Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
EDTECH WEEK Shark Tank Champions: AI, XR, and The Future of Learning
This special EdTech Insiders episode features the four Shark Tank winners from EdTech Week. Each founder shares how their breakthrough approach is transforming learning, teaching, and workforce development across K–12, higher education, and global training environments.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Lirvana Labs’ multilingual, trauma-informed AI companion.
- Socrait’s voice-powered automation of teacher admin work.
- Skillmaker.ai’s XR training that cuts years to days.
- Glimmer’s personalized formative assessment and insights.
- How these innovators are scaling impact across continents and industries.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:18] Christie Pang, CEO & Co-Founder of Lirvana Labs on Global AI learning companion & teacher “Mission Control”
[00:21:42] Jason Palmer, Co-Founder & President of Socrait on Turning teacher talk into structured data
[00:35:53] Robin Cowie, Founder & CEO of Skillmaker.ai on XR & smart glasses accelerating technical training
[00:50:48] Neel Rao, Co-Founder & CEO of Glimmer on AI-powered personalized math scaffolding and insights
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[00:00:00] Christie Pang: We thought that this piece of ethical, safe, responsible, harnessing of this tool, making sure that the person that's actually wielding the tool, which is the teacher, feels at ease, feels empowered when they use this tool, they're not being made to do heart surgery when they're trained as a general physician anymore, is the most vital piece to unlocking and scaling impact.
[00:00:28] Jason Palmer: Everybody's using AI. Don't just use ChatGPT. It's easy to fall into that. Find the AI that's right for you and your experience if you're a teacher or a principal. Socrait is probably the best way to actually like leverage that classroom data in the future, all teachers are gonna be augmented by some type of AI.
And are teachers gonna be typing in the future? No. They're gonna be teaching in the future and so it's gotta be a voice powered AI that's listening to them and taking what they say and turning it into work for them in the background or doing the work for them in the background.
[00:01:00] Robin Cowie: We've gotta change the way that people think about technicians.
'cause these are very sophisticated computers that happen to ride on wheels. And so that job is a very good paying job. And it's also a lot different than the way it was in the fifties of the sixties. That kind of nostalgic feeling we have towards cars, which is great, like emotionally. But the truth is these are very much STEM jobs.
These are very much scientific jobs. The people that are being attracted to it are very technical people and they need technical tools.
[00:01:33] Neel Rao: They can also help us out quite a bit in terms of trying out Glimmer with like different workflows, whether that's like for a bell ringer, for an exit ticket, for core instruction, for homework, working in a lot of different potential areas in their classroom instruction and seeing here's where it makes the most sense or.
Here's a particular feature that would make it really useful in another context.
[00:01:58] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at
EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.
And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
Christie Pang is the CEO and co-founder of Lirvana Labs, a global AI lab at advancing safe equitable learning tools used across four continents, a multi award-winning leader. Named among ASU gvs, leading women in AI. She's a former HSBC executive and an advocate for inclusive innovation and women in tech.
Christie Pang, welcome to Tech Insiders.
[00:03:01] Christie Pang: Thank you Alex. I'm so glad to be here.
[00:03:03] Alex Sarlin: So first off, congratulations on your Shark Tank competition win. Really exciting. There's a lot of fierce competition this year, a lot of really amazing submissions. But tell us about Lirvana Labs. For people who don't know, you're a pretty exciting property in EdTech.
We've never gotten to talk before, but I have followed your work and it's really exciting what you're doing. Tell us about what Lirvana Labs does and why you started it.
[00:03:26] Christie Pang: Well, thank you Alex. So we started in 2023 with three refugee camps in Lebanon that has been serving Syrian refugees, 13,000 of them between the age of three to 18.
And we, my co-founder and I, decided that we are at the heart of Silicon Valley looking at one of the greatest disruptive technologies coming out, which is general artificial intelligence. And we wanted to do something that is zero to one. Which means we wanted to do something in education where those that have the least and is the last gets a chance to kickstart and have a good pathway towards literacy, reasoning, critical thinking, and social emotional learning.
Now, barring the toxic stress in the trauma that these children are going through, we developed this in partnership with a nonprofit and Harvard researchers that look at cognitive development in brains under toxic stress. We developed a learning companion called Yeti Confetti. Yeti Confetti is a celebration of not knowing yet.
So confetti celebration Yeti, I don't know yet. And this language model can trans language between English and seven E languages to explain any concepts in English literacy, foundational language arts, mathematical reasoning, and social-emotional skills during the learning process. Yeti will explain those in oral explanations to children and will also speak with positivity and resilience, building vocabulary.
It is context and curriculum responsive, so it can take in and ingest any curriculum, rubric, instructional practice and standards across the world in order to tailor its instruction. So we wrote that out and we won the MIT Solve Global Learning Challenge Award a year later, but we quickly realized that.
The pain that is currently what we're we're feeling in education is not only that students are left behind, there is an achievement gap. Um, that is an unfair disadvantage to a lot of students simply because of where they came from or they grew up in. But there's also a lot of pain in educator burnout, especially the teachers that have the heart and mind to try to reach these students.
And there's data paralysis at the administration level. And so we decided to build an interoperable platform expanding beyond Yeti confetti for a teaching co-pilot. It's not a teacher assistant, it's not to replace teachers, but it simply lets the teacher know that these students have progressed this much and it's time to celebrate them, or it writes progress notes on behalf of the teacher in the formats that they need to write that are not instructional time in classroom.
So these are tasks that teachers don't want to do, and it's taking time away from them connecting with students. So we do this through an agentic platform. We've trained orchestration agents and data preparation agents to take in information from iReady reports. Also from Yeti's interaction with students.
Also from voice notes that teachers might wanna say and tell the AI, Hey, I observed this in the classroom. All of that aggregated. And we have about a concurrent 30,000 student data point level right now with a flexible data model that can then prepare and do those workflows for teachers and administrators.
So right now we're serving schools across New York City, California, Texas, and also four continents in the world, including Lebanon, Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand. Soon to be in Uganda and Kenya and Malaysia. So very exciting times and very, very lean team of about 21 employees across the world.
[00:07:22] Alex Sarlin: That's incredible. And you span two different really exciting areas of AI and EdTech, the learning companion space, especially psychologically trained, resilience based learning, companion and progress monitoring, data analysis, teacher efficiency, which is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle as well.
Not replacing teachers, as you mentioned, but assisting teachers in supporting them, especially in communicating to students pieces that that are gonna be valuable for those students. It's a really powerful story. So tell us about your EdTech Week experience. What was it like pitching on the Shark Tank stage, or alongside many different judges, lots of different VCs.
I know you're a pretty veteran pitcher. You've taken this story around the world in a really exciting way, but I'm curious what it felt like in New York at EdTech Week.
[00:08:07] Christie Pang: Yeah, so we are in the category of growth and path to Series A and all of my fellow competitors, well at least three out of the four of them I know very well.
So we have been in contact because of partnership discussions. We've also been in sharing stages at A-S-U-G-S-V as fellow panelists as well. So everyone was a familiar face. The exciting thing about EdTech Week, which was very different from all of the, I would say, knowledge leadership events that we have been in, or pitch events that we've been in, is that the floor was occupied by the right.
Folks by, right. I mean, it was very thoughtfully crafted into, I believe, six or seven categories. So everybody in the growth and pathway to Series A companies are looking at similar metrics. Mm-hmm. We are, we're thinking about scaling appropriately. We're thinking about, Hey, how can we bring our proven efficacy to scale?
How is it possible to streamline and improve margins? And so that, those pitches are very different from early stage prese and seed pitches. So I, I really appreciated the fact that it was heavily and intelligently curated and we were in the right category. I. Learned a lot from the fellow competitors in my category, especially from a couple of folks that are in hardware spaces that are thinking about the next phase of hardware beyond screens.
That was really inspiring to me because I have children that are five, seven, and nine and more screens are really not the answer for me. So there was a lot of interesting conversations that reaffirmed. Our direction, which is we wanna be the AI infrastructure glue behind proven theories of change, other startups or existing ed tech features and offerings and products who have proven efficacy, whether you're in the curriculum space or content, but really lack the r and d into a flexible ingestion of data streams to power up.
The educator side to power up what the administrator needs to see. Not only just the learning companionship or the personalized self-directed learning piece. There's a lot of that happening that we can see. So we wanna be that glue. And I think Ed Tech Week really elevated us. I would say most valuably, not really for investment's sake, but for those partnerships.
[00:10:56] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Partnerships, especially when you're a global organization and you're working in the American school system, those partnerships are so vital for expanding. You mentioned partnering with nonprofits. I'm sure you're partnering with all kinds of people. One partnership that I found very interesting about your work is you've worked with the Jung Gens Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to do co-design work to learn from students.
You did a panel about that at at tech week, and I've followed your work on that for a while. Can you tell us a little bit about that work and how it's informed Yeti Confetti and Lavana Labs progress?
[00:11:28] Christie Pang: Yeah, no, thank you for bringing that up Alex. That's something that we are gonna look forward to doing more of in the next few years as well.
What came to us was the Joan Gans Cooney Center has this offering that's funded by the Walton Foundation, and we were one of six at tech companies that were chosen, uh, stage agnostic to go through a play test and co-design of our product with students. First of all, that is a groundbreaking idea. I was like, I, I was like, duh, we should have done that from, and to be honest, I've been doing that.
In my living room and with my three kids since 2021, we started thinking about why is it not possible for my 4-year-old to sit in front of YouTube? Why do I feel that it's not safe? Why does she lose interest after certain periods of time? How can it be better? Right? So having that student or learner insight into an input into product design, into user interface design, into motivation and gamification, design was a brilliant idea.
Yeah. We started doing this first and foremost, making sure that our assumptions were research backed. So JGCC had literacy and writing coaches from University of Tennessee and all other universities across the country work with our team to verify that. Our assumptions were research backed, but we didn't stop there.
Right? Research back's not good enough. We then went out to say, well, this is what the research says, and here's a prototype. The funny thing, adding a little anecdote here is that using AI to role play historians and famous figures is a diamond dozen. Now
[00:13:18] Alex Sarlin: it is.
[00:13:19] Christie Pang: And we all thought as adults that that's really cool.
So we thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if you had a writing coach that was roleplaying Shakespeare and has a funny voice like Shakespeare or Harper Lee that is inspirational, has a voice, has a really strong sense of self and story to tell, and let's create these historical characters and it's going to be inspirational.
And these
[00:13:48] Alex Sarlin: fourth grade, see where it's going. Yeah.
[00:13:49] Christie Pang: Well these fourth graders that came to the Y to co-design with us just sort of sat there and said, well. I'm not gonna listen to it. And we said, well, what would make you want to listen to it? And immediately, you know, a student spoke up and said, I would listen to it if, if it were a K-pop demon hunter.
[00:14:08] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:09] Christie Pang: And we were like, okay, well none nowhere in the research says that that's not allowed. We can still carry out all of the research backed protocols and processes with the mask of a K-pop demon hunter in the front. We had to throw everything that we planned to do in those three days with the students out the window, and the team had to overnight redo the avatars, reconfigure all the agents.
Look up all the videos, K-pop, demon hunters, so that we have context to augment our AI. And then the next day we went back into the room and the students started learning and were very motivated to take feedback. Were motivated to review and revise their writings. So it was a game changing moment for us.
And now we are inviting all schools after school programs, the y across the world. We're gonna be speaking to the YWCA in Asia very soon about doing a co-design with youth across the world, because that's what we believe when educators, uh, they, they say this to us time and time again. When they see their students engaged and want to come to school, that's when they say this particular piece of technology will make a difference.
I don't have to worry about forcing the dosage. I don't have to worry about making them do it. They want to do it and they're self-motivated. That's the aha moment for teachers. So we will start with that, co-design with students so that the student is excited to learn
[00:15:48] Alex Sarlin: again. Yeah. And it's K-Pop Demon Hunter in the front, but you know Carol Dweck and Resilience Yes.
Coaches in the behind the scenes.
[00:15:57] Christie Pang: Yeah. That's a pretty
[00:15:57] Alex Sarlin: powerful combination.
[00:15:59] Christie Pang: Yes, that's right.
[00:16:00] Alex Sarlin: So what is next coming out of EdTech Week? You, I mean, you've mentioned lots of partnerships, lots of global moves, but, uh, I'm curious, just you've won competitions in the past, you mentioned the MIT raise competition, but winning this Shark Tank competition is a little bit of a, you know, a win in your sails.
I'm curious what is immediately on your radar for Lirvana Labs as you continue your growth trajectory?
[00:16:22] Christie Pang: Yeah, so I'll talk about it from a partnerships angle and I'll talk about it from a product angle and then a little bit from the investment side, but from the partnership angle we announced at New York at Tech Week, we're a formal partnership with TNTP and TNTP.
Obviously, we're also panelists of various leadership panels at at Tech Week. That meant that we now have a renowned nationwide teacher professional development partner, and we thought that this piece of ethical, safe, responsible, harnessing of this tool, making sure that the person that's actually wielding the tool, which is the teacher, feels at ease, feels empowered when they use this tool.
They're not being made to do heart surgery when they're trained as a general physician anymore. It's the most vital piece to unlocking and scaling impact. And so at Tech, we was the venue that we chose to announce the partnership, and we are going nationwide with TNTP. We're hoping that our Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, New York City districts that we're currently servicing since 2024 will benefit from this robust engagement with teachers without adding to the burden of teachers.
Lots of engagement with various teacher communities are now happening because of that, starting with New York City. So that's the first part we're the most excited about. We are also talking about partnerships with content creators who have shared stages with us. At EdTech Week, we're also talking about partnerships with our fellow competitors in our Shark Tank.
And so a lot of this is making sure we stay being the deep tech glue for everybody else. Second piece product wise, it was interesting. We had teachers and district leads take and send back photos of our pull up banner at the at tech week booth telling us that I've never heard this phrase before, but I want this on my desk tomorrow.
And what we had, we had on our banner for ed Tech week was. AI Mission Control Center for global educators. Mm. We know that all educators have a mission in mind. They have their mission. We don't have to redefine that mission for them. We just need to make their mission so easy to carry out that they want to do it over and over again.
That they're excited about their work and that they find meaning in their work and they see the impact. And so we are not going to be in the business of, and this is on the product side, we've made it very clear we're not in the business of adding additional content, adding additional work to the teacher's day.
The teacher's day has not elongated everybody. And the school day has not elongated since I went to kindergarten. And the size of the curriculum they are supposed teachers are supposed to deliver has increased. So much.
[00:19:31] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:19:32] Christie Pang: You can obviously say, well, that's not possible. Are you going to talk at light speed in order to deliver so much content in the same amount of time?
No, that's not possible. So we're going to be not in the business of introducing more things that you need to do in the classroom, more curriculum, more content that you need to deliver. Instead, we're gonna be in the business of reducing all of the work that you wish somebody could do for you if you had a teacher assistant or an analyst that will help you improve your connection with your students, help you improve parent engagement.
Help you prepare those IEP reports faster, help you glue together those CSVs and all of those multi tab spreadsheets where you're made to fill in, you know, some data point from this dashboard. No more dashboards. Not more dashboards, and AI can be this invisible but helpful assistant that you can collaborate with that will help you and that can learn how to do things the way you like it to be done.
That's what we're going to be focused on, on the product side.
[00:20:41] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, from dashboards to mission control, it's a, it's a new metaphor for EdTech. I love that. And that collaborative approach, uh, you've mentioned so many collaborations just in this conversation, I think is also incredibly pertinent and relevant.
The new teacher project, incredibly important organization. It's really exciting news. Thank you so much. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do. I feel like that Lavana has been really carving its own very, very fascinating path in what AI and education can and should look like. You're both global and local.
You're both teacher and student, and, but you're thinking really strategically and I've just seen nothing but positive successes in your wake and in your future. So I'm really excited to see it. Thanks so much to you. Christie Pang is CEO and co-founder of Lirvana Labs global AI lab, advancing safe, equitable learning tools used across four continents.
They also make Yeti confetti that's Yeti for yet, uh, not yet, and are building an infrastructure for AI everywhere. Thanks so much for being here with us. Ontech Insiders.
[00:21:40] Christie Pang: Thank you, Alex.
[00:21:42] Alex Sarlin: We are here with Jason Palmer. He's the co-founder and president of Socrait for over 30 years. He's founded, invested in and grown leading ed tech companies, including Schoolnet, Credly, and Learn Platform.
He's a lifelong education advocate. He served 12 years on UVA's School of Education Board and lives in Baltimore with his middle school age daughter, Jason Palmer. Welcome back to EdTech Insiders. Thanks, Alex. Great to see you again. It's great to see you again too. Congratulations on your Shark Tank win at EdTech Week.
Just a couple of weeks ago. That was just a week ago now. I'm so excited for you. Tell us about your new project with Socrait. You've sort of switched hats from the investment side for many, many years to the founder role and what are you doing with Socrait?
[00:22:28] Jason Palmer: Yeah, so, Socrait is super exciting. As you know, I've been investing in companies for many years now, and Maria Anderson, my co-founder, she goes back and forth between being a teacher, inventing a new company, selling the company, becoming a teacher again, back and forth.
Multiple times. Maria has done this and after selling her last company, which we sold to academic benchmarks, she said, I'm done being an entrepreneur. This is so much work being an entrepreneur. But I knew it would only take in and it did take like two or three years before she finally called me back and said, I have this idea.
I think it could solve teacher burnout. It involves AI. And she told me the idea, and it's so genius, basically. Socrait, which is like a little device you could wear on your lapel or you just put your phone somewhere that can listen to you as you teach in the class every day. It listens as you teach and then it does all the administrative work for you in the background.
So it keeps track of attendance, behavior, warnings, praises, class participation. Next year we're gonna build in the ability to fill out your special ed forms for you. It sends parent emails. You still have to push the send button. But basically all that administrative work that's been dragging teachers down and causing so much burnout, it just listens to you and it turns what you say into structured data and the AI agents do your work for you.
It's really quite simple and it's really taking off. It's the dream.
[00:23:50] Alex Sarlin: It is. It is. Exactly. What we've talked about in AI and ed tech for the last three years is wouldn't it be amazing if AI could literally offload all the administrative work, the pieces of the teaching job that teachers don't wanna do, that they have to do the filling in forms, the taking attendance, and they can focus on relationship building and teaching and all of the things that they signed up for to be educators to do.
Exactly. That's really exciting. So tell us about how it's, you say it's taken off, what? Yeah, yeah. Are people saying about it? What does it, what does it look like? So the company,
[00:24:18] Jason Palmer: yeah. The company's less than a year old, and we launched our Alpha product in April at A-S-U-G-S-V. We immediately got 700 teachers to volunteer to be alpha testers.
Many of them used it in April and May. Some of them used it over the summer and back to school. At this point, we now have a full school enterprise edition that we've sold into a number of schools. We actually have 20 schools that we're seeking for our Lighthouse Partners program. These are gonna be development partners that get a very special low price to be part of the Development Partners program, and you get to roll it out to all the teachers in your school, and you get to help us with the co-development of the product.
By this time next year, we will probably have about 250 schools. We're already in 14 states. Our goal is to be in all 50 states in the next year. And I'm mentioning this last 'cause it really is the least important, but we've raised $2 million in angel investments and venture capital. That have helped us build much faster.
This is a company that's less than a year old, but already has a full-blown school enterprise product in the marketplace.
[00:25:19] Alex Sarlin: Well, you're solving a series of very acute pain points in the education system, and that is how product market fit is is found. That's really exciting. Tell us a little bit about your EdTech Week experience.
What was it like pitching at Shark Tank? What was it like learning that you were the winner of your category?
[00:25:36] Jason Palmer: You know, it was total fun. I have been the judge at Shark Tank multiple times. This is the first time I was on the other side and many of the judges were like, what are you doing up there? You're in the wrong seat.
You should be down here. But it was quite awesome to see. We won the AI and education contest and there were many other companies that had really phenomenal products. I had to give it my all. And then I had to add in there a little bit that like the best age to be an entrepreneur is 46 years old.
Everybody assumes it's like the 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg's and there are some great entrepreneurs in their twenties. I was an entrepreneur in my twenties. But the best time to really build a business is when you're Maria and my age. When you're in your mid forties, fifties, you know what to do. You've worked in various companies.
You know how to build a great culture, build a great team. I mean, we have nine people on our team, and it's like the dream team. We've brought people together from multiple companies we've worked with in the past. They all know their roles. We all love and get along well with each other. It's a dream.
[00:26:34] Alex Sarlin: That's incredibly exciting and, and you know, having experience is valuable for being an entrepreneur but also being as connected. I mean you spent over 30 years founding investing in companies with, with new market venture partners, with others. You've just been Absolutely. Advocates
[00:26:47] Jason Palmer: foundation. Yeah, yeah.
Foundation.
[00:26:48] Alex Sarlin: So, so I can imagine your Rolodex is fully stacked when you're trying to build a really killer dream team in education and EdTech. That's exciting to know. Yeah, I can imagine. People were surprised to see you on the other side of the podium. That's really, really funny. So what is next for, Socrait, you mentioned you're AIming at all 50 states.
You're building in special education functionality. That's really powerful. Building off the momentum of EdTech Week and of all the other momentum you're getting, I'm curious what your roadmap is looking like.
[00:27:15] Jason Palmer: Yeah, the next three months, if I, and this is kind of the way you think of it as a CEO of an early stage company is in three month chunks.
Yeah. It's really about getting those 20 most innovative schools. So we're looking for principals, assistant principals, teachers who want to be part of our Lighthouse Partners program. Plus we're trying to get to between 1000 and 10,000 viral teacher users. We're gonna be somewhere in the middle there by January, February, March timeframe.
Get as many users, get as many development partners, keep making the product better. We actually have a product roadmap now that's like two years long given our small team, and then we're gonna go back out in the springtime and raise another round of venture investment. But right now it's all about partners.
Partners, partners, get more schools, get more teachers.
[00:28:01] Alex Sarlin: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So I have to ask, even I, I know you're gonna have a great answer to this, but the idea of being able to record what's happening in the classroom as unstructured data and structure it and then use it for completing administrative tasks is so powerful.
I think others sometimes feel like a little afraid of that because of the surveillance or the privacy, or just the claims. I'm sure this is something you talk about all the time. I'm sure it's part of your pitch and part of your thinking every day. How do you address that? Because I, I love the idea of, of structuring data and using it, but I can imagine others might find it a little icky.
[00:28:33] Jason Palmer: Yeah. Well, what we found so far is 80% are kind of favorable on it, and 20% are very concerned about privacy. And everybody has that privacy as the first question, actually. Right. And we've done a bunch of things to immediately address that. So the first one, kind of obvious is most schools have a policy that student names cannot be shared with LLMs.
So we anonymize all student names. Anytime information is sent to an l lm. The second thing is, even though you said recording, we don't actually do any recording. There is no MP three file, there's no audio file. So create listens and then immediately transitions it into structured data. Like Alex is present or Jason is tardy or so and so was warned or so and so was did class participation and got praised.
So it's immediately changed in the structured data. There's not even a transcript that's made available to the teacher and teachers say 20,000 words a day. So that transcript would be completely crazy anyway. So you really have to change what a teacher says into the structured data to make it work. And then the third thing is that we have a rock solid privacy policy.
Like we've been around three to five years. We work with Gunderson, some of the best privacy lawyers in the country. We work with Ike Safe for FERPA compliance, et cetera. So we've built this thing with kind of privacy and security as the core values. So.
[00:29:55] Alex Sarlin: Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and I, I misspoke. I didn't know it wasn't recording.
When you mentioned that, you know, the device,
[00:30:00] Jason Palmer: everybody always assumes the, by the way, the other thing always people assume is that it also collects student voices and it doesn't. It is 100% just collecting the teacher's voice and that makes it a little bit easier and different on the privacy policy too.
'cause you probably know there's like a Kapa rules for 13 and under. We're not collecting any data from students in elementary or middle school. It's just the teachers in middle and high school and sometimes elementary too.
[00:30:27] Alex Sarlin: Brilliant. And makes a huge amount of sense. It made very, very, uh, yeah, it makes a lot of sense and I, I can imagine why you have that long list of beta testers and hundreds of teachers wanting to sign up because they say so much in any given day.
And the idea of being able to take their speech and translate it into structured data and turn it into administrative function, especially if it's their speech and not the classroom. That, exactly, that takes it to a whole new level of usefulness. That is exciting. Jason, I totally get it. Yeah. Last question for you.
As somebody who has been pitched so many companies over the years, I'm so curious about how you take the learnings from seeing generations of different ed tech entrepreneurs and pitches and ideas and, and waves and take them into this AI moment. You know, this is a, an exciting moment for ed tech. It's also a moment that is uncertain, right?
A lot of people are trying to figure out where this is all gonna go. Will there be a backlash? Will there, you know, what's it all gonna look like? What lessons have you taken from seeing back in the school, net days from seeing all of these different things happen in EdTech to this present moment? What stands out to you?
[00:31:30] Jason Palmer: Oh, well, I wrote a whole Substack on this about three weeks ago, and honestly in like three more weeks it'll be outdated because AI is moving so fast. Yeah. But the main thing is that schools, teachers, students, to, everybody should get on the AI bandwagon to some degree. Whatever degree is comfortable for you, play around.
There was a time, not that long ago, I was at a conference at Denver Public Schools about three months ago, and I asked how many people in the audience have used AI 10 or more hours in the past month, and it was like half the people in the room, which I was kind of surprised by. 'cause three months earlier it had been like a quarter of the room, right.
I'm pretty sure if I asked the question now, it would be a hundred percent of hands would be up. Maybe a couple stragglers would still put their hand up, even if they haven't done it 10 hours. And so everybody's using AI. Don't just use ChatGPT, it's easy to fall into that. Find the AI that's right for you and your experience if you're a teacher or a principal.
Socrait is probably the best way to actually like leverage that classroom data in the future, all teachers are gonna be augmented by some type of AI. And are teachers gonna be typing in the future? No, they're gonna be teaching in the future. And so it's gotta be a voice powered AI that's listening to them and taking what they say and turning it into work for them in the background or doing the work for them in the background.
And the same applies to pretty much everything that's going on. We already have schools asking us, you know, what, if there's. Hall monitors. Could hall monitors also have these, we're like, what would the hall monitors have it for? Oh, you don't know what happens in the Ja in the hallway. Guess Jason behavior is a big issue in the hallway.
And same thing with assistant principals and principals. They, they say, we would love to buy it for our school, but could you get me one for me too? Because I have all these meetings and I gotta write all these emails too, and I gotta fill out all these systems. So I'm pretty sure we all will have, and maybe this is 10 years, it won't happen overnight, but everybody's gonna have some type of voice AI assistant, and it'll be tailored to you as a person and it'll be tailored to what your job is and what types of things you need to do with your voice.
So
[00:33:34] Alex Sarlin: makes a lot of sense. And we, we saw OpenAI acquire Johnny Ives wearable AI company and I think they probably have some ideas about how to do that in as a consumer. They totally do. I
[00:33:44] Jason Palmer: dunno if you saw it, there was a like a recent thing where they were gonna do an unveiling and the two of them were on stage and they basically talked to each other for 20 minutes and there was no unveiling.
And I was like, oh my gosh. If I'd been there with this little device that we have, I could have stolen the show. Like, like we're actually ahead of open AI and Johnny Ive right now, but to be honest, this is our product for 2026. It rocks, it's great, but we know eventually we're gonna need to work with whatever glasses Google comes out with or Apple comes out with or whatever.
The Johnny Ive product is, our goal is to work with whatever wearable device you want to use. We already do work with iPods and Bluetooth speakers, et cetera. We work with all of it, but this is actually the favorite for 2026 right now.
[00:34:30] Alex Sarlin: It's a really exciting idea and I, I know it. You, it is the kind of idea somebody comes and says, I have an idea for how to do this.
You're like, it takes about 30 seconds to explain and you want it, right? Yeah, I'm sure teachers like, sign me up right now. That's right. Well now the
[00:34:44] Jason Palmer: trick is to figure out how to explain it in three seconds before they flick that TikTok. So that's actually what we're working on right now. So how can you explain it in three seconds?
So, well, when
[00:34:51] Alex Sarlin: you said you are teachers going to be typing, never, never type a word again. There you go. There's your three seconds.
[00:34:58] Jason Palmer: Ah, that's a good one. You're right, you're right. Yeah,
[00:35:01] Alex Sarlin: yeah. Never type again. Never fill out, never type
[00:35:03] Jason Palmer: again. You made it even shorter. You made it one second.
[00:35:05] Alex Sarlin: Yesterday was the last form you ever filled out.
Well, it's always amazing to talk to you Jason, and congratulations on the Shark Tank win at EdTech Week. Jason Palmer is co-founder and president of Socrait with Maria Anderson, another EdTech legend. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. Thanks so much, Alex. We are here with Robin Cowie of Skillmaker.
Robin is a Blair witch, legend turned tech visionary. He fuses a filmmaker's storytelling with a startup CEO's strategy. As founder of Skillmaker.ai, he's reinventing workforce training, replacing textbooks with torque wrenches and whiteboards with mixed reality, bridging XR and AI tech and trades workers and employers.
Robin Cowie. Welcome to a Tech Insiders.
[00:35:53] Robin Cowie: Yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me here. It's been quite an experience. Ed Tech was wonderful.
[00:35:58] Alex Sarlin: I'm so happy to hear it. Yeah, it was such an amazing moment to sort of bring everybody together in New York, get to talk to people with so many different types of ed tech backgrounds.
So I have to ask, in your biography it says, Robin is a Blair witch legend. Tell us about what that means. Let's unpack. Yeah.
[00:36:15] Robin Cowie: My father in the sixties was an industrial psychologist. He actually worked in gold mines and he picked up a film camera to step into the shoes of the gold miners, and he created what he called first person learning and was kind of immersive filmmaking from the point of view of the people learning the job.
When I went to film school, that inspired me and basically I made the black witch based on that idea of first person experiential learning slash horror. So later on I went into making video games and first person was a really big deal for me there. I ran the Madden football franchise, and then I got involved in, essentially with my dad, helping people in prison learn how to be electricians, and so we were able to reduce the amount of time.
That people learn from eight months to 10 days. Wow. And that inspired me to start Skillmaker. I have now been working with Napa Auto Parts for the last two years, and we are going to reduce training for auto technicians from two years to 25 days. So yeah, we have an XR AI solution platform that I'm very excited about.
[00:37:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's an incredible, absolutely incredible career trajectory. And I feel like maybe there's a through line there of what we would call the edic field, right? Experiential learning, right? Immersive experiential. When you're in the Blair Witch Project, you are there. You're seeing it through the eyes of the people there, and it's as mysterious and scary as it would be in real life.
And if you are training to become a mechanic, if you're training to do torque wrenches, if you feel like you're really there, the experiential learning accelerates that training.
[00:38:04] Robin Cowie: Yeah, we combine, certainly we do some of it in vr, probably about 20% of the learning in vr. We do mixed realities, so it's hands-on.
So you're actually physically using tools and working with tools in a mixed reality. But then a huge part of what we do about 70% is all in smart glasses. So you can imagine when you fix cars, like you could train on an F-150, but you also need to be able to work on a Toyota Corolla. That's like a 2010.
So we put the majority of the information actually in smart glasses, and we then we use the cameras on the smart glasses and the microphones and the speakers to essentially accelerate on the job workers. So it's great. It's a wonderful training tool, but it's also really. Productivity, efficiency, and yeah, we're super excited.
Napa obviously is a huge partner, but we're also working with Triple A and a number of other exciting companies.
[00:39:01] Alex Sarlin: Well, first off, I haven't mentioned this yet. Congratulations on your Shark Tank win. Great course, but what a incredible idea and I think. The mixed reality, the smart glasses, these are new technologies, even beyond virtual reality.
These are technologies that have really only emerged as consumer ready in the last handful of years, and I think people imagine that this kind of thing was possible, but I don't think they maybe realize that it's already here and it's really, really exciting to hear that it's already here and that you're scaling it.
What would be next? I'm curious how you might expand out that type of immersive training where you have all the information loaded into your smart glasses while you're doing something. I can imagine that being used in so many different circumstances.
[00:39:45] Robin Cowie: Yeah, no, I mean, you're absolutely right. I would also add to your list of recent technologies.
Just artificial intelligence and data science and kind of how that works. Because what we've done is really separate the knowledge from the hardware, and we really have kind of a software as a service platform that then is hardware agnostic that can feed out to whatever needs to be. And you, with AI, obviously you've got natural language processing, so you can bring that into the fold.
Yeah, I mean, our focus is pretty narrow at first. We're hyper-focused on automotive repair, whether that's for OEMs, actual original equipment manufacturers, or whether it's the aftermarket like napa, or whether it's collision like aaa. But then naturally we're starting to have conversations now where we're talking to companies in trucking and we're talking to companies in shipping.
And so it doesn't take too long where you. Increase that circle to be like, okay, transportation in general, like how do we do that? And then once you get into transportation, the next question is like energy. So I think startups fail if they don't hyper focus. And so we are definitely hyper-focused on NAPA and aaa, our immediate clients, but we're building it for expansion, we're building it for scale.
And certainly I think the overall trajectory of what we're trying to do is super exciting. And at the moment we're just going flat out working as hard as we can, and it was wonderful to really bring this to the attention of many learning environments because right now we've been focused on enterprise.
We haven't really started bringing this to trade schools or high schools or anything like that. So yeah, ed Tech was really the first time that we're meeting people who are in that environment and talking to them about it.
[00:41:34] Alex Sarlin: And I imagine they're pretty excited about it because it seems like an incredibly new and very powerful form of learning.
You've mentioned that highly decreased time it takes for training that would potentially carry over into a learning environment.
[00:41:48] Robin Cowie: And I think the certification part is really important. We basically consider ourselves an apprenticeship accelerator. Everything that we do, any one of those has testing included, and it actually articulates into the automotive service excellence a SE, which that's the certifying body for automotive in the United States.
So we have an exclusive relationship with A SC. We have an exclusive relationship with Napa, and we're making sure that everything that we do translates into getting techs working faster, making more money personally, and then also ultimately getting certified so that they can go from Ctech to BTech to ATech to master tech to specialist.
Now there's a huge crisis they are missing next year, 650,000 auto repair technicians. So it's a massive problem and one that's just gonna increase. So. I think we're in the right time, right place, right idea. It's a lot of hard work, but we're having fun.
[00:42:50] Alex Sarlin: Sounds incredible. So tell us a little bit more about, you mentioned your platform agnostic and it's sort of a software solution.
Using AI under the hood is part of the idea here that the AI is trained on the certification knowledge, it's trained on the manuals and all the, it, it, it understands the Toyota Corolla 2010, like inside out. So when somebody is looking at a particular carburetor, it knows everything about it. It knows where to go.
It know it can, you can ask questions and it brings up
[00:43:17] Robin Cowie: information thinking. I would say hardware agnostic. So in other words, we can play on Pico or Quest three or you know, apple Vision Pro or you know, or RayBan Smart Glasses or all the other plethora of glasses that are coming out. So we're hardware agnostic, but yeah, you put your finger on it.
We are using AI mainly for natural language processing, you know, multimodal information, so images and video and all of those kinds of things. But at the heart of it is really kind of, you know, traditional data science. And at the heart of it we've got a, a vectorized database and that database is built on, you know, a hundred years of NAPA knowledge, you know, to all of that experience.
But we're able using retrieval, augmented generation or rag, to essentially stack the knowledge bases. So. We start with Napa, but then we can integrate things like, you know, phi or basically integrate additional knowledge bases on that. But I would also say there's kind of like the theory of how to do something and then there's the real world experience of how to do something.
And so we're using the glasses to capture data as well. Mm-hmm. So, okay, you know, here's, this repair was done as a first time fix. It was done quickly. So let's take that data positively and bring it up to the attention. Or as we're going through the repairs, boy they keep on making these mistakes. Let's capture that data.
Maybe we should do a VR module about that. Right? So like we're really trying to have this continual feedback loop so that the product itself gets better and better and better all the time.
[00:44:57] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, because if you have people doing repairs and recording it and seeing exactly how all the steps that database is perpetuating and can be used for future training for both the AI and for people.
That's incredibly interesting. Thank you. What? Yeah, what a product. I, I mean, you say, and you're totally right, startups have to, to succeed, but interviewers get to think about all the ramifications and I'm thinking, I'm thinking heart surgery when I, when I hear you do this, you know, it's like there's, there's so many different ways you can take that same concept.
[00:45:29] Robin Cowie: It's interesting that you said, uh, heart surgery or healthcare. When we first started thinking about this, and we've, for many years, I've done a lot of thinking about healthcare and those kinds of things. One of the things that's really beautiful about automotive is there is a very specific way to fix a car, and there's a very specific, it either works or it doesn't work.
When you start getting into healthcare, the branching choices and the human body is just so complex. And then also when you get into healthcare, there's just so much verification. There's a lot of, you know, challenges in there. So I mean, hopefully, you know, I'd love to go into that space, but. I also think that, you know, we've got a critical infrastructure problem in this country right now.
We, unfortunately, you know, trade schools were reduced and, you know, shops and high schools were cut back. And if we're gonna like, build the infrastructure that we need right now with all the data centers and all the, you know, all the construction that's needed and all the. You know, transportation issues and all that stuff, then, you know, this is a very specific thing that we can apply our skillset to.
And then, you know, Napa themselves have been just this remarkable champion. It's 19,000 shops, you know, overall there's 1.4 million technicians working in this country. So, and also like the complexities of, of cars are really interesting. Vehicles are very interesting because of EVs and hybrids and automated vehicles.
And like right now, you know, the automobile industry is going through an incredibly interesting change. And so it just makes sense that, you know, there's a lot of people aging out and there's a huge need. In fact, really we've gotta change the way that people think about technicians. 'cause these are very sophisticated computers that happen to ride on wheels.
And so that job is a very. Good paying job. And it's also a lot different than the way it was in the fifties or the sixties, that kind of nostalgic feeling we have towards cars, which is great, like emotionally. But the truth is these are very much STEM jobs. These are very much scientific jobs. The people that are being attracted to it are very technical people and they need technical tools and, and so we're providing them smart glasses and VR and MR.
And all kinds of integrated technology that really helps meet them where their challenges are.
[00:47:59] Alex Sarlin: It's an amazing idea and I think it puts together the experiential hands-on learning. With the academic learning, they're literally happening, happening at the same time. If you're inside a machine and you're making moves, but you're wearing VR glasses that can tell you what's going on and what part is what, and, you know, basically do live diagramming, live analysis.
I feel like it's a new, a new paradigm for what learning looks like and that idea that these are STEM jobs and STEM careers, but the training for them could be extremely hands-on, I think would make it appealing to a, a huge number of young people who are trying to sort of navigate this really complicated, you know, work environ.
[00:48:38] Robin Cowie: We just did a test this past Friday where we bought in some high school kids, 16, 17, 18. They knew nothing about cars. We tested them, well, actually a SE tested them. We then ran 'em through one lesson on fixing breaks, which is about a two hour experience. We gave them smart glasses, we tested them again, the test scores went up by 33%, and then we put 'em on vehicles and at the end of the day, they were actually doing a brake repair job.
And that is one day of time. So that's just crazy, you know, it's, it's really, and it was amazing to see their confidence step up, where they go, oh, I know this tool. I know this procedure. I know how to do this. And they got to fail in VR before they got to actually work on a real vehicle. So I think that's it, you know, having information when they need it, just in time information.
And then also being able to fail fast. And also being able to do it anywhere at any time. So I'm very excited about it. I, I would say, you know, I, I'm very fortunate to, had a wonderful movie career and a, a really wonderful gaming career, but for me, this is so meaningful. There was one young lady who basically said, from the last set of training that I did, she's like, well, in 10 days I became the highest earning person in my family.
And I just, like, it really took me by surprise. And I was like, all right, this is it. Like, this is what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life. So I get up every morning like, it's challenging. It's, it's, it's a lot of hard work, but, you know, anything worth doing is, is challenging.
[00:50:11] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. That just gives me chills, that quote, because that is the absolute dream.
I mean, literally life transformation right there. And you could fail fast, but you can also learn fast, clearly. Incredibly exciting. I wish we had more time, but Robin Cowie is a. Blair Witch Legend, a, a filmmaking legend. He's done video games at the level of Madden, and he's fusing filmmakers Storytelling with a startup, CEO's strategy with Skillmaker.ai.
Congratulations on your EdTech Week win, and I can't wait to talk again. This is a, this is such an exciting idea.
[00:50:45] Robin Cowie: Truly appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
[00:50:48] Alex Sarlin: Our next guest is Neel Rao. He's the co-founder of Glimmer. He's a former high school math teacher and a former PM at IXL. He's a Stanford graduate with a bachelor's in computer science and a master's in Symbolic Systems, and he has researched how AI can better measure learning.
He started Glimmer to help teachers reach every student no matter where they are in their learning journey. Neel Rao, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thank you so much for having me on. So tell us a little bit about Glimmer and how you came to it from your EdTech and Stanford background.
[00:51:23] Neel Rao: Yeah, so as you mentioned earlier, I'm a former high school math teacher, and Glimmer is really born out of some of those experiences and out of like the kind of teacher that I wanted to be back then but didn't have the time or the resources to be able to be that teacher.
I really wanted to understand my students deeply understand like their thought processes and where their learning gaps were, but I just didn't have the time to be able to look through every single student worksheet afterwards or be able to then tailor my lesson plan a bunch of different ways. And so we started Glimmer to make the daily formative assessment cycle really easy for teachers.
So the way it works is teachers can upload any resource and we'll basically create a tailored version of it. For each of their students. So we can add scaffolds for students who need it or can add extension problems for students who are doing well, as well as adding like accommodations for students with IEPs or even translation support.
So really wanted to make a version of the lesson that is actually personalized for each student. So this is then pushed out to each student and they work through it on their own device and as students. Or working through it. The Glimmer tutor works alongside them to analyze their misconceptions. But instead of just giving away the answer, we want to really surface that student thinking.
So it asks them kind of prompting questions or guiding questions and engages students in that math dialogue to eventually get them to the right answer and to get them that conceptual understanding. And then lastly, we wanna make sure that all of that information we're gathering is actually usable for teachers.
Mm-hmm. So we can synthesize all the different student work examples and all the different like student AI conversations, and then analyze all that information to give teachers reteaching recommendations. So to make sure that it really gets back into their hands and that they are at the forefront of being able to fill in some of those learning gaps.
So we give them recommendations for what the whole class needs. We can create like the optimal groupings based on specific misconceptions. Then we can also help them understand who needs those one-on-one check-ins. So really wanting to keep teachers at the forefront of their own instruction.
[00:53:27] Alex Sarlin: That's really exciting.
As an instructional design, geek of kinds, I am a huge proponent of formative assessment. I remember first reading Wilman Black and really coming across that concept when I was in graduate school and saying, oh, this is clearly what school should look like. You're low stakes, continuous formative assessment.
You're getting feedback, you're getting, you know, assessed to learn rather than assessed to get a grade. And all those pieces that you just named are exactly the pieces. You know, you assess, you can remediate if needed. You identify misconceptions and then of course, aggregating that data to the teachers means you're adding a huge amount of value for grouping or for class instruction or subsequent instruction.
That's really exciting. Tell us about your pitch at EdTech Week. That's a really exciting idea. It also stands out in a crowded field, so I'm curious what that pitching experience was like at the Shark Tank.
[00:54:18] Neel Rao: I mean it was definitely a little bit nerve wracking. I think we only started Glimmer about three months ago now, so this is kind of our like first really big opportunity to share it with a ton of different people at once.
But it ended up being really fun. I mean, these are like the sorts of things that we enjoy thinking about, we enjoy talking about. So it's fun to get to share a little bit more about Glimmer. And then also we were really excited to be able to present to such a really, I guess like star-studded group of judges.
So people that we really respect in education. And I think that's true across all the Shark Tank panels. Actually some of our investors are sharks on some of the other shark tanks, which is kind of cool to just get to see them and hear some of the other pitches from other. Shark tanks as well. Yeah, it, it was great to be able to talk to them and also to hear even what some of the other pitches we're working on as well.
I think there's a lot of really, really cool companies and a lot of founders who we've like gotten to know who, who we really admire and so it's great hearing about some of their work and I, I think it's also very inspiring to be able to see so many people who really, really care about making math education better and have come up with a lot of really cool ways to be able to do that.
[00:55:24] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. One thing I love about the EdTech community in general and EdTech week specifically, is this spirit of sort of cooperation and coopetition, maybe you would call it. It's like you're competing in front of the Shark Tank panel, but you know, everybody likes each other in those rooms. Everybody's rooting for each other to succeed.
You know, the judges, yeah, we all have the exact same goal. Exactly. And people wanna work together. They wanna partner. You know, I don't think there's a feeling of zero sum, like, because one company wins, the others lose and they go home with the tail between their legs. That's not how it works at all, but it is still a really exciting win.
So you're three months old. That is a very new company. Tell us about what the traction has been so far. What does it look like at when you get into classrooms and teachers use this new type of formative assessment?
[00:56:08] Neel Rao: Yeah, it's been really exciting to hear some of the feedback from teachers, from administrators we've talked to so far.
So what we, we are really excited to get like, Glimmer into classrooms. We've developed a cohort of initial pilot schools for this coming spring, and so we're kind of like in the final stage of, of building out the product. We've been demoing it, we've talked to over 200 teachers, a a bunch more administrators, really trying to co-design it alongside them.
Sure. As we're, you know, fully developing, making sure we have the right features that make sense to them, that we're able to fit into their workflows, and that we are really, you know, able to make the most valuable product. And so we're really excited to be rolling it out this coming spring semester with, uh, a group of about like five to 10 really innovative school partners.
We want to work alongside, be able to get their feedback, see how they're using it, and I think first and foremost, like really make sure that we're having the impact that we wanna have. So to be able to measure that, both in terms of like what do student outcomes look like, and then also in terms of just what are teachers, kind of like qualitative experiences using Glimmer.
Like is it saving them time? Is it giving them more insights into their students? Are they able to really. Integrate easily into their workflow. And so yeah, we're really excited for this coming spring. Really excited to be able to roll out Glimmer in classrooms and excited to just kind of listen and learn from all these teachers and all these admin and make Glimmer, you know, as impactful as we can.
Heading into the 20 26, 20 27 school year.
[00:57:36] Alex Sarlin: No question. That's, that's such an exciting time to be in. I recently interviewed Justin Reich, who is a uh, MIT professor and an ed tech sort of guru in his own right. And he had this idea that just feels so relevant to where you're at as a company. I just thought I'd bring it up for you, but also for our audience here, he was really advocating the idea that.
Building an evidence base for your tool is obviously the real goal for all of us in EdTech, but sometimes it takes a long time. It could be very expensive to build a, you know, publishable evidence base and do the ESO tier. But one thing you can do very quickly is actually encourage your pilot customers or your customers to do, you know, what he called local science.
It's like, you know, for one of your pilot customers, they could say, well. We've done formative assessment in past years. Now we're doing it with Glimmer. How can we sit down and compare what this looked like last year to what happening this year in terms of the summatives test scores or in terms of students' appreciation of the class or in terms of what teachers are using data for.
And, you know, you can actually create these sort of quasi experimental cycles. And what it does is it allows every school to build their own sort of mini evidence base that's useful for you. Obviously you wanna know that it works, but it's also useful for them to go to back to a school board or go to a administrator and say, Hey, it's working.
We did this in, look at our numbers, 20, 23, 24, and 25. Look, it's working in the, in the math class. I'm curious how you react to that. 'cause that, that was a, a really sort of epiphany kind of idea for me in some ways. And it feels like you're right at that stage.
[00:59:03] Neel Rao: Yes. Yes. And for us it's also, it's really important to start to do that, like right as we're getting started.
While I think the solution space of what Glimmer can look like is still a little bit broader in terms of like trying to prioritize different features for our roadmap, I think it's really important to. Not try to like design something, give that to teachers and then almost drop something in. But it's really important to us to co-design it alongside them so that they really do get direct feedback in terms of what we're building, being able to.
Cater it to their specific needs. And also I think they can also help us out quite a bit in terms of trying out Glimmer with like different workflows, whether that's like for a bell ringer, for an exit ticket, for core instruction, for homework, working in a lot of different potential areas in their classroom instruction and seeing here's where it makes the most sense, or here's a particular feature that would make it really useful in another context.
And so we like feel really, really lucky to be able to design this alongside teachers and design it alongside these administrators so that we can gather their insights, we can gather their feedback and make sure that we're making this as helpful as possible. And then also being able to look at some of those metrics too, to say like.
Here's how students' math scores look before and after Glimmer, or here's how, like, you know, teachers like amount of time spent outside of class or like, here's what teacher burnout looks like, or what teacher retention looks like. So wanting to gather Yeah, some of those preliminary metrics to see is Glimmer actually moving the needle?
And, you know, I mean that's, that's like the, the whole point of Glimmer is to improve student math outcomes and to make life easier for teachers. So, you know, we like, might as well find out whether that's happening.
[01:00:42] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, that's the, the power of having these great innovative pilot partners.
They wanna know, you wanna know, you can co-design the solutions together and sort of adjust as you go. It's really exciting to hear. So what's next for you as you, you know, I imagine for a three month old company. Winning a Shark Tank competition at Ed Tech Week, one of the biggest events, you know, in the world for education is a big win behind your sales.
It's sort of a, a rocket boost, what's next and uh, what do you feel like you're gonna take out of that win and, and sort of take back into the field with you?
[01:01:14] Neel Rao: It was really exciting to win. And also I think really exciting in terms of the sorts of conversations that we were able to then generate from that, both in terms of like really cool people from via tech world, you know, like investors who I think have seen a lot of companies can offer a lot of advice or kind of seen some of what works and then what doesn't work.
But then also I think what was really cool is that a lot of like principals and teachers actually end up reaching out after that as well. And so being able to also hear from them has been really exciting and being able to just. Share Glimmer with more and more people. And in addition, being on this podcast is very exciting for the same reason, but we like, feel really excited about, about what we've built and about our pilots for the spring.
But I think it's been great to just get so many more people who now like, kind of know about Glimmer and are able to weigh in and who we can lean on for, for advice or, or for, you know, connections to more schools or more districts who might find some value from Glimmer. So I think in terms of like what's come out of being able to win this competition has really just been getting connected to a lot of really, really cool people who, who have a lot of like interesting things to offer in terms of like, advice for Glimmer or just helping expand some of the places that we're, we're able to, to get to.
[01:02:30] Alex Sarlin: It's an exciting moment and it is such a boisterous and sort of Bulant community. You know, I feel like the EdTech community, everybody wants to know what's going on, wants to know each other. You know, as somebody has done lots of interviews at this point with different people in the space, it's really just such a.
Positive. You know, everybody wants at least to partner up to sort of figure out how to break through and solve some of these problems that we all facing. Teacher burnout, student outcomes are too high up on the list and we're all trying to figure out how to solve them together. So it's encouraging to hear that you've been embraced by the community with this new company, and I'm really excited to see what you do next.
I'm glad to help you be on more radars with this podcast, and I think it's really exciting to see what's gonna be next for you. Neel Rao is the co-founder of Glimmer. He's a former high school math teacher, a former product manager at IXL and a Stanford graduate. And Glimmer is reinventing the formative assessment cycle with assessment, tutoring, aggregated data for teachers, formative assessment, one of the most underrated aspects of education, the testing effect.
Everybody, he can't, don't sleep on the testing effect. Thanks you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[01:03:36] Neel Rao: Thank you so much. This has been
[01:03:37] Alex Sarlin: really fun. 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.
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