we figured out which spaghetti sticks on the walls and which doesn't, and so it's an exciting time to cover it.
Well, I think that wraps our show today for Weekend EdTech. If we've got a guest coming on there, they're rolling on right now. And also for those of you in the space who wanna follow us, please click subscribe on our substack, we'll add you to our WhatsApp where the conversation continues before and after the show.
And thank you all for all your support.
[00:37:56] Alex Sarlin: Just one fundraising edge tutor outta the Philippines raised a million dollars for out online tutoring, outsourcing. The reason it stands out to me is we just talked to the CEO of Edge tutor at our event. He was really nice, had all sorts of great ideas. This is a, a place that literally trains tutors to be matched for large ed tech companies and really interesting model out of the Philippines.
So, but more power to Henry there. Yes. It's a crazy time, Ben, and I'm looking forward to continuing to cover it with you.
[00:38:22] Ben Kornell: Awesome. Well, if it happens at EdTech, you'll hear about it here at EdTech Insiders
[00:38:27] Alex Sarlin: for our deep dive today, we are talking to Colin Ernst, founder and managing partner of the EdTech Leadership Collective, a membership organization that brings together high performing EdTech leaders in a collaborative environment that amplifies their impact and enriches their leadership journey.
Colin is a leader with extensive cross-functional experience in the K 12 ed tech industry. Before establishing the collective in 2022, he served as CEO of Learn Well, CRO at book Nook, VP of Marketing and Strategy at Alexia and corporate VP at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt through the EdTech Leadership Collective, Colin provides executive coaching and professional peer groups for company leaders for more than 40.
Of the EdTech industry's most well-respected organizations. Colin Ernst, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks Alex. Glad to be here. So first off, tell us about what is the EdTech Leadership Collective and what led you to start it?
[00:39:27] Collin Earnst: Yeah, so the EdTech Leadership Collective is a membership organization to build greater leadership capacity in K 12 ed tech organizations.
And we have nearly 60 members who are directors, VPs, C-level leaders in K 12 ed tech companies. And they work with one another in a range of professional peer groups, exec coaching and, and small peer-to-peer programs to be able to share challenges, best practices, successes and support one another in their professional growth.
And currently working with, like I said, 60 members across 40 different ed tech companies. And the kind of the spark for creating this organization was just seeing how challenging it is to. Scale and grow companies in K 12 I Tech and I've been in this space a while as as you have, and help scale a few different organizations.
And scaling is hard. Not everyone has done it before. A few years ago, when I left my last role and was just thinking about what's next, I was talking to a number of investors and C-level execs, and they were saying how much they were struggling to grow because they didn't have sufficient leadership capacity in their organizations.
It was creating a blocker. To growth. And that led me to kind of dig deeper and deeper and do some research and really find a fairly broad need. And I've always, in my career, enjoyed building strong teams, processes, and leaders. So this for me is a labor of love and just enjoy being able to work with so many ed tech leaders.
[00:40:50] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So I think the first question, I wanna dig into this lack of depth in leadership. 'cause I think this will resonate with people and we wanna dig into it. But first just give us a little bit of a broad understanding of what it's like. You have these specific verticals, there are leaders in different capacities within EdTech.
Tell us about what types of people come to the EdTech Leadership Collective and what makes it's special that it's about EdTech and it's not just sort of standard leadership coaching. 'cause it's so cool that it's so specific to this particular industry.
[00:41:17] Collin Earnst: What I've found is, and I'm sure you've found this as well, EdTech is just, it's a special niche.
It's just. And I was in a peer group similar to the collective earlier in my career, back when I was at Alexia. And for me it was transformative. But one of the challenges was in work, this was across industry, peer group, and what was so challenged is translating back and forth, the strategies, the practices, and those kinds of things that just didn't quite copy back to EdTech in the same kind of way.
[00:41:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:41:44] Collin Earnst: So I wanted to build something focused specifically on ed tech, and so we work with folks at the director, VP and C level, and we do it in two fashions. Our kind of flagship program is called that leadership accelerator program, and we have one for. Customer success. Mm-hmm. For product, for marketing.
So it's actually getting together director and VP level leaders to talk about challenges specific to being a customer success director in K 12 EdTech. Because those challenges are unique. Yes. And the challenges we see commonly across EdTech companies are so similar. It's actually really provides that acceleration because we're learning from each other in real business practices.
So much of the time that we spend in those meetings is analyzing business cases. This is an HBS strategy where you're analyzing a business scenario and what would you do? Instead of analyzing something that some other company that we're not familiar with has done, our members are actually, they're documenting and unpacking a challenge they're facing at the current moment that's a blocker or a key decision or an opportunity.
So they're actually, they're presenting that case to their fellow peer group members. While the other members need to kind of digest that synthesize and understand it, and then give feedback and advice and counsel to that presenting member to help them make a stronger, well-vetted decision to bring back to their team.
And meanwhile, the rest of that group is, has the opportunity to really bend their brain differently. On a challenge they haven't experienced yet, but it's gonna be common to them, right? Because they're in that same customer success director. So the ability to be able to build this skill of problem analysis and decision making and anticipating and acting quickly on those, that's one of these leadership capacity skills that I'm sure we'll dig into later.
But that's where we spend most of our time, and it's just this supportive, open environment where we're bought into one another's success along the way.
[00:43:37] Alex Sarlin: EdTech is such a unique beast. It has all these different stakeholders that have sometimes different incentives. The sales cycles can be long and complicated when it comes to marketing or customer success.
There's just so much. I can imagine being a fly on the wall in some of your sessions and just the complexity of having to satisfy all of these different types of people in the same building or in the same district who have totally different ideas about what success looks like. And it's a unique field, and I bet it's incredibly valuable for people to be able to talk through real life situations and case studies on the ground in education, technology, in their actual companies, and learn from their peers.
I can only imagine that people come out feeling very transformed.
[00:44:15] Collin Earnst: Transformed and empowered in, in knowing they're not alone in this and they're on the right path.
[00:44:20] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that makes sense. And so let's talk about this lack of depth in leadership. You just put out a report specifically about this, and basically you're saying that when you ask executives about do they feel like there is depth in their leadership bench, that if they were to leave tomorrow, that there'd be people to step up?
A lot of them do not feel that way, and there's this sort of a lack of confidence from the executive leadership, but at the same time, a maybe a little bit of an overconfidence from the rank and file or from the people within. Tell us what that looks like.
[00:44:47] Collin Earnst: This is one of those key questions that we started digging into three years ago, and we've done this survey every year.
We survey about 150 K, 12 EdTech execs, and one of the first questions was around their assessment of leadership capacity in their organizations. And it's been between 80 and 90% have identified a lack of leadership capacity or leadership depth as an obstacle to growth for the organization. And about a third of them has said it's a major obstacle.
Mm-hmm. So we wanna dig a bit deeper, you know, what does that mean? What does that look like? As you're referencing, we look at this idea of succession plans and talent depth, and a good way to measure that people because it, that's a indicator of longevity and success, durability of a company. So we asked the question, if any member of your exec team were to resign tomorrow unexpectedly, how confident are you that you could fill that role internally?
And we see only between like 10 and 20%. 10 and 20% are confident that they can actually hire from within, which is fairly low. And the flip side of that though is when we asked those non-executive leaders, those middle managers, how confident are you that you were ready to step up? That was like 60 to 70%, right?
So we've got this dramatic difference in terms of what the level of readiness is and probably what it takes to get there. So we to pull that apart more. And one of the common concerns that we hear. From the C-suite is their non-executive leaders are in unfamiliar waters, right? They're out of their depth, experiencing new things.
Like you said, scaling is hard. Not everyone has done it, but we put so much of the success factor of our strategic plans on those non-executive leaders. That's where the action is. And we find that three quarters of those that we responded say that if those middle managers struggle, that's a real business risk to the organization.
So how do we support their success?
[00:46:41] Alex Sarlin: I mean, one thing that I have recognized many times in my own ed tech career, and I would imagine some of your ed tech leader collective members have seen this as well, is that ed tech is a unique industry in a lot of ways, and one of the ways that it feels like to me is that people often go in because they wanna make a difference.
They're idealistic. Some of them have education backgrounds, they've done TFA, or they had a parent who was a teacher, or they came from a different industry because they really wanna sort of improve the world, which doesn't always overlap with the sort of executive business skills, the managerial on the ground skill that you imagine, you know, in finance for example, even if you're mid-level, you're maybe imagining, Hey, maybe someday I'm gonna be in the corner office and sort of getting ready for it.
I don't know if that's always the same feeling in EdTech. It's not as much of a corporate ladder world, and I wonder if that's part of the disconnect. What have you found, if there've been some of the factors or some of the feelings inside your leadership collective about why there is this sort of gap between middle management and executive.
[00:47:38] Collin Earnst: Yeah. I think one of the factors that's really important that we talk a lot about in the collective is understanding the component skills of leadership capacity. So we tend to think about that in three elements. One is functional expertise, so that's skills related to your specific department, which it works.
So sales, marketing, customer success product, and those skills are kind of transferable across industry, right? Mm-hmm. Because it's a functional skill. So these are things like understanding best practices, tools, and platforms, how to measure success, right? And those are the skills that are typically. The way we get promoted earlier in our career.
'cause we're really good at our, our marketing shop and it's easy to observe, right? And quantify. And that gets us to advance initially. The second area of competency is domain expertise. So that's understanding the industry in which you work. So it could be finance or biotech or manufacturing. For you and me, it's K 12 ed tech, right?
So that's understanding things like funding, legislation, buyer personas, underlying efficacy behind products and those kinds of things. And what's interesting there is those are the skills that typically result in you getting poached from one company to the other because you've built this domain expertise, the ability to apply some of this to your functional work.
And that's where a lot of our folks that come from the classroom have deep domain expertise and are trying to build out in the other areas. The third area is managerial expertise. And so those are the skills and expertise around. Analyzing, making decisions and communicating those. So more specifically, it's managing priorities and metrics based goals, problem analysis, decision making, building and empowering teams and communications.
So listening, writing, and speaking. Those are the key managerial expertise skills. And when we ask in our surveys, ask the C-suite, ask the non-executive, there's pretty strong alignment that those are the key skills to make that next leap to the exec suite. But what's interesting is that a lot of the time and energy that companies spend in pd, I.
It goes where it goes to functional. Yeah. And domain, we think about, you know, going to the inbound conference or dimensions, professional selling, it's, there's less attention on those managerial skills. So really getting clear about what those are. Another reason for one of the gaps is companies aren't specific enough about what it means to be at that next level.
So having the, the rubrics, the exemplars of here's what it means to use those expertise areas at a director level, a vp, a C level. So being clear about that and really putting on the managers to communicate that back. Mm-hmm. And we asked about this in the survey about the mentorship that leaders are getting and, and by the way, everyone agrees, execs, middle managers agrees that companies aren't spending enough time and energy on those high potential leaders.
But the other thing is, when we think about that clarity of what that next job is, only 9%. 9% of employees are getting clear guidance and support, their manager may be generally supportive. Hey Alex, I hope you get to the next level. I'm, I'm behind you, buddy, but are they giving clarity about what you need to do and giving feedback on a regular basis.
So those, for me, thinking about the skills and the feedback and not kind of slipping into this idea of what I think are more fluffy definitions like executive presence, for example.
[00:50:59] Alex Sarlin: Right. I mean, I think you're onto something really key there. Part of it is that EdTech is a relatively young field. I think that you look at, my dad was a finance was a banker, right?
He worked at Citibank Travelers for many years and it's like if you're in a system like that, everything is defined, right? There's levels and levels and levels. They know exactly what defines each level. They know the rubrics that you're mentioning. Everything is sort of created and metrics based because it's had a long time to get there.
And they've sort of created a whole system that if you go to Microsoft, they have all these levels of engineers. If you go to uh, airplane company, it's extremely structured. If you go to Boeing. EdTech isn't often like that. He said they maybe haven't had the time or the wherewithal to really define, you know, what does it mean to inspire a team, empower a team, what does it mean to hire and move people around or get them into their best position or set them up for success as they like to say.
If you're an EdTech executive listening to this, or you're on the other side, you're a middle manager and you're looking to sort of get better definition of this, what would you recommend that either side do to move to the next level of definition within an ed tech company and see that next step and define it and then work towards it?
[00:52:02] Collin Earnst: Yeah. I think it's doing those things around creating those definitions, but also the time that we spend and how we engage and being really aware of some of those gender-based disparities that also exist. Right, sure. As we dug into this, it was important that we look at how we're supporting. All individuals.
And as we know, education and ed tech, 70% of individuals in our space identify as female, but we're not seeing that percentage all the way up through the C-suite. There is definitely a glass ceiling and our data showed similar that men were three times more likely to be in the CEO seat compared to their C-suite colleagues who were female.
And so it starts with how we support people throughout the process and doing things like, you know, we talked earlier about clear guidance and support. 28% of women said they got no guidance or support whatsoever. 28%. And so really putting it on our manage to say, what's the cadence with which you're meeting with your, your team members, that should be frequent.
What's the kind of feedback you're giving? Because what we're seeing, I mean in general, the feedback and the clarity isn't great, but men are twice as likely to get feedback, at least on a monthly basis. Hmm.
[00:53:13] Alex Sarlin: Really?
[00:53:13] Collin Earnst: How do we get better when we're not having regular feedback? Men are also twice as likely to get constructive feedback to find as helpful.
So that's gonna make it more challenging. And then the other thing I'd encourage companies to do is take a really hard look at their programs, their leadership programs. We ask all respondents, how effectively does your company's leadership program support individuals from historically marginalized groups in the C-suite?
42% said we're doing fine there outside the C-suite that was in the low twenties. Hmm. Wow. We asked men how well these programs support people from historically marginalized groups. 52% female, 21%.
[00:53:52] Alex Sarlin: Let's dig into that a little more because those are very compelling statistics and I think they make sense. I bet many people listening to this have seen these dynamics play out in their daily lives.
So I just wanna hone in on one aspect of what you are saying. You know, you mentioned this hand wavy concept of executive presence, but really underlying it is this concept of managerial skills, communication, critical thinking, empowering a team. You know, basically giving updates in a way that builds confidence, gets everybody excited, making goals.
In my experience, and again, I'm just bringing anecdotal to this, but I'm curious if this resonates with you and the research here. It feels like sometimes if you are in big meetings where everybody is presenting their updates, which is I think, a prime opportunity to showcase your presence, how well you communicate to a group, your confidence, your ability to inspire confidence.
Often when female leaders get up and deliver their updates, the updates, they can be fantastic. They can be like hitting all goals, everything's going great, all these new initiatives, and people look at it and be like, okay, that team's like fine. Let's not worry about them. They're doing great. They don't see it as that person is management material.
There. There's a little bit of almost like a taking for granted that female workers and middle managers and leaders will do what they need to do, but not seeing it as overachieving. Whereas sometimes with male middle managers, that same report can come across as, oh, this team's killing it. We should really be like looking at this person as a high potential, you know, leadership opportunity.
It's almost like a, just a difference in perception about what's expected versus what is counts as above and beyond. Have you seen things like that in either your sessions with potential leaders and and leaders or in the research?
[00:55:23] Collin Earnst: I wanna dig into that executive presence concept first. That part I feel is problematic because a lot of times when aspiring leaders are asking, what do I need to get to the next level?
You need to show you have executive presence. Executive. I mean, it's this nebulous, very subjective kind of it factor, which sometimes is mistaken for bravado or outspokenness or extroverted nature, which are tend to skew male. What I really challenge people to do is think about what are the component skills that really go into what, what we probably mean deep down in executive presence.
And that's things like someone who has strategic clarity, someone who is able to. Analyze problems and who is decisive? Someone who can influence others across the org and take in influence as they're making decisions. And someone who communicates with confidence and clarity. That gives someone a presence and it seem as management material, but what are those skills?
Those are managerial expertise kinds of skills, and by focusing on those with. Specificity. That's how we can build up that executive presence. So I think it's one aspect is really being sure that we're breaking down those skills and supporting the development of those. But then also, you know, as we're thinking about building our management teams and thinking about, you know, who's management material, one is being really intentional about how we're building diversity on our teams.
Diversity of thought, diversity of perspective, diversity of background, diversity of communication style, and not just, you know, as you said, responding to the hand waivers who seem to give a, a very, you know, decisive presentation. It's really looking at what are the kinds of skills and backgrounds we, we want?
What are the experiences and perspectives that we want? And then going out and actively finding those individuals and tapping them on the shoulder and providing a path for them. So a lot of times aspiring leaders here, you know, Alex, you'll be ready for that next role when you can show me you've led a cross functional project.
That's not helpful. Right. What we need to do as leaders is say to those individuals, listen, as we've shown you on the rubrics, one of the key skills is, is working cross-functionally. Here's a project I'd like you to lead. Right, exactly. And seeing that individual, and I'd like you to lead this project.
Here's, you know, I'll support your success, but not just tag them with that project, but name them into power. Particularly important for our individuals from historically marginalized groups, that this person is in charge and they have my backing and I want your support for them. Otherwise, it's an uphill climb for them, tapping them, naming them into power to their colleagues and to your own colleagues.
You're paving the path in a way that every other person should have. I think that's key and that's how we're, you know, showing up with intentionality as leaders to build up those teams and helping folks along the way. For me, that's key.
[00:58:15] Alex Sarlin: I love that. I feel like the proactive nature of, you know, defining what the next step looks like and then actually creating those opportunities rather than expecting people to have to make them themselves or carve out influence and power on their own and say, oh, I'm gonna try to make this thing happen and I don't have any mandate to do it, but I'm gonna try to make it happen.
'cause it's the only way I can showcase my cross-functional skills. It's not a recipe for success. That makes a lot of sense.
[00:58:39] Collin Earnst: That's one of the things that we do in our programs, because I lead the peers, but also I connect with those members managers. So we're talking about what's the growth each individual needs to have.
And we have an individual growth plan that's not just their departmental goals, but what are those, you know, manage up, down, across, in what are those kinds of goals? What are the projects they need to work on? And giving them the workspace in our peer group meetings to be able to work on those goals, to bring business cases, to be able to prove that out and support them along the way.
So there's this kind of 360 way of supporting individuals on that path.
[00:59:12] Alex Sarlin: It's really interesting. This is a slight comment more than a question, but I, I'm curious if this resonates and then I wanna ask you about ai. One thing that I think is interesting about EdTech is sometimes the leadership, the CEO suite across the board are pulled in from other industries.
Mm-hmm. And they often bring with them, I think, for better or worse optics and the way of defining leadership from other industries. You know, I've interviewed many, many, the heads of companies and CEOs and leaders, you know, in this podcast over time, including many, many, many incredible female leaders and leaders from underrepresented backgrounds.
But I do think it's really. Interesting. There's almost like a self perpetuating nature where it's like a company can grow up to a certain point and then they'll bring somebody in from outside from a different industry who represents what A CEO might look like, and often that's a white male. Mm-hmm. And then they, not necessarily on purpose, but they sort of bring that business, finance, whatever industry they come from, they sort of almost like superimpose it onto the ed tech company.
And then you lose some of that nuance of what you're talking about it, but like a strategic thinking and clarity and communication rather than bravado or presence, quote unquote. Is that something you have seen in your cohorts? Do you see people who are like, Hey, we suddenly got this new CEO from externally 'cause they didn't think they could hire internally and now it feels like the culture is changing.
[01:00:27] Collin Earnst: Do you see that ever? Yeah, I've seen that in our membership and just my work in general in the industry for, for the past 20 years. I think that's one of the aspects that makes. K 12 Ed Tech different is that, and I think this is in a good way because so many companies are mission focused, student focused.
There's almost this dynamic of a nonprofit in terms of just that commitment to the mission, which is, is a powerful and good thing, right? But what can be challenging, I'm sure you've seen this as well, is balancing the high growth expectations. You have PE backed, or you have someone come from outside the industry.
How do you balance the growth and the business aspects with the mission-based aspects? And it takes a special kind of skill and nuance that many leaders in ed tech have those who enter this space, it may take them a while to develop that. It can be a real hurdle. So when we, especially when we get up to the executive level, uh, groups that we have in working with the C-Suite, that's where when there's an entrant from outside the industry, we really lean into more of the domain and sometimes functional versus the managerial and help 'em understand the context of not just what are the, you know, the sales cycles and the, you know, funding of the, our industry, but also how are people wired in EdTech?
And I mean that both in terms of in districts, but also just your employees. How are they wired and how do you need to manage change a little bit differently in this space than elsewhere? How do you motivate in this space differently?
[01:01:53] Alex Sarlin: That resonates so much with me and I've seen so many times people who, especially in customer success, to give you an example, you know, to be amazing at customer success at an EdTech company, especially at an early stage, means like you'll do anything for your customers who can be teachers or students or you know, adult learners who are paying for a program or certificate or a degree and usually like will go to the wall for them.
And then as the company grows or as the unit grows, that going to the wall for your customers becomes actually less and less of a value because you suddenly it's about, well what is the business need and where do these overlap and where do they not overlap? It creates this incredible tension that I think is felt everywhere in the company.
If new leaders come in and say, why do they care so much about this one particular aspect of the product? It's like, because there's like six power users who love it, who resonates so much with me,
[01:02:40] Collin Earnst: and I think that's a, it's a really interesting point because even with our individuals who are from the K 12 space.
Driving them strategically to understand, okay, what's most important for the business is this thing we thought was important to go to the wall for. We gotta acknowledge and understand that we need to kinda let that go.
[01:02:56] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[01:02:56] Collin Earnst: You know, we spend a lot of time focusing strategically with our members on understanding where do you put your energy?
Where do you not put your energy to get the company, you know, for what's best for the, the customer and the company ultimately.
[01:03:07] Alex Sarlin: Right. And where can they come together? You know, are there creative solutions where you can support your end users and not be abandoning them, but also not do so much for them that you like literally don't even know about the bottom line or know about the growth metrics where it's like it's all about figuring out these tickets and making sure your individual customers are happy.
I've been on both sides of this and it is so painful, but as a company matures, I think it all comes together. I have to ask you about ai. How do you think AI is gonna impact the future of ed tech leadership?
[01:03:36] Collin Earnst: Anti leadership in general. I think it has a tremendous opportunity for skills development, particularly in early stage career, right?
So as we're building out our functional skills, our domain expertise and knowledge, just be able to provide that more equitably to all employees where they might not be given the time from their manager or the access to the resources. So the ability to have that information sometimes in simulation form I think can really help accelerate those individuals and even sometimes connect individuals in a more peer-to-peer.
Where I kind of caution us is thinking about what we've talked about today, just how nichey this space is, and when we think about the broader models of business simulations, I don't know the volume of information about K 12 EdTech is deep enough yet. Maybe it'll get there. I can't see that far yet. But to be able to apply what it means to be a, a leader and a manager in this space.
So I think that's one aspect, just to not get overconfident on its ability to, to be domain specific. The other thing is learning is a human endeavor. When we think about what motivates us, it's that accountability, it's that shared commitment to how we wanna operate and, and investment in one of our successes.
That's what motivates people. That's what gives people stamina in our groups, when we're learning from each other's successes and challenges, it's not just the tactics we're learning, like what decision you make, what program should in place, we're learning about what did it mean to be a leader in that situation?
How did you show up? How did you manage the communication and the emotions? And you know, this is a lonely job and 70% of our leaders in EdTech are experiencing imposter syndrome. So to be in a space where, you know, okay, no, I'm, I'm not seeing things the wrong way. I'm actually on the right track and maybe I have a couple things I can learn.
But having that kind of reassurance and, you know, things like modeling behavior. We're a product of the people we surround ourselves with. So surrounding yourself with, with high caliber, high quality individuals, I think it goes for a lot. I guess two last thoughts on ai. Your AI bot is not rooting for you.
I know it says it does, does, you know, great job, but someone who. It has a personal connection who can encourage and understand, and when you're in a setting of a human-based learning setting where you feel seen, you feel heard, you feel reassured, that's where the magic happens. That's where you build confidence.
That's where you build. Presence and that's where you build capacity. So I think there will always be an element of that. AI can help us gather information and connections better, but I think leadership development will always be a human driven capacity.
[01:06:10] Alex Sarlin: That's really interesting. I think of the best leaders are the people.
I consider the best leaders who I've worked under. And in some ways they feel like they're out front almost like blocking and tackling for you. It doesn't feel like you're having to do things for them. It feels like they're almost doing what they can to clear you the way for your success, which is such an, an unusual feeling.
And it, it's so exciting when you see it and you need a human relationship to understand somebody's personality and their job function and the their role within the company and their relationships and all the pieces that would sort of make it work. So yeah, I can't wait till there is EdTech specific AI leadership simulation.
That sounds really fun. But you're right, it's probably a few years out. It's a small data set for now. This has been fascinating. So where can people find more about the EdTech Leadership Collective online, if they wanna find out about your cohorts, about your offerings and how you work?
[01:06:56] Collin Earnst: Check us out@edtechcollective.org.
It's where all the information on the programs and blog and lots of information and events, ways to engage with us.
[01:07:03] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. I love that you're building this incredible community within the EdTech space. I think we both really value that idea of sharing and and learning from each other, so it's fantastic.
Thanks for being here, Colin Ernst EdTech Leadership Collective.
[01:07:15] Collin Earnst: Thanks, Alex.
[01:07:17] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.
