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Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
John Gamba on What EdTech Needs to Get Right About AI, Scale, and Learning Outcomes at Catalyst @ Penn GSE
John Gamba is Entrepreneur in Residence at Catalyst @ Penn GSE, where he mentors education entrepreneurs and leads the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition. Over 17 years, the competition has awarded $2M to ventures that have gone on to raise more than $200M in follow-on funding, with a strong focus on equity and research-to-practice impact.
đĄ 5 Things Youâll Learn in This Episode
- How the Milken-Penn GSE Competition supports high-impact edtech founders
- Why research-to-practice is critical for scalable education innovation
- How AI in education is moving from experimentation to institutional adoption
- What it takes to center equity while building sustainable edtech businesses
- Why learning outcomes matter more than funding or reach alone
⨠Episode Highlights
[00:02:15] The evolution of the Milken-Penn GSE Competition
[00:09:26] From AI pilots to learning-science-driven implementation
[00:13:35] Responsible AI and avoiding âAI junk foodâ in education
[00:25:42] Keeping equity at the core of edtech innovation
[00:29:44] Measuring real impact beyond capital raised
[00:39:54] Why AI benchmarks and standards are the next frontier
[00:44:36] How founders can engage with Catalyst and Catapult
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[00:00:00] John Gamba: We're getting kind of tired of this. Oh my gosh, are we dumbing down our kids and our students with AI and need to move into what can we do to promote it? What can we do to leverage it? What can we do to institutionalize some of these practices? To really develop the whole child and build critical thinking and metacognitive skills.
[00:00:25] 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.
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We have a fantastic episode of EdTech Insiders. This week we are speaking with a true legend in the Ed Tech space. John Gamba is entrepreneur in residence at Catalyst at Penn Graduate School of Education, where he mentors education entrepreneurs and leads the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition, which is now in its 17th year.
The Milken Competition has awarded $2 million to hundreds of founders whose ventures have gone on to raise over $200 million. John also directs the Gamba Family Foundation, which is committed to closing the achievement gap for underrepresented students in the US. John Gamba, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:01:48] John Gamba: Hey, Alex. I'm so happy to be here. It's great to see you.
[00:01:51] Alex Sarlin: It's great to see you again. The Milken Pen competition is amazing. You have done such incredible work in this space. I'm really looking forward to covering this and talking about everything. John Gabo world all today. So let's start with a business plan competition we just mentioned your 17th year.
Tell us about what the competition is for those who don't know about it and how it came about and how it's evolved in 2026.
[00:02:15] John Gamba: Yeah, you set it up really well. Before I jump in there, I just want to take a pause for a moment. It is MLK. We need to recognize that. It's great to be chiming in here talking about our competition, but there's also other things that we need to be thinking about in the world and taking a pause and thinking about.
Martin Luther King's legacy, and I've encouraged a lot of people to take a break today. So let's have some fun with this conversation. You hit it. It's now in its 17th year, the milk in Penn, GSE Education Business Plan competition. We've supported hundreds of ventures from dozens of countries. We've given away over $2 million of cash and prizes, and those companies, the impacts there, those ventures have gone on to raise $200 million in.
Follow on capital. So it is all under the umbrella of Catalyst at Penn, GSE, and our vision is to advance innovation, impact, and equity in worldwide education. We do that through a continuum of programming, webinars, meetups, our EIR hours, and our signature program, which is the milk and pen, GSE. EBPC, so I'm excited to be here and dive in about the competition again, 17th year.
I can't believe it. It's
[00:03:26] Alex Sarlin: amazing. You are focused both personally and within all your work on underrepresented students on closing equity gaps. When you talk about the $200 million, all of these hundreds of companies that you sort of identified and found and amplified and elevated early on that have gone on to grow, what do you see as the competition's most significant effect on the education ecosystem, especially regarding equity?
[00:03:49] John Gamba: Yeah. What started as a competition where you apply? We have democratized judging. We have over 70 judges that look at applications. Wow. And then we select the finalists. They used to just present on stage. And we named the winners, has now evolved into a semi-finalist phase where we support 25 semi-finalists through our virtual accelerator.
Catapult over four to five months. And we really lean in on leadership, your team product. How do you differentiate yourselves as a venture market? How do you go to market? How do you come up with a go to market strategy that's gonna scale? And then finance and fundraising? How do you raise capital through a purpose-driven lens?
And the ones that really get through the application into the semi-finalists. And into the finalists on stage at the finals, really have distinguished themselves with what we call a focus on research to practice. Hmm. They really have an underlying logic model, a theory of action or a theory of change rooted in foundational research within a evaluative model where they're able to measure the outcomes of whatever they're delivering in and through the EdTech space, and they're able to demonstrate that in a sustainable and scalable way.
So those ventures that are able to convey that through their application, make it through our semi-finals, through the lens of leadership, product, market, and fundraising, and then can get up on stage and really present their value proposition in five minutes or less, really have had success through the competition.
Yeah.
[00:05:27] Alex Sarlin: Are there a couple of companies, I know 17 years and they're not only. The winners of the competition, but all of these semi-finalists, all of these cohorts that you're now moving to, are there particular companies that stand out to you as sort of great examples of what the Milk and Penn competition is really about?
Are there, are there companies that you'd like to highlight? Just say this is exactly what we mean by research to practice. This is exactly what we mean by putting all the pieces together.
[00:05:52] John Gamba: Yeah, it's funny, a couple of anecdotes. Our fearless leader, Dr. Michael Golden and I, throughout the year when we do the applications, then we do the semi-finalists and we do the finalists, and we do the presentations on stage four times a year.
We say this is our favorite day of the year. The first time is when we call the semi-finalists. Because it is life changing. They get to align themselves with the University of Pennsylvania founded by Ben Franklin and go through the support mechanisms. Then when we call them again and they've become finalists, they're able to get up on stage and present their venture in front of world class audience members at Holland iq, which is where we've hosted.
The milking competition and then the winners, and we do our, our winter views and we sit down and really get into the backgrounds, what they've learned through the process, and then where they're going. And those are the three times. And then the fourth time is when we call 'em back and say, you're a member of our family, and we stay with them.
And we've stayed with a lot of the winners. Over these 17 years. Just to start last year's winner's resume, Jody Anderson focused on workforce development for justice impacted job seekers won the NBA's All-Star Challenge, came out of Stanford's Accelerator for learning. Big fan of Isabelle's work there.
And just crushed it. He was a two time semi-finalist in our competition and for the last two years just really nailed it. Sophie and Aaliyah from college Contact, they had won the South by Southwest EDU Pitch competition. They came in, they've leaned in, they did great. They were our second place winners through flexion and then DM Christelle from Enlight.
App. Also a Forbes 30 under 30 winner and has just a refugee from Africa who came here with a dream and is now transforming student engagement as we know it. I mean, those are just three stories from last year. You can imagine some of the stories from the last 17 years, we've had Jessica Hicklin from Unlocked Labs.
We've had a sage salvo from Words Live, and like you said, Alex, it's not just the winners, the finalists, the semi-finalists. It's an entire community. We've supported organizations like the Great Prisms of Reality and Anna Rupa Gangly, who came through our competition and really got to know her and is doing amazing things in the world of VR and solving the algebra, geometry, and stem problem for underrepresented schools.
So the stories are vast. I could go on and on and it's personal for us. We don't just. Pick semi-finalists and winners and that's it. We really try to lean in and support through an intentional methodology.
[00:08:29] Alex Sarlin: One of the things that I love most about the EdTech world globally and in the US is just how much there is this sense of community.
People really are. It's not a doggy dog sharky world. It's people are supporting each other. They're working on really important, specific problems, like all the ones you just named, and there's a lot of sense of how do you find your people and find your support network. And I think. The Milk and Penn competition and the Penn GSE in general has done an incredible job of really building this sense of community and uplift for so many different types of entrepreneurs.
I'm curious, you've done the competition for a number of years. When you look at the modern era, some of the entrepreneurs you just named or some of the applicants for the most recent years, what do you think is getting the community sort of most excited? I mean. Obviously AI is in the air. That's one of the things.
But I'm curious how you see the sort of zeitgeist evolving as somebody 70 judges, hundreds of applicants, and somebody who's been in the space for a long time. What gets people most excited in the last couple of years?
[00:09:26] John Gamba: Yeah, so I think there's been a continuum here and the magic AI word, and you kind of throw that around, but I think it's as ventures.
Have become super intentional with the use of AI and machine learning to transform education as we know it, and the continuum. Alex, over the last couple of years really started, you know, around the pandemic. We started seeing like Alex Cotran and AI literacy, we started seeing this. Oh, AI is really gonna train, and it was just the demystification at first few years ago of ai.
What is it? What isn't it? How do you look at AI through an asset versus a deficit lens? And how do we build this sense of literacy around what AI can do through an ethical, responsible? Lens and that kind of gestated for a few years. Then we moved into this. Let's dip our toe in the water and let's try it out.
AI tutors and thinking about AI through the lens of what can I do to just try it out and see if there'd be an impact Still through a responsible, ethical, secure. Way, and we saw that for the last couple of years, kind of leading up to last year. What I'm most excited about this year is sort of the institutionalization of AI through the lens of learning science.
What are we doing to leverage ai, AI data sets, AI models, AI benchmarks? What are we doing with the LLMs, the frontier models, as well as some of the smaller models, people who are actually developing their own models to transform education. Leveraging the latest and greatest in learning science. So if they're using it for literacy, what are they thinking about in terms of the science of reading?
If they're using it in stem, if they're using it through the lens of mental health and whole child development, what are we doing to leverage AI to develop the whole child and do it through a learning science? Lens to develop critical thinking, creative problem solving, complex reasoning skills. We're getting kind of tired of this.
Oh my gosh, are we dumbing down our kids and our students with AI and need to move into, what can we do to promote it? What can we do to leverage it? What can we do to institutionalize some of these practices? To really develop the whole child and build critical thinking and metacognitive skills. I'm a big, constructive, troubleshooting person, productive struggle, and really being sensitive and looking out for the ventures that are really bringing forth AI applications.
Last year, 70% of the applications were AI powered. This year will probably be more, but how are they using AI to really solve complex and persistent problems in education through the lens of learning science?
[00:12:16] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic answer. And I think that combination of the, what you call the institutionalization of ai, thinking about AI within the constructs of education in a way that's going to be positive.
It's not just the commercial AI tools being injected into the workflow of the school system or the university system, which I think we've been wrestling with. It's actually. Baking it into the system in a constructive way, and then combining that, as you say, with learning science, with what we know about pedagogy, with what we know about teaching, that is a very exciting vision of the future.
I think that we are at this really important moment because the AI world, there's been a lot of backlash about the AI world in general. After all of this hype over the last few years. We just saw, I think as last week when we're recording this, the congressional testimonies about AI for children, and I think people are starting to.
Combine the idea of AI for children. Is that good or bad with education? But the ed tech field could leapfrog this problem, right? We don't have to fall into the AI for Children. AI companions, AI toys. It could be AI for actual learning. I'm curious how you think about this, and in terms of your Catalyst community, how do you talk to some of these many companies that you're working with about how to be responsible shepherds of AI and not sort of.
Fall into the bucket. You have sort of the baby that's thrown out with the bath water as people start rebelling against some of the AI tools.
[00:13:35] John Gamba: Yeah, I think I saw a Fortune article last week. AI is junk food for the brain, and there's only so many ways we can put it in terms of this. I have a 17-year-old junior in high school and we talk a lot about chat, GPT, and we talk a lot about.
Tools that can detect cheating and plagiarism and, and how to get around certain norms and standards. And then we get into the real essence of prompting and the real essence of utilizing AI to help distill information, to help with your research process, help with, uh, reading, writing, learning, a SR and, and that whole complex world.
I think that you said it best with the C word community. I think it takes. All of the stakeholders within this ecosystem ventures, researchers, policymakers, technology providers, the ones that have the money and power in the space, which are the frontier model providers. They're asking a lot of questions now, we're making a lot of money.
We have very powerful tools, but what can we do to leverage them in the $700 billion education space? So there's a financial incentive for them, but I think they're really asking. The important questions before they get pushed out of the space. What can we do to build infrastructure, to build data sets, to build models that application providers, solution providers that are out there, those that we support through this competition can really.
Build on top of those LLMs to really address and solve the persistent problems, the persistent challenges that we're seeing in a meaningful, intentional, scalable way. I mean, Alex, think about it, 70% of our kids in the United States can't read at grade level. What are we doing to develop reading skills, literacy skills through the lens of science of reading?
If we have a chat? GPT, but we need to get to pre-K, k and first graders who may not be into chat. What do we do with a SR and what are we doing to really develop literacy and linguistic skills and a love of reading, deep reading skills. I won't get into the science of reading and the reading wars, but what are we doing to comprehensively address this problem and where are the moonshots to really address it?
We've had cancer moonshots. I wanna see a literacy moonshot. I wanna see the best and the brightest in this world of science, of reading and learning science really attack this so that we can put a dent in this once and for all. And I think our time has come with the power of AI and the power of machine learning.
So we'll see. We're gonna see, and we're gonna continue to do what we do to support these ventures and innovators to do this in an intentional way.
[00:16:21] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I, I love your framing there, of the Frontier Labs are out in front with the technology, very powerful tools. In my experience, they care from both the moral and a financial standpoint about supporting education, supporting schools, supporting universities, supporting families.
At the same time, the ed tech community is so tight. They care so much about learning science, care about outcomes. I think bringing everybody together in community, the researchers, the policy makers, the investors, everybody to really say. This could be our moment. If we handle it right, this could be our moment where we can take this incredibly powerful technology, all the learning science that has been done over the last 50 years, all of our learnings as founders and entrepreneurs and investors and operators in ed tech, and knowing the school systems and actually elevate and actually get to those outcomes we want and not let this be.
Considered another fad that comes in and out and in and out. I wanna talk about, you mentioned the Catalyst program and the Catapult program at Pen GSE, and these are both really interesting. They're interconnected. Tell us a little bit about how you think about community at Pen GSE. Give us like a walkthrough of an experience.
A founder? Founder as they start interacting with your world, what do you do with the Catalyst? What do you do with Catapult to sort of bring people up in it? You mentioned, I think four to five months. Talk us through what that looks like, because I think people would find it really interesting to hear how these programs overlap.
[00:17:39] John Gamba: Yeah. Catalyst at Penn GSE, which is overseen by our Vice Dean, Dr. Michael Golden. He's been here a little bit longer than me, seven years, but it was really built around this vision of integration, integrating our researchers, integrating our professional learning group, integrating our innovation and entrepreneurship group, and developing this vision of advancing innovation, impact and equity in worldwide education through the lens of research to practice.
Unlike some of the other entrepreneurial support organizations out there, we have a real opportunity with working with some of the best education researchers in the world as a leading graduate school of education. So what are we doing to harness that research, develop evaluative models to measure the impact of what some of our ventures are doing, and doing it in a sort of action research way?
How are we bringing these ventures out into the community of. K to career learning, testing, measuring, iterating, evaluating what works, what needs to be built. And that's really the essence and the vision of Catalyst. As an organization, we have our Penn Learning Network. We have our educational excellence group that looks at policy and with Tamia Sipo Smith, we have our.
McGraw Prize, what is sometimes known as the Academy Awards and the leading award for education, and recognizing those who are pioneering some of the latest and greatest tools, technologies, functions, supports, leadership models in education. So all of those pieces are within the Catalyst umbrella, and we all come together to advance innovation, impact, and equity.
Catapult is our asynchronous. Virtual accelerator, which advances or connects ventures with advisors, researchers, practitioners. In this community of practice for education innovation. All of our applicants who become semi-finalists go through the virtual accelerator. Catapult and they get an advisor who supports them in the areas of leadership, how to build a dynamic team product, how to employ or how to leverage AI to really build moats for your product or service market.
How are you thinking about aligning to pedagogy? As you said, Alex, how are you thinking about. Standards and standardization. How are you thinking about bringing this out to market and being able to demonstrate to a K 12 higher ed or workforce learning customer that you're actually delivering value in a measurable way?
And then finally, what are you doing to set yourself up for sustainability, growth, and ultimately scalability? We see a lot of companies that. Get to that $2 million, $3 million of a RR, but how do you get to 30 million, 50 million, a hundred million of a R? What can we do to kind of spark the innovation and spark the methods and the process for you to get to unicorn zone and really develop a sustainable value so that you can deliver in sustainable output and outcomes in education where it's most drastically needed.
[00:20:56] Alex Sarlin: As I hear you talk about these programs, which are really quite amazing, it strikes me that you're putting together different worlds of the education ecosystem, right? The research world, the high level research world from a leading graduate school of education from a very elite university, amazing university.
Then you're putting together the business side of things, right? A RR growing a RR, passing that startup to growth phase, to actually sustainable processes. And then you're combining that with the early stage stuff. The idea of how do we get catalytic capital entrepreneurship, get people off the ground, and you're thinking about equity at the same time, which is something that a lot of higher education.
Cares a lot about, but it is not always baked into the ecosystem of where everything is going. It's not always obvious. I'm curious, when you think about other leading graduate schools of education that Harvard and Stanford and Carnegie Mellon Hopkins, great places, what advice would you give from the Penn perspective of how to take these complicated worlds that all have their own vocabulary?
They all have their own sort of incentives, right? Researchers care about something different than entrepreneurs. Sometimes they care something different about investors, but how do you take all the pieces together and try to get your head around them and really help build a community where people can talk across these silos?
And in some places these are silos, right? Business schools, graduate schools of education, accelerators are not Shark Tank style competitions. These are not always under the same umbrella, but they are at Penn. How do you think
[00:22:21] John Gamba: about
[00:22:22] Alex Sarlin: it? And researchable.
[00:22:22] John Gamba: That is a great question, and as an entrepreneur for decades, I have always thought about things through the lens of sustainable, competitive advantage, building moats, barriers to exit, barriers to entry, and I've had to think for the last seven years through the lens of a spirit of partnership.
We don't consider Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Isabelle's work as a competitor, or MIT Solve, or Harvard's Innovation Lab as a competitor. But more as a platform and as a part of an ecosystem. Hey Isabelle, what's working over there at Stanford Accelerator for learning? Like when we go to the conferences there and we see sponsorships from Silicon Valley, we're like, wow, I wish we had access to this kind of industry leaders to be able to promote this kind of work.
And Isabel and Dean Schwartz will look at us and say, yeah. We'd like to think about how you're looking at it through the lens of research to practice. Stanford Accelerator for Learning is somewhat provincial in focusing on their faculty and learners, whereas Catalyst at Penn, GSE is outward facing.
Dozens of countries are represented in the work that we're doing. And so we start thinking about how can we leverage what's great about what you're doing and what's great about what we're doing? And every time I reach out, Hey Isabel, hey Harvard Innovation Lab. Will you sit on panels? Will you come speak?
Will you come talk to us? And I don't mean just the big names too, Columbia, and you're right, Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins and USC and A SU is, they're thinking about things through an entrepreneurial lens and an innovative lens. And we're collaborating regularly 'cause. God knows we have persistent challenges and we need to work at these things together as universities and as those who are committed to research and impact and evaluation and best practices.
So we're getting better at working together, and I think that's critically important as we move forward, not to think of each other as competitive esos entrepreneurial support organizations, but collaborators and partners in this ecosystem. To look at these challenges and try to solve them in a way that can be sustained and scaled.
[00:24:36] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. So well put, I mean, those are the worlds, the education world, including education, research, but also practice. The technology world and the business world are all very, very rich world. There's a lot there in all three of them. Putting them together is quite a puzzle, but it's incredibly exciting and I couldn't agree more that everybody has the opportunity that working together raises all boats here.
Let's talk about the equity lens of this as well, because I know this is a passion of yours. It's also baked into your work at Milken, at Catalyst, at at Catapult. When you are talking to entrepreneurs, when you're looking at business models, you're looking at total addressable markets and a RR. How do you ensure that both outcomes, but also particularly outcomes for underrepresented populations?
Stay at the core of the work. This is something that is, you know, people who do B2C Ed Tech, they can grow really fast. They can do all this great advertising. They can put ship in the app store and get lots of users, but they don't tend to be underrepresented users. Right. It's such a complex ecosystem.
I'm curious how you maintain your focus on equity and how you bake it into as many processes as you can at Penn.
[00:25:42] John Gamba: Well, first of all, the E word has become a bad word, and so the first thing I'd say is by being sensitive, but also intentional. I think our President Jameson's done a really great job about acknowledging the realities of this administration.
I mean, it's easy for me to be flippant and just pass by that comment, but, you know, $200 million of of research, of funding was stripped away over the E word, really right over. What was considered to be a pejorative approach, and I have to be careful, SY system by which our university was approaching challenges and opportunities to solve problems in the world.
I'm being very diplomatic and very careful because the way that you navigate that and I, I don't think that University of Pennsylvania was innocent in all ways. We can always get better with our language and our communications and our, our approaches, but we never. Folded. We still think about the persistent problems through underrepresented or marginalized communities.
We still have equity in a lot of our language and in a lot of our practices. And I'll give you a tangible example. Sure. Again, being careful. In our Milken competition, we score how you are. Approaching equitable access, equitable experiences and equitable outcomes in education higher than other things like your product, like the way that you look at your market or the way that you differentiate from competition.
So we score it intentionally higher because we're looking to be intentional about how we're thinking about. Addressing underrepresented communities, mar historically marginalized communities and really still being a champion and a leader in that world. While also being sensitive, also being critical about how we go about it.
Some go to the extreme and they're, they're not healthy, so we're constantly looking at that, but never compromising our vision and our values. We still say that we advance. Innovation, impact and equity in worldwide education, even if that may cost us, we're doing it in a sensitive way. We're doing it in an intentional way and we're doing it in an unapologetic way, but with sensitivity.
[00:28:08] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I know this is a, a highly politicized issue. It is. Very polarizing. And it in some, in some communities, in some conversations. And I think you explained that very diplomatically. It is a really complicated issue and especially, you know, I, I think in the, in the Ivy Leagues and at Penn in particular, this has been something that's made, you know, been very third rail over the last couple of years.
At the same time, I think, you know, the EdTech community were at large. Cares about reaching students and they care about reaching students who need to have their learning outcomes improved, and that often overlaps with historically marginalized and underrepresented populations in all sorts of areas around the world.
That could mean incarcerated populations, that can mean low income communities. That can mean. First generation college students. There's so many different ways to define it, but it is great to hear that this is still centered for you, even as you are being sensitive to the realities, the political realities, which are also very real.
And yes, lots of money on the line there as well. So you're 17 years in, so you're coming on your 20th anniversary of the milk in Penn, GSE competition of this community building approach, putting together all the pieces, uplifting, really amazing educational entrepreneurs and training them and supporting them.
I'm gonna ask you to put on your little, your future hat. You know, put on your future cap for a minute. It's your 20th anniversary. It's the 20th milking pen competition. What has happened between now and then that gets you most excited? What are some things that you're hoping to accomplish in the next two to three years as the technology evolves, as business practices evolve, as the politics evolve, what are you gonna be most excited about as you do your 20th anniversary celebration?
[00:29:44] John Gamba: Yeah, it's a great question and, and we think about this a lot. It's a very natural response that I'm gonna give you, and that is when I say, and I whip it out. Thousands of ventures supported hundreds, thousands of ventures supported $2 million given away. They've gone on to raise 200 million in follow on capital.
That's been the talking point for a couple of years. We're now getting into, okay, how many learners. Did we touch? How many educators have been supported? What has happened? Informatively and Summatively as a result of those organizations that we've supported? And they could be re ventures, they could be researchers, they could be nonprofits.
We support 'em all. I think getting more intentional with data, recognizing the power of AI and what that can do for us to become more automated. Yet intentional with being able to report out how the impact is manifesting itself across our ecosystem and our partners is really what's gonna distinguish ourselves.
And that's just good business practices. The more you can measure, the more valuable you become. So I'd like to see in three years our ability to not only say we've supported thousands or tens of thousands of ventures from dozens or hundreds of countries, but what did they actually do right? Over that period of time to impact the most underrepresented or impact or challenge or fix or work to solve the most persistent problems.
And can we point to that tangibly? In 2026, we had this many ventures that were touching this many learners. In this kind of way, mental health literacy, stem, steam, and by the end of three years, we were able to show that they had improvements on park scores or they had improvements on smarter balance or whatever the latest and greatest summative assessment will be.
This is how they did formative. Through formative assessments. We're doing a lot of work now with Digital Promise on this big Kate AI grant. Thinking about how AI models, AI benchmarks, AI data sets can impact formative assessment. No longer do we wanna say what's gonna happen in three years. I wanna know what's gonna happen next semester.
And with the power of ai, we're able to do that more intentionally and more meaningfully. So I'd say after three years. Getting a little bit more narrow instead of broad with the measures of success with what we're actually measuring. Informatively over that period of time is really gonna distinguish us as a, a leading entrepreneurial support organization and innovation center in this space.
[00:32:25] Alex Sarlin: It's a fantastic answer. Let me actually double click on that for a moment or just dive into it a little because I think what you're expressing here is something I have, I've heard. In many interviews throughout the ecosystem, and it's a desire to get past those reach metrics. The raise metrics, right?
$200 million in follow on capital. It's an amazing metric, but all of that money is in service of outcomes. It's all in service of actually changing students' lives. And this is something that, you know, a number of organizations have been really grappling with. I think of things like the reach capital.
Impact Report or the Owl Ventures impact reports that they put out where they take each of their portfolio companies and they say, well, what are we defining impact as? And because the companies are so different, impact is different, right? If it's a mental health company, it may be behavioral referrals.
If it's a test prep company, it may be test scores or, or as you say, you know, summative assessments. If it's a company trying to get people to do credit recovery, it would be. Number of credits recovered. I actually think this is something that, that is pervasive in the education world and it, it's something I love that you're addressing it directly and I'd love to peel back the onion one more layer and say, how might we as a community get past some of the metrics that are easier to gather, but don't actually get to the core of what we're trying to do and get to those core metrics even when.
The education ecosystem is very broad, right? It's not that every education startup is working on the same problem and we're all trying to do it. It's not like, you know, if you're working in finance, it's like returns who got the best return, which hedge fund? Hedge fund get the best returns. They can all compete directly on it on one metric, right?
That's not true in education. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how we can think about transformation, how we can think about learning gains in a way that helps sort of the entire ecosystem orient towards authentic outcomes. Rather than money or reach, even though those are obviously a big part of it.
[00:34:14] John Gamba: So I'll give you a direct answer that can kind of build, and we can follow up on this, but I'd say the one word that I think of is patients and patients capital, and the leaders, the LPs, the gps of these funds are all thinking about this. You mentioned AL Reach new markets, rethink, GSV, I mean, they're all thinking about returns.
Yes. But how can we do it in a realistic. Period of time in a space that is historically known to operate at a glacial pace. Very resistant to change, very hard to measure. Therefore, we can't really think of IRR the same way if we're really going to be honest with ourselves in how we're going to solve these challenges.
And I think that it's really important to think. Quantitatively mixed methods and random control trials, but also qualitatively, how can we come up with case studies success stories that can be published that are out there? You know, kudos to you and Ben. You know, the market map. Who's doing this? How are they doing it well?
Who are they doing it with? Who are the school districts? Who are the higher ed institutions? Who are the career learning, career education companies out there that are really doing it well and how can that be benchmarked? So I think that it's a role of, in the financial markets of being patient, I think that it's in our ecosystem, it's in our interest to be more intentional about communications and how we present this information.
And I think it's, IM important that we always go back to my original point and that is. Metrics. If you can't measure it, don't do it. Right. What are you doing to be able to present data in a way that says through a whole child lens, through an equity lens, through a mental health lens, through a hair on fire issue, lens of literacy or stem steam.
Yes. How are we measuring the impact of whatever we're delivering over time and how can we reward those who are doing it well?
[00:36:16] Alex Sarlin: Yes. I love the way you're putting that. And when you say IRR, that's like impact rate of return is that that stands for?
[00:36:22] John Gamba: Well, investment rate of return is one way to look at it, but I think you gotta look at it as impact rates of return.
How do we come up with a quality scoring system that says they used AI in this way and it delivered that outcome over this period of time? You mentioned silos though also. You know, I also think we have to get out of this idea of. HQIM, high quality instruction and observation and evaluation as being two things.
I think with AI we have an opportunity to really think holistically about new models that are gonna really disrupt and change for the better our community, I think we have to get out of, oh, that's an instructional tool. That's a teacher tool, that's an administrative tool. No. How are we thinking about these things all working together, interoperably?
Because if we get into these silos, we're gonna get into that problem of asking that school district superintendent who's gonna say, yeah, I have 200 ed tech tools, and I don't know how they're working with each other and what they're doing to deliver value. Big challenge. So the more that we can get intentional about.
Publishing, tracking, recording and having a lot of these tools, interoperate, I think we're gonna be in a much better position, patient capital, acknowledging the glacial pace that the space tends to move. Being really intentional of, I put my toe in the water, I tried it out, and this is what it delivered.
Let's iterate and build on that. I think we're gonna be in good shape, and those are the types of ventures that we're looking for that tend to do really well through our competition.
[00:37:57] Alex Sarlin: I love that you're focusing on the pace of change as part of the equation here. This idea of taking all of these different types of business models that are addressing different populations.
Sometimes they have different core value propositions or basically core impact measures that they're trying to change and saying, well, how do we actually boil them down and sort of distill it back down to what are the core things we're all trying to do? How do we measure them? How do we make sense of them and the financial returns?
Definitely important from the business perspective, the growth metrics and the reach definitely important from both the investment perspective and the ability to change lives, the ability to have impact. But if we sort of as a community really start to define what we mean by impact, and I know as you said, all of the venture firms have been working on this.
Obviously researchers has been working on this for, for a long time. I think we could really sort of uplevel as a Ned tech ecosystem if we had a little bit more. Not codification in a rigid way, but just a little bit more cross-functional understanding of what we mean by impact. It's exciting to hear you that you're thinking about this and so many are thinking about this.
So as we look at the next few years, you mentioned the AI infrastructure piece that's starting to happen. AI benchmarks, AI data sets. There's been a lot of money and a lot of energy going into. Filling the gaps. It's not about just AI tooling, it's about how can AI actually be baked into our entire systemic approach to education.
Benchmarks are have been particularly interesting and I'm curious how you think about AI benchmarks, the idea of how might we evaluate models, whether they're the frontier models or people making smaller models, or you know, how might we evaluate models from a pedagogic perspective or from a perspective of what we actually care about.
For education. We, we just talked to Kumar Gar. They're do, they're trying to help AI benchmark for career navigation saying, how can we evaluate AI tools against how good they are at helping people navigate their career? That's a really interesting question, and I'm curious how you think about it from your perspective at Penn.
[00:39:54] John Gamba: I just got back from a great working session with the great folks at Digital Promise. Yeah. And Driven Data and Peter Bull and John Whitmer, and we're talking about this exact issue and I, I think this kind of navigates or wades away from the competition, so I wanna be careful not to geek out too much, but I love talking about this, Alex, and I think, how do we.
IMS, how do we LTI advantage AI in education and I think it comes down to standards. And what I mean by that is data sets and models have to come down to, alright. We're as powerful as the data we're analyzing. How can that translate into standards and maybe even things like, I'm an old guy, right? I'm 55-year-old white male working in this space.
How does that turn into an authoring tool, or how does that turn into an SDKA software development kit that a. A software developer can use and leverage Yes, to be able to develop applications and tools that have a meaningful impact. So I'm waiting and looking. As I think about LLMs and I think about who has the power.
Right now, I'm thinking about how published standards can be created to make sense of the data that is being collected. So in closing, kind of the dot, dot, dot and the geometry proof. Actionable insights, right? That's what I wanna start seeing, coming out of, uh, some of the data sets and some of the models, some of the benchmarks that are being created, and I think they should be public and publishable.
Now, what that means in terms of the venture that's developing a science of reading a SR tool. Is thinking as they're also thinking, oh my gosh, if this becomes successful, is that Frontier Model Company? Is Anthropic, is OpenAI, is Google just going to build it themselves because they have so much money?
How do we get them to work together? And if you think about IMS, I talk about IMS because I'm a big interoperability person, right? One of the biggest things, one of the best things that they did was think about. SSL, right? How do we think about making data sets, making standards easier for developers to build things that will will interoperate so that we can take big swings at that glacial pace?
A lot of the things that often inhibit. The adoption of a lot of these tools are ease of adoption, and there's a lot of things that the LLMs, I think the frontier model companies can throw out infrastructure wise, data sets wise that can make that a little bit more frictionless, a little bit more fluid, and those are the types of things that we're looking at at a very high level with some of the powerful players in the space.
[00:42:48] Alex Sarlin: Totally agree. I mean, we, we've seen Google and Anthropic and open AI all launch learning modes in the last year, and they all are saying, Hey, we are optimizing some portion of our product to try to help people learn, gather information, make sense of it, build mental models and schemas. But because the benchmarks are not in place for what that actually means, what that looks like in practice, they can build them and then sort of.
Have them out there as features, but they are not competitive with each other because nobody's measuring it. They can't say, we wanna be the ultimate learning tool, let alone, as you're saying sort of down the stack, the people who are using those models underneath the hood, how can they optimize to do even better on pedagogical models, on tutoring, on mental health, on career navigation?
So. I totally agree with you. I think those benchmarks and that metaphor you're using of IMS global and and LTI and building a set of standards that the entire EdTech world can rally around that is easy to use, could uplevel the entire space. So benchmarks incredibly exciting to me as well. I appreciate you geeking out on it with me for absolutely.
Last question for you, for you here is very tactical and practical, which is that I'm sure listeners listening to this who are hearing about Catalyst and Catapult and the milk and pen competition for the first time. You've been in the space for a long time. A lot of people know about you at the same time.
There's always new people coming in contact with you if you are a entrepreneur listening right now saying, oh, this Catapult community sounds really interesting. This Catalyst program sounds really interesting. How might they start getting involved in the Penn ecosystem and even, even the broader ecosystem mentioned that your relationship with, with Stanford Accelerator for Learning or Harvard Innovation Lab, how might an entrepreneur listening to this start saying.
I wanna be in that world as well. I want to be connected to all of these really powerful programs that are designed to turn research into practice or to help entrepreneurs break into the market.
[00:44:36] John Gamba: So the easy links first. So Google the Milken competition and you'll see a homepage and an easy way to apply applications for our competition are due February 11th, and the application is easy.
The first thing people say is, oh my gosh, is this an NSF grant? It's gonna take me a long time. I don't have time. No, you should be able to get this application done in under an hour. Some people challenge me on that, so I'm gonna say two hours max. A good application, not your typical S-B-I-R-N-S-F-I-E-S grant when people, tools, competition, where people get nervous.
So that's the first thing. If you wanna have a one-on-one with me, just go calendly.com/john gamba. And there's one-to-one mentorship that we offer and I offer through my office hours as well as ask me anything. On the Milken Competition and Entrepreneur Breakthroughs to really tap into our community.
So calendly.com/john Gamba and the Milken competition for getting into our competition this cycle, applications due February 11th application. Super simple. In terms of your broader question, I think it's a great one. Here's my advice. Make time for your own learning. Don't be afraid to say when people start talking glittering generalities, right Alex, about data sets and models and things that really get into jargon.
Stop. What is the use case? What exactly does a data set do? What does a benchmark or a model do? And don't be afraid that you might be a little bit behind or a little bit. Confused about what some of these applications and what, what some of these terms mean and make time to learn. And by that I mean go out into the community and say, every week I'm gonna read or I'm going to engage in the EdTech Insider Podcast and really learn from the guests and learn from the newsletters that come out.
Alex Koran in in terms of ai edu. Great. One big fan of Cooney with AI ethics and everything that Erin's doing in that world. Claire Zou in her newsletter. If you don't have the Claire Zou newsletter, because she gets into it through the lens of products, ventures, and services, I think that's really an important one.
Amanda Bickerstaff, big fan of hers. So those are kind of like the big five. So tap into catalyst of pen GSC in our competition. I think getting into the community, receiving newsletters and saying Every Tuesday from nine to 10, from eight to 10, I'm just gonna stop, turn off everything and read some of the community newsletters.
Huge fan of Etch and Matt Tower and Whiteboard advisors. So you know, the usual suspects, everybody who comes to our happy hours and our events. But I'm a big believer in all of those and. I do think it takes a village to really attack these persistent challenges that we're seeing in our space and to really have meaningful impact moving forward.
We all have to work together, ventures, universities, researchers, policy makers, government, nonprofits, and the more that we can do that, the more that we can evangelize how that's happening through best practices and case studies. I think we'll be on our way to more and more moonshots, and I'm excited about it.
[00:47:54] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic.
[00:47:55] John Gamba: So
[00:47:56] Alex Sarlin: February 11th you have less than two hours, maybe even as low as one hour to apply to the Milken-Penn GSE competition. That's February 11th. So that's, you know, just a few weeks from now. But also, yes, I have the engraved on the back of my iPad is one of my favorite quotes in education.
Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn, right? It is a lifelong learning approach to, if you wanna teach, if you wanna help people learn in the world, you have to constantly learn yourself, and you named a whole bunch of fantastic resources and people who are really helping elevate all the very fast moving news, especially in AI and education.
[00:48:34] John Gamba: Seminal advice that I give Alex to simplify it for me to the mentees that I work with as well as my children. Be interested. Not interesting. Yes. Yes. The love of learning is really, really what it's all about. And that's what, uh, gets me up in the morning, running into the shower and, and working with incredible purpose-driven entrepreneurs with our team at Catalyst, at Penn, GSE, our fearless leader, Dr.
Michael Golden, and our dean, Dr. Katherine Strong. So. Love being here, love collaborating with you and, and I know this is gonna be a to be continued conversation
[00:49:08] Alex Sarlin: always. John Gamba is entrepreneur in residence at Catalyst at Penn GSE, where he mentors education entrepreneurs and leads the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan competition where applications are open until February 11th, 2026.
Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech insiders.
[00:49:28] John Gamba: Alex, my pleasure. Keep doing the great work.
[00:49:30] 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.
